Do you follow the Science?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/11/briefing/covid-cdc-follow-the-science.html
Do you follow the Science? Have you ever eaten more than a teaspoon of salt in a day? Ever eaten raw cookie dough? What about any undercooked beef? Where do you have the largest probability of getting into a car accident? Behind the wheel of a vehicle or sitting on your sofa?
When you’ve indulged in any of these actives have you been following the science? According to this article the C.D.C feels obligated to tell woman what they should do with their own bodies. The “C.D.C. tells sexually active women of childbearing age not to drink alcohol unless they are on birth control”. What does “the science” say about toddlers or pregnant women wearing masks for long periods of time?
The list goes on and on. I do my best to attempt to follow all of my doctor’s instructions. However I also have a family to provide for. Unfortunately as human begins we have to make hard difficult choices that can have severe consequences. If you have never had to make a life changing decision I would consider that privileged. This article not only takes into account everyday life but also mental health.
As mature, intelligent people we should be able to conduct a pros / cons analysis for our own lives. We have learned over the last two years how wrong the “science” can be, how quickly and how frequently it can change. The closer and closer we get to mid-terms it’s interesting how much more flexible following “the science”, mandates and guidelines have become. Politicians who abused their power need to be held accountable. Do not allow them to back track at the very end and be reelected.
Direct Quotes:
The C.D.C. describes medium-rare hamburgers as “undercooked” and dangerous. The agency also directs Americans to avoid raw cookie dough and not to eat more than a teaspoon or so of salt every day. And the C.D.C. tells sexually active women of childbearing age not to drink alcohol unless they are on birth control.
If you happen to be somebody who engages in any of these risky activities, I have some bad news for you this morning: You apparently do not believe in following the science.
But it has led to a widespread misunderstanding. Many people have come to believe that expert opinion is a unitary, omniscient force. That’s the assumption behind the phrases “follow the science” and “what the science says.” It imagines science almost as a god — Science — who could solve our dilemmas if we only listened.
Many other Covid questions, however, are complicated. What does the science say about them? It says many things. Above all, science makes clear that public health, like the rest of life, usually involves trade-offs.
If you want to minimize your risk of getting sick from food, you probably need to eat less tasty food than you now do. If you want to minimize your chance of dying today, you should not get inside a vehicle. If you want to minimize your children’s chance of going to an emergency room, don’t allow them to ride a bike or play sports.
Proponents of an immediate return to normalcy claim, implausibly, that masks and social distancing do nothing to reduce the spread of Covid and that anyone who says otherwise doesn’t care about schoolchildren. Proponents of rigorous Covid mitigation claim, just as implausibly, that isolation and masking have no real downsides and that anyone who says otherwise doesn’t care about the immunocompromised.
The truth is that Covid restrictions — mask mandates, extended quarantines, restrictions on gatherings, school closures during outbreaks — can both slow the virus’s spread and have harmful side effects. These restrictions can reduce serious Covid illness and death among the immunocompromised, elderly and unvaccinated. They can also lead to mental-health problems, lost learning for children, child-care hardships for lower-income families, and isolation and frustration that have fueled suicides, drug overdoses and violent crime.
As you think about your own Covid views, I encourage you to remember that C.D.C. officials and other scientists cannot make these dilemmas go away. They can provide deep expertise and vital perspective. They are also fallible and have their own biases. C.D.C. officials tend to react slowly to changing conditions and to view questions narrowly rather than holistically. They often urge caution in the service of reducing a specific risk — be it food-borne illness, fetal alcohol syndrome or the Covid virus — and sometimes miss the big picture. The C.D.C. was initially too slow to urge mask use — and then too slow to admit that outdoor masking has little benefit.
There is no one correct answer to our Covid dilemmas. People are going to disagree passionately, and that’s frequently how it should be.
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