March 23, 2021 | Opinion by Marc A. Thiessen, Columnist, The Washington Post
Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), [spoke] at a recent White House news briefing.
Here is how she updated Americans on the spread of the virus:
“As of yesterday, we have confirmed 1,277 cases of the B.1.1.7 variant across 42 states, including the first case of the B.1.1.7 variant with the E484K substitution that had previously been found in the U.K. Nineteen cases of B.1.351 variant have been found across 10 states, and three cases of the P.1 variant has been found in two states.”
Got that? Me neither. I consulted some medical experts, and here is an English translation of what she said:
“We have confirmed 1,277 cases of the U.K. variant across 42 states, including the first case of the U.K. variant with a mutation of the spike protein that had been seen in the South African variant. The U.K. variant with this South African mutation had only been found in Britain, but has now appeared in the United States. In addition, 19 cases of the South African variant have been found across 10 states, and three cases of the Brazilian variant have been found in two states.”
That’s a lot clearer, isn’t it? So why doesn’t Walensky just say that?
Maybe she’s so immersed in the medical jargon it sounded clear to her. For some public health experts that may be the case.
But I suspect there’s something more pernicious going on here. Public health experts, whose job it is to inform the American people, are instead confusing them in the name of wokeness.
When the variants began arriving, experts and journalists did refer them by their place of origin. This was in keeping with tradition.
- MERS is called the Middle East respiratory syndrome because that is where it originated.
- The Ebola virus is named for the Ebola River in Congo.
- The Zika virus started in the Zika Forest of Uganda.
- Lassa fever is named for the Nigerian town where it originated.
- Marburg virus is named for German city where it first emerged …
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