"I am shocked that CDC and FDA are yielding to political pressure. I am calling for immediate action to require they put science over politics, resuming their support for my preferred policies."

-DNC liberal politicians, pretty much all of them

-...and also disturbing number of lefties, who really ought to understand how comically absurd this is

I mean seriously. Yes FDA can and should be a purely professional operation like OMB. And in fairness, they mostly are, though they have some notoriously bad (but consistent!) practices. Still, they have police powers and thus are inherently political.

But CDC not political??! The Centers for Disinformation Creation and Promulgation has been mostly political for decades. They want us to think of them as all being like EIS - which is a great professional and scientific corner of the agency. But that is not who they mostly are.

The political right - both conservatives and the ethno-nationalists/theocrats/fascists who control the GOP - generally understand this. Political acts are ultimately about politics. The oligarchs certainly understand it. Leftists do do, but don't have much power.

But liberals and 'libertarians' - two sides of the same naive coin - often have this bizarre idea (born of entitlement and narrowness of vision) that their preferences are somehow existentially The Natural Normal Way To Do Things, rather than one set of political choices of many.

This is not to say that there is not anti-science in the mix, of course. Saying "this treatment will save 35% of those with serious cases" when even the dubious cherry-picked study that is based on puts the number at only about 1% is obviously very very wrong.

It was appalling that FDA stated that. But the whole point of a few tweets back was that CDC does anti-science all the time, so this is not exactly a new corruption.

If you base a policy decision on bad science, it will almost certainly be a bad decision:

E.g., If your goal is to open everything, like normal, as soon as possible, and the resulting policy is "go ahead and halfway open everything", you are making an anti-scientific decision (it is clear that things will never renormalize without squashing transmission).

But this is not remotely the same as saying that the good science tells us what to do. It only shows what is (really: "appears to be", based on what we know now) the most promising way to pursue a particular goal. "Goal" inherently meaning "POLITICAL goal".

This is effectively the same point, about another topic area. https://twitter.com/isbellhfh/status/1298963896217276417?s=21 https://twitter.com/isbellhfh/status/1298963896217276417

Closely related point: the choice of what to research is political. The most obvious example is: CDC does not study gun violence; CDC obsessively studies vaping. Both of those are political choices. Thinking there is just a Right answer to about doing either of these naive.