Cool that the CDC's exhausted, incredibly diligent employees can spend weeks researching and crafting an effective and thorough guidance document, and then get fully undermined by Redfield's cowardice when he cosigns a WH document that dismissed CDC advice for being too cautious. https://twitter.com/cmyeaton/status/1286505592052256768

oh i'm steamed

source for that statement, btw: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/health/cdc-schools-coronavirus.html

"Experts on the subject at the CDC were cut off from direct communication with the working group after their input on the statement was interpreted as being too cautious, the official said."

fucking hell.

So Redfield decided to take his agency's employees' countless sacrifices made in the interest of figuring out how to keep kids and their families safe, and throw them all out the window in the interest of playing politics with a murderous administration?

Fucking hell, Bob, do you know how many hours of unpaid overtime your agency's employees are putting in, because they, unlike you, can recognize the stakes of the decisions your agency's public statements inform?

Also- “Still, [Redfield] said, 'The goal line is to get the majority of these students back to face-to-face learning.'”

Listen, bitchass, if your overriding priority is "get kids back to school" and not "keep kids alive," you have no damn business leading a public health agency.

Do you think CDC's incredibly dedicated teams are going to forget how readily you sold them out, Dr. Redfield, thanks to your own chickenshittery?

Do you even care how many weeks of work you undermined?

How quickly do you think people forget institutional betrayal?

Do you think it's fun for CDC employees to face a barrage of questions from friends and family about why the public-facing work they're contributing to is bad, even though they individually are working as hard as they can to craft effective guidance?

What do you think the long-term repercussions of your choices will be for the federal public health workforce? Or did that even occur to you in your scramble to save your own ass, Dr. Redfield?

Having taken some deep breaths: I'm grateful for @abbygoodnough and @apoorva_nyc's reporting, which made this private fiasco public enough that we can all see how badly the CDC's appointed leadership is abdicating their duty, & betraying their employees' efforts in the process.

I am grateful for the federal public health professionals who continue to work so incredibly hard in the hopes that some slivers of evidence-based policy will make it through the political miasma. This should never have been asked of them, but they still persist.