Dr. Marty Makary is a highly accomplished surgeon at John Hopkins. I posted some video of his presentation to Congress here. He has now written “10 myths told by COVID experts — and now debunked” at the New York Post.” He writes that throughout COVID the CDC:
weaponized research itself by putting out its own flawed studies in its own non-peer-reviewed medical journal, MMWR. In the final analysis, public health officials actively propagated misinformation that ruined lives and forever damaged public trust in the medical profession.
He then lists 10 ways that the CDC misled Americans. These are the headlines only–visit the NYP for the entire article:
- Natural immunity offers little protection compared to vaccinated immunity.
- Masks prevent COVID transmission
- School closures reduce COVID transmission
- Myocarditis from the vaccine is less common than from the infection
- Young people benefit from a vaccine booster
- Vaccine mandates increased vaccination rates
- COVID originating from the Wuhan lab is a conspiracy theory
- It was important to get the second vaccine dose three or four weeks after the first dose
- Data on the bivalent vaccine is ‘crystal clear’
- One in five people get long COVID.
The main sin of the public health officials, according to Makary:”Public health officials said “you must” when the correct answer should have been “we’re not sure.” Markary’s succinct quote dovetails nicely with the title of Mark Alan Smith’s article at Quillette: “Masking Uncertainty in Public Health: Had it actually been “following the science,” the CDC would have transparently communicated its uncertainty at every step.” Smith elaborates:
Had it actually been “following the science,” the CDC would have transparently communicated its uncertainty at every step. The agency could have informed the public that the best research on other respiratory infections found no benefit from community masking, but the properties of SARS-CoV-2 left open the possibility that the largely cloth and handmade masks available at the time could help in checking its spread. A CDC committed to science would also have worked with other government agencies and private organizations from the first clusters of cases to conduct high-quality RCTs on masking. Such trials would need to be powered with large sample sizes in order to detect modest effects. To this day, they have not funded any RCTs.
