The role of the CDC and your state and local public health departments is mostly in providing the science-based measures that can be taken to control the spread of disease and reduce illness and death. Vaccine and other medical countermeasures are mostly developed by the private sector, often with huge investments in tax dollars, or promises of government mandates such as vaccinations. Despite the many unknowns and having to base decisions on assumptions and other similar diseases, there is no doubt that these measures saved and can still save hundreds of thousands of lives: the mathematics of unchecked disease spread is pretty straightforward. It's the job of our elected leaders, not the public health agencies, to balance these measures with job losses and essentially decide how many deaths they are willing to stomach in order to preserve the economy (that decision is incompatible with the Hippocratic oath and the ethics of most public health professions, even engineers). That's a shit sandwich no matter how you approach it.
And I think we can both agree that the behavior of engineering materials is a lot simpler to predict, with great accuracy. But the engineering analogy to what you are accusing the public health professionals of is spending too much to make the bridge safe, when it would be possible to save a lot of money if we are willing to let that bridge collapse and take a certain amount of unlucky people with it.
And I think we can both agree that the behavior of engineering materials is a lot simpler to predict, with great accuracy. But the engineering analogy to what you are accusing the public health professionals of is spending too much to make the bridge safe, when it would be possible to save a lot of money if we are willing to let that bridge collapse and take a certain amount of unlucky people with it.
