NEW—CDC was truly suffocated by Trump WH at every turn. Kyle McGowan, a former chief of staff at CDC, and his deputy, Amanda Campbell, witnessed WH dismissal of science, WH’s slow suffocation of CDC’s voice, meddling in messages & siphoning of CDC budget.
https://t.co/HeuNbUggiw

2) ““Everyone wants to describe the day that the light switch flipped—It didn’t happen that way—more of like a hand grasping something, and it slowly closes, closes, closes, closes until you realize that, middle of the summer, it has a complete grasp on everything at the CDC”
3) “Mr. McGowan and Ms. Campbell, both 34, say they tried to protect their colleagues against political meddling from WH and HHS but was largely stifled by the Trump administration.
4) “The White House insisted on reviewing — and often softening — the C.D.C.’s closely guarded coronavirus guidance documents, the most prominent public expression of its latest research and scientific consensus on the spread of the virus.”
5) “The documents were vetted not only by the White House’s coronavirus task force but by what felt to the agency’s employees like an endless loop of political appointees across Washington.
Mr. McGowan recalled a White House fixated on the economic implications of public health.
6) “He and Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the C.D.C. director, negotiated w/ Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, over social distancing guidelines for restaurants, as Mr. Vought argued that specific spacing recommendations would be too onerous for businesses to enforce”
7) ““It is not the C.D.C.’s role to determine the economic viability of a guidance document,” Mr. McGowan said.
They compromised anyway, recommending social distancing without a reference to the typical six-foot measurement.
8) “Over the summer, political appointees at the health department repeatedly asked C.D.C. officials to revise, delay and even scuttle drafts of @CDCMMWR they thought could be viewed, by implication, as criticism of President Trump.”
9) ““It wasn’t until something was in the M.M.W.R. that was in contradiction to what message the White House and H.H.S. were trying to put forward that they became scrutinized,” Ms. Campbell said.

“What’s not legitimate is to overrule science,” he said.
10) “Often, Mr. McGowan and Ms. Campbell mediated between Dr. Redfield and agency scientists when the WH’s requests and dictates would arrive: edits from Mr. Vought & Kellyanne Conway on choirs and communion in faith communities, or suggestions from Ivanka Trump, on schools.
11) “Every time that science clashed w/ messaging, messaging won”. Episodes of meddling sometimes turned absurd. In the spring, CDC published an app that allowed Americans to screen themselves for symptoms. But WH built its own, then demanded CDC wipe its app off its website”!
12) “Top CDC officials devised workarounds. Instead of posting new guidance for schools and election officials in the spring, they published “updates” to previous guidance that skipped formal review from Washington. That prompted officials in Dc to insist on reviewing updates.”
13) “especially unnerved last winter when officials in Washington told the C.D.C. that regular telephone briefings with another senior scientist, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, were no longer needed because Mr. Trump had his own daily briefings.”

(Sidebar: Dr Messonier is my hero)
14) “Dr. Messonnier angered the White House in late February when she issued a public warning that the virus was about to change Americans’ lives.
15) “There’s not a single thing that she said that didn’t come true,” Mr. McGowan said. “Is it more important to have her telling the world and the American public what to be prepared for, or is it just to say, ‘All is well?’”

“They need to be allowed to lead.”
16) BOTTOMLINE: CDC being censored and muzzled is one of the greatest travesties of this pandemic. And its tarnish reputation one of the worst stains of Trump WH.

➡️ all this is incredible painful to me cuz of what I also went thru in Jan trying to warn:
https://t.co/I5G7PL6boG

More from Eric Feigl-Ding

JUST IN — "Camp Auschwitz" insurrectionist of the Capitol siege was just arrested this morning in Newport News, VIrginia.

2) this guy was just arrested.


3) We cannot have a repeat of the fascism from WW2. This is @Schwarzenegger’s speech was so powerful.


4) My wife @andreafeigl1’s 🇦🇹 great grandfather secretly fought Hilter’s Nazi regime & smuggled many Jews to safety as an aircraft engineer. He was thrown into a concentration camp, and escaped.

She knows a few things about Nazi history—Jan 6th was downright fascist. Read 👇


5) So this cover is from a semi-tabloid magazine in Germany, according to @andreafeigl1. But even so, how did such a magazine still get it so damn right?! Maybe Germany 🇩🇪 has seen this kinda fascism before...
JUST ONE PERSON—UK 🇬🇧 scientists think one immunocompromised person who cleared virus slowly & only partially wiped out an infection, leaving behind genetically-hardier viruses that rebound & learn how to survive better. That’s likely how #B117 started. 🧵 https://t.co/bMMjM8Hiuz


2) The leading hypothesis is that the new variant evolved within just one person, chronically infected with the virus for so long it was able to evolve into a new, more infectious form.

same thing happened in Boston in another immunocompromised person that was sick for 155 days.

3) What happened in Boston with one 45 year old man who was highly infectious for 155 days straight before he died... is exactly what scientists think happened in Kent, England that gave rise to #B117.


4) Doctors were shocked to find virus has evolved many different forms inside of this one immunocompromised man. 20 new mutations in one virus, akin to the #B117. This is possibly how #B1351 in South Africa 🇿🇦 and #P1 in Brazil 🇧🇷 also evolved.


5) “On its own, the appearance of a new variant in genomic databases doesn’t tell us much. “That’s just one genome amongst thousands every week. It wouldn’t necessarily stick out,” says Oliver Pybus, a professor of evolution and infectious disease at Oxford.

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THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)