The Instruments Were the Point

Welcome to the Age of Diarrhea — Peter Shamshiri, String in a Maze

Shamshiri's piece is about the four-month cyclospora outbreak, and it does the necessary work of tracing the funding cuts, the optional reporting, the White House sitting on Taylor Farms' recall deadline while naming only Taco Bell. But the line that stuck with me is the one that isn't about blame at all:

You'll see the illness, but you won't know its source.

A crank got put in charge of health policy and now people are sick. But cranks come and go. What Shamshiri is describing is the dismantling of the machinery that lets a society notice things about itself.

We know measles cases have exploded — more since 2025 than in the previous twenty-five years combined. We know that because someone built the thing that counts measles. That number isn't a fact of nature sitting out in the world waiting to be observed. It's the output of a surveillance system, staffed and funded, that has to be maintained the way a bridge has to be maintained. Take away the counting and the cases don't stop. They just stop being a number. They become a feeling. A bad season. Something going around.

A problem can be argued about. A mystery can only be endured. And an administration that would rather be endured than argued with has an obvious interest in converting the first thing into the second — not by lying, exactly, but by defunding the instruments that make lying necessary.

Which is why anti-transparency isn't a side effect of this politics. It's load-bearing. Shamshiri points at Clarence Thomas spending decades arguing that disclosure laws are unconstitutional, worried that transparency invites "reprisals" from an angry public. Reprisals meaning: people finding out, and then having opinions about it.

Worth reading in full.