CDC vaccine panel realizes again it has no idea what it’s doing, delays big vote

Today's meeting was chaotic and included garbage anti-vaccine presentations.

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[Uncivil Servant]

Leaving the anti-vax nonsense aside, I've been in positions working with teams of people whose responsibility, prior to a meeting like this, is to make sure that everyone gets the same copy of any proposals ahead of time, that presentations are vetted ahead of time, etc.

It's not just the people in front of the microphones who are failing here, this is what a breakdown in the civil service looks like, in the beginning. And as much as I want to end this with a joke about what happens at the end, Swan Lake is somehow a lot less funny than it was last year.

 

[Uncivil Servant]

I am not exaggerating about presentations being vetted, by the way, from citations to having the proper agency logo on powerpoint slides. I cannot stress enough that government meetings and committees are as much like the theatre productions I've worked on as anything in government.

So yes, if a committee descends into a complete circus for reasons other than external people and events, that falls entirely on the competence of the people who planned it every bit as much as a theatre production where Romeo walks on-stage wearing Juliet's dress and tells Juliet to "get thee to a nunnery", from Hamlet.

 

[Uncivil Servant]

Silent rebellion by staff members, maybe? Malicious compliance, basically.

No. Of all the possibilities, this is not one of them, or at least not the way you're thinking. These are positions where malicious compliance can be a criminal act under certain circumstances.

I'm not talking about the people on-camera: this would be like the technical people on a TV set letting a boom mic fall on an actor, it's not something that happens deliberately, it's a sign that the people who had previously been doing that job competently have been fired.

Remember DOGE's civil service purge? The civil service is a bit like sewage*, you never really think much about it when it works, but when it stops working it tends to be a very noticeable example of exponential collapse: very slowly, and then suddenly all at once.

The problem is, and here I'm kinda not joking at all: eventually nobody knows what's going on, because nobody is coordinating anything in the government, and television news switches suddenly from a congressional hearing to airing a rerun of Swan Lake or Disney movies.


*No, really, we're cool with this comparison, you can't have civilization without sewers