The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issues mask mandates, prevents landlords from evicting non-paying tenants and now they’re going to act as a ‘national weather service’ to forecast what people should do on a daily basis based on how a virus is behaving.
The CDC assembled a new team of 100 scientists – unelected bureaucrats if you will, as our new overlords.
“We think of ourselves like the National Weather Service, but for infectious diseases,” said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist and associate director for science at the initiative, run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Washington Post reported.
The scientists want Americans to look to them for instruction and guidance before they make decisions.
“We would love to be able for people to look to us to say, ‘I’m about to commute on the Red Line. … Should I bring a mask based on what’s happening with respiratory disease in my community? Should I have my birthday party outside or inside?’ Those kinds of decisions, I think, are where we would like to move toward,” Rivers said, according to WaPo.
“Scientists will also look at who is infecting whom, how well vaccines protect against infection and severe illness, and how that depends on the vaccine, variants and the time since vaccination, said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist and the center’s science director.” The Paper said.
The team of scientists will be based in Washington DC and will report directly to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky.
The Washington Post reported:
A new team of federal health scientists officially embarked Tuesday on a mission to provide what has often been absent from the nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic: better, faster information about what is likely to happen next in this public health emergency and in future outbreaks.
The Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, which starts with $200 million in funding, was created last summer to improve understanding by the CDC and the government more broadly of the coronavirus — and future outbreaks — in real time. White House officials formally launched the effort Tuesday at a summit hosted by the Office on Science and Technology Policy on strengthening U.S. early-warning systems for health threats.
Newly appointed White House coronavirus response coordinator Ashish Jha said public health leaders have scrambled during the pandemic to do the best they can.
“But it’s also been really clear, this is no way to run a response to a pandemic,” Jha told panelists at the event.
Without a centralized, trusted source for forecasting, “policymaking in that context is nearly impossible,” Jha said. “That, to me, is going to be a major contribution of this center. I feel like we are embarking on a process that will put us in a totally different footing for the rest of this crisis and future ones.”
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said the “very small but very mighty” team will analyze every stage of a health threat, from its epidemic potential to a comparison of health interventions. The center will also prioritize identifying vulnerable groups who are often invisible because they are not captured in data.
Experts, including Rivers and others on the team, have long advocated for an infectious-disease forecasting center.
The center will provide support and analyses to decision-makers in the federal government and in states. That includes forecasting how many covid cases might be expected in coming days and weeks by analyzing the number of new cases and hospitalizations, and examining the population groups most affected.
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