There Are No Coincidences

Within days this week,

• Brian Stelter announced his departure from CNN after the cancellation of his show
• Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart indicated that some parts of the Mar-a-Lago search warrant affadivit could be released and ordered the DOJ to submit proposed redactions next week, against its wishes
• Donald Trump began a highly visible campaign of ironically endorsing far-left Democrat candidates, on the assumption that if his endorsements of Republicans have worked so well, they should for Democrats as well.
• A federal judge granted an injunction that prohibits the Marine Corps from enforcing the Biden administration’s military vaccine mandate against Marines who filed for religious exemption from the mandate and who were denied
• Dr Walensky announced plans to overhaul the CDC Wednesday — while admitting to major “mistakes” in handling the pandemic.

In particular, the week prior, the CDC reversed many of its public COVID guidelines even before Dr Walensky's announcement:

The abandoned CDC recommendations include: testing and quarantine for asymptomatic COVID-19 infectees and close contacts, the six-foot rule, and preferential treatment for vaccinated people, especially those who are "up to date" on shots.

One common mitigation is unlikely to come back regardless of the agency revision. While the CDC recommends COVID-positive people wear a "high-quality" mask for 10 days indoors, even at home and regardless of symptoms, few school districts still have mask mandates.

The agency will no longer distinguish between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups in its guidance, summarized in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, because "breakthrough infections occur" and those with natural immunity "have some degree of protection against severe illness."

In other words, even the guidelines the CDC has kept, like indoor N95 masks for those who test positive, are likely to be honored only in the breach. And think about all those social distancing signs, floor stickers, and sidewalk calibrations that even now haven't been power washed away, not to mention the double cloth masks Dr Walensky herself wore as some kind of wacky example, notwithstanding it was already known that cloth masks single or doubled up offered no protection from COVID. Dead letters!

I think that just the developments over the past several days are directly or indirectly related to the end of COVID and the vast social experiment in the quasi-therapeutic state that it represented. The CDC, which had been thought to be a well-regarded agency up to late 2019, was ordered to sacrifice its prestige on the altar of that noble endeavor. However, the regard in which it was held was even then by no means unanimous. One of the smartest TV series ever, Fringe, had an oddly prophetic episode that first aired on January 21, 2010:

In Boston, a visibly sick man from the Netherlands arrives at an office building, only to collapse and die. The veins in his body erupt with blood, spraying surrounding witnesses. The Fringe team arrive on site, and while interviewing the witnesses, another man also becomes sick. The sick man attempts to leave the building, only to be stopped by Walter (John Noble), who sees the man spray out blood and realizes there is a contagion. The building is quarantined with Walter's son Peter (Joshua Jackson), FBI agent Olivia (Anna Torv), and the rest of the witnesses still inside.

The CDC arrives and soon clash with Walter, who wants some blood samples to take back to his lab at Harvard.

. . . Walter continues his theory that the virus wants to escape the building, hence the multiple escape attempts by the infected. . . . As a bio-hazard team enters the building to test people for the virus, a CDC official orders the army to prepare for a "level six eradication", because they still do not know how to contain it.

The major plot element, given the McGuffin of the virus, is the effort to circumvent the CDC, which doesn't have a clue but nevertheless thinks the best solution is a level six eradication, which translates into blowing up the whole building and everyone inside it. (Dr Walter Bishop, the brilliant character written to synthesize everything that was ever flaky about Harvard, is the neo-noir truthteller of this story.)

Wikipedia notes at the link, "Andrew Hanson from the Los Angeles Times thought it was a really good episode, and even wished it could have been turned into a movie, were Fringe to get into filmmaking." (I've thought about a Fringe film franchise myself, but by the time it's produced, if ever, many of the original actors will be too old to appear in the film. But you know who'd be a good replacement for John Noble as Walter? Johnny Depp.)

One thing I would say is that if they ever do make a film based on that Fringe episode, the writers wouldn't have to look too far for inspiration to create the head of the CDC. Dr Walensky could almost play herself, but it's a shame Cloris Leachman isn't available.

The deep state has brought the CDC down to the level of neo-noir black comedy, and Dr Walensky, unfortunately, won't be able to fix it.