In his first email to CDC staff, he wrote that the federal government's "decisions, communications, and processes" broke the public's trust during the pandemic, and that "acknowledging this reality is a necessary step toward renewal." In practice, the CDC has been undergoing a kind of forced renewal for months.
More than five years after COVID-19 began spreading in the United States, a new conventional wisdom has taken hold in some quarters: Public-health officials knew or should have known from the start that pandemic restrictions would do more harm than good, forced them on the public anyway, and then doubled down even as the evidence piled up against them.