Bức thư tuyệt hay

là bức thư của sử gia kinh tế Phil Magness gửi tới tạp chí Wall Street Journal về sự kém cỏi và thiếu nhất quán của bác sĩ Fauci...
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In times of public-health emergency (tình huống khẩn cấp về y tế công cộng), the federal government (chính quyền liên bang) takes on the role of a provider of information (cung cấp thông tin). Unfortunately (đáng buồn thay), as “The CDC’s Delta Variant Panic” (Review & Outlook, July 31) illustrates (minh họa), our government has fallen into a pattern of not only vacillating (lắc lư, chập chờn; do dự, dao động; không kiên quyết, không dứt khoát) between contradictory (mâu thuẫn) positions, but also fanning the flames (thổi bùng ngọn lửa) of Covid-19 misinformation.

This pattern extends to the earliest days of the pandemic. Far from providing leadership, agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and figures such as Anthony Fauci have a record of projecting their own unfounded speculation (suy diễn vô căn cứ) as authoritative scientific judgments on matters in which they lack clear evidence (thiếu bằng chứng rõ ràng). Recall how the CDC spent spring 2020 attempting to dissuade (khuyên can, can ngăn) the public from buying masks, how Dr. Fauci described the risk of Covid to the U.S. as “minuscule” in late February 2020, and how “two weeks to flatten the curve” morphed into two months, then a year.

More recent vacillation includes ever-changing advice on masks, a re-evaluation of the lab-leak theory (thuyết âm mưu (virus) rò rỉ từ phòng thí nghiệm), the confidence-undermining pause on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, and now encouraging alarmism with misleading claims about the number of Delta variant breakthrough cases. Despite this stream of inconsistent (không nhất quán) messages, these public-health authorities are routinely invoked by journalists and social-media fact checkers as the standard against which “Covid misinformation” is to be judged.

A year and a half of placing political expediency over scientific accuracy has taken its toll on the public. By failing to acknowledge the limitations of their own knowledge and repeated errors of judgment, Dr. Fauci and the CDC have undermined the very trust they seek to command. If public trust in science declines as a result, these officials have only themselves to blame.

Phillip W. Magness
Great Barrington, Mass.

Modest Proposal: If you’ve taken your Covid cues at any point over the last 1.5 years from the psychic healer wellness blog’s “long covid” survey; from the Neil Ferguson model; from Fauci’s self-contradictory press conferences; from Rebekah Jones’s social media activism; or from Sam Bowman, you don’t get to complain about the other side promoting scientific misinformation.

Tags: health

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