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Re: “‘Catastrophes of the 21st Century’ in which I warned that we were increasingly unprepared for recently familiar events like hurricanes and earthquakes, but not the recently unfamiliar, like a pandemic or approaching asteroid.“

Do you mean “unprepared“ or “prepared“?

My naïve reading of the 25 July 2020 version makes me think the latter.

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"...shows the public’s loss of trust in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most prominent U.S. government public health expert during 2020. Whatever one’s policy differences with the positions of government advisors in CDC, it should be clear that no effective response to a pandemic is possible without a CDC that trusted by the general public."

Dr Pielke, what happens when it IS the "trusted" governmental sources who are causing public distrust through : contradictory advice based on unreasonable restrictions without clear evidence of their efficacy (masks on 2-year-olds) , misplaced official trust by the WHO and CDC in Chinese use of US funding (the NIH money that was used in Wuhan for gain-of-function research), rejection of useful alternative treatments (ivermectin, hydroxychloroquin) because Republicans mentioned them), , even outright lies (telling us masks were not needed when the fear was inadequate supplies) ?

It is our government that has politicized the entire pandemic and turned half the population into snitches and scolds that abuse the other half . I am wholly in favor of your definition of open "shadow science", but when the "trusted sources" themselves politicize the narratives they tell us and demonize oppositional interpretations of the science, the result is what we have today. I wish all the players had your integrity, Dr Pielke. But they don't .

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Atlas was right, while the CDC and Fauci were wrong and obviously corrupt. They lost the facade of legitimacy just by having a little light shone on them. Maybe fixing the corruption is the right way to go.

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Blaming Scott Atlas and The Great Barrington Declaration for undermining confidence in the CDC and Dr. Fauci is nonsense. Both the CDC and Fauci lost the confidence of many Americans due to their own duplicitous behavior and the clear incompetence and political bias of government bureaucracies and bureaucrats.

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