Maggie's Farm

The CDC has always been overcautious. It is sort of their job. Conservatives got bent out of shape about the CDC during Covid, but a lot of that is because the regular people were only listening to them for the first time.

The difficulty is that this was also true of non-medical branches of Gov't, which went into OMG mode as if this was something brand new. I worked in a medical facility for decades, and we got very good at sorting through What do we have to go along with, even though it's overwrought? What can we ignore? What do we ignore but make it look like we are going along (wink, wink) to stay under the radar of such people?

Other federal agencies and governors did not know how to navigate this because they had never paid attention to the CDC before. No votes or fundraising there, why bother? Local note: Gov Chris Sununu, because he grew up with this, and is one of the few people in gov't with a graduate degree in a practical science, navigated it well. Of course, to many people he was still too restrictive, but they generally don't have much ability to argue that on the merits.