Former CDC Director: Spring Lockdown “Poisoned the Well”
Media outlets have pointed to misinformation as a key challenge in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.
But with nearly half of Americans unsure that public health officials understand the coronavirus, have other factors led to the divide between the public and public health?
Tom Frieden, a former director for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), acknowledged in a recent Atlantic article that the initial lockdown in the United States actively bred mistrust.
The first action, closing parts of society, needs to be strategic. Timing matters. The initial widespread closure in the spring poisoned the well. Many parts of the country shut down too soon and for too long. By the time COVID-19 came to areas that hadn’t yet needed to close, people were tired of waiting and resisted continued restrictions. An effective closure needs to be nuanced, specific, and tightened and loosened based on real-time data about where the virus is spreading.
While Frieden may be groping for rhetoric to justify more “localized” lockdowns, he hits upon a key point: it’s mistrust, not misinformation, which officials are encountering.
It is common for politicians to portray resistance to further restrictions as resulting from conspiracy-mongering; few officials have taken responsibility for what Frieden identifies as a massive error in judgment.
We should not understate the import of this admission from a key voice in US public health circles. Given Frieden rates noncompliance with social distancing as deadly, his logic implies that the rush to blunt restrictions by health officials cost lives.
Frieden is not the only official making such admissions: the current director of CDC, Robert Redfield, expressed concern over the rise in suicides and overdoses linked to the social-abstinence strategy.
Many jurisdictions continue to restrict even small outdoor gatherings despite lacking data to support such measures. Most still take an “abstinence only” approach to messaging around social contact, rather than offering practical advice. And to the chagrin of epidemiologists with experience from the HIV years, such as Dr. Julia Marcus, politicians continue to use shame-first messaging.
When a public-health approach isn’t producing the desired outcome, it’s time to try something different. Instead of yelling even louder about Christmas than about Thanksgiving, government officials, health professionals, and ordinary Americans alike might try this: Stop all the chastising. Remember that the public is fraying. And consider the possibility that when huge numbers of people indicate through their actions that seeing loved ones in person is nonnegotiable, they need practical ways to reduce risk that go beyond “Just say no.” — Julia Marcus, PHD, MPH, — The Danger of Assuming That Family Time Is Dispensable — The Atlantic
Those with serious experience combatting HIV (or Ebola — see here) know that community mistrust is an inevitable part of navigating any disease outbreak. It must be addressed in ways that are responsive to people’s social needs. Yet state governors like New Jersey’s Phil Murphy go as far to post pictures of maskless folk devils on twitter.
The covidiot anti-masker 5G conspiracy theorist may exist in the backwaters of Twitter, but is largely a fantasy formation. The “COVID denier” exists largely in the minds of people who are living a Marvel movie version of the pandemic, with clear “good guys and bad guys.”
As we see from Frieden’s comments, the public health bureaucracy is now reckoning with mixed views that can arguably be traced to its own failings. Trust is earned carefully and lost easily.
Akin to the recent political fixation on “Russian bots,” a fixation on conspiracy theorists among the political class provides a way to avoid thinking about the complexities of social conflict. By victim-blaming society itself for increasing cases of COVID-19, the US political class hopes to distract from its bipartisan crisis of legitimacy. But regardless of the pandemic, that crisis is here to stay.