More than 1,000 current and former officers of "an elite disease fighting program" at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have signed an open letter denouncing President Donald Trump and the federal government's disastrous response to the Covid-19 pandemic and demanding that the prestigious public health agency be allowed to resume its crucial role in protecting the health of the nation's people.
"The absence of national leadership on Covid-19 is unprecedented and dangerous," wrote 1,044 physicians, nurses, scientists, and other health professionals who once were or now are Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) officers at the CDC.
Hundreds of retired and active EIS officers, sometimes called "disease detectives," have signed the letter to publicly share their "concern about the ominous politicization and silencing of the nation's health protection agency during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic."
"It doesn't take 1,000 EIS officers to see that the Trump administration has made a catastrophic mess of its pandemic response," said Carl Bergstrom, a biology professor at the University of Washington, on social media. But when they do, he added, "the people in charge damn well better pay attention."
"Bravo!" tweeted Dr. Rick Bright, the former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority at the Department of Health and Human Services, in response to the letter.
As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, Bright publicly announced his resignation from the National Institute of Health on October 7 in a scathing statement condemning Trump's deadly ineptitude.
"It's time to speak up," Bright said this weekend on social media. "Silence is complicity."
Dr. William Foege, a world-renowned epidemiologist and former director of the CDC, has also been an outspoken advocate of whistleblowing to shed light on the Trump administration's refusal to respond adequately to the pandemic.
In late September, Foege sent a letter (pdf) to current CDC director Robert Redfield, urging him to risk his job by speaking publicly about the White House's epic failure to mitigate the coronavirus crisis, as Common Dreams reported.
While Redfield has not taken up Foege's call, the letter signed by over 1,000 former or current CDC "disease detectives" does begin to expose how Trump has undermined the once highly regarded public health agency, jeopardizing thousands of lives in the process.
The letter explains:
In previous public health crises, CDC provided the best available information and straightforward recommendations directly to the public. It was widely respected for effectively synthesizing and applying scientific evidence from epidemiologists and biomedical researchers at CDC and worldwide. Its historic credibility was based on incomparable expertise and 70+ years of institutional memory. That focus and organization is hardly recognizable today.
The U.S. epidemic is sustained by deadly chains of transmission that crisscross the entire country. Yet states and territories have been left to invent their own differing systems for defining, diagnosing and reporting cases of this highly contagious disease. Inconsistent contact tracing efforts are confined within each state's borders—while coronavirus infections sadly are not. Such chaos is what CDC customarily avoided by its long history of collaboration with state and local health authorities in developing national systems for disease surveillance and coordinated control.
When the letter was originally drafted in May, the country's Covid-19 death toll had already surpassed 100,000. "The devastation continues," the signatories wrote, "with an end not yet in sight."
Now, nearly 220,000 lives have been lost to the pandemic in the U.S. alone.
"CDC should be at the forefront of a successful response to this global public health emergency," said the retired and active EIS officers. "We urgently call upon the American people to demand and our nation's leaders to allow CDC to resume its indispensable role."
This article originally appeared on Common Dreams. You can read it here.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.