Thing is, "the CDC" is thousands of people, almost every one of whom is doing their job the best they can, with honestly earned pride in being a civil servant.
What we see as "the CDC" is largely the product of people at the NYT and other news outlets. The CDC site has far more information than any of us want to read, and when the NYT "summarizes" their words to say something different, the CDC still get the blame.
The leadership of the CDC is helping destroy the labor of all those good people too; Redfield (was it? the director) telling Congress last march that "they had everything they needed to control this disease" was one of the finest displays of burro-crat stupidity in the history of the nation.
I think that's debatable. While I'm sure there are some people at the CDC that are doing a good job, the organization as a whole has just repeatedly bungled. I have followed COVID extremely closely since the very beginning, and I struggle to come up with even a single thing where I can say "The CDC really nailed that."
At a minimum, the leadership is just completely inadequate to deal with this type of problem. My feeling is that the situation is similar to the U.S. Army at the beginning of WWII. The U.S. kept losing battles at the very beginning until large parts of the top leadership that were good at paperwork and bureaucracy but bad at leadership in the field were replaced with leaders that were good at winning battles.
In the same way, the CDC leadership appears to be optimized for a slow pace, and the avoidance of mistakes that they can be blamed for. What we needed was a "wartime CDC" that could make quick, correct decisions based on incomplete data, and use their capacity to go out and acquire more information as it was needed.
What we see as "the CDC" is largely the product of people at the NYT and other news outlets. The CDC site has far more information than any of us want to read, and when the NYT "summarizes" their words to say something different, the CDC still get the blame.
The leadership of the CDC is helping destroy the labor of all those good people too; Redfield (was it? the director) telling Congress last march that "they had everything they needed to control this disease" was one of the finest displays of burro-crat stupidity in the history of the nation.