If you're waiting for the CDC to tell you how to think about masks, here's something to consider: Do you eat more than a teaspoon of salt a day? The CDC says you should not.
Experts are enormously valuable, but we can't expect them to tell us how to live.
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* Don't eat cookie dough.
* Medium-rare burgers are dangerous.
* Women of childbearing age shouldn't drink unless they're on birth control.
These are all CDC messages. The agency does many things extremely well. But thinking about risk holistically often is not one of them.
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It's a reminder that "follow the science" isn't a helpful way to think about many Covid issues.
What does the science say about mask mandates, for example? It says many things. Above all, science makes clear that public health, like the rest of life, usually involves trade-offs.
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If you wade into the angry, polarized debates over debate, you will often find people who try to wish away these trade-offs. They pretend that science offers an unambiguous answer, and it happens to be the answer they favor.
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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. At the same time...
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... 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.
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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.
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“We need to be better at quantifying risk, and not discussing it in a binary way,” , the chief health officer at Indiana University, says.
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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.
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CDC 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 from medium-rare burgers or Covid — and sometimes miss the big picture.
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Here's a simple guideline: don't trust elected officials to give you good substantive expert info; don't trust substantive experts to make policy decisions that balance competing values or stakeholder interests; and don't trust randos on the internet to do either.
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People have come to think of expert Covid opinion as a unitary, omniscient force. That’s the assumption behind “follow the science.” It imagines science as a god — Science — who could solve our dilemmas if we only listened.
It doesn't work that way.
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