[FRIAM] vaccine

[glen ep ropella]

There's the key point, right? That diversity fosters openness, facilitating the entrance, maintenance, and extinction of all sorts of wild-type rationale. Writing in stone an authority figure like the CDC, or Fauci, or [who|what]ever dampens that openness ... stunts our ability to reason. I spend a lot of energy denigrating the denial of expertise. But appeal to authority is arguably worse.

If Redfield or Azar suddenly announced a vaccine, the process is open enough that you could email the clinical trial PIs and find out whether you might trust it. Normalizing/unifying trust into any single app, org, or person will always be a mistake.

On August 23, 2020 4:42:42 PM CDT, David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:
> 
>if Redfield is directing the CDC, and Azar is directing whatever he
>directs, and a month before Election Day there is a declaration that
>there is a vaccine available, I would not take it.  In the earlier eras
>of the CDC — say, when the public health officials of Taiwan came to
>visit CDC to learn how to design a pandemic response, because it was
>universally seen as the gold standard world-wide — I would probably
>have taken it.  I am told, through a friend who Is a working
>epidemiologist within the agency, that both of them are regarded as
>trouble, Redfield more through incapability than malice, Azar the more
>typical trumpish combination of both.