department of unfortunate names

The New York Times warns us that just because someone dies, has a heart attack, or a miscarriage immediately after receiving a flu shot does not mean that the flu shot is the cause of said misfortune. There are 2400 miscarriages a day in this country, for instance; it is a virtual guarantee that some of them will occur mere hours after being vaccinated. In our world of manufactured outrage and 15 minute news cycles, we should not mistake coincidence for causation.

This seems like good advice. But can we really trust the Centers for Disease Control, when they employ this guy as their spokesman:

“Back then, it was a neat thing to have a fax machine and get out four pages a minute,” said Joe Quimby, a press officer for the disease centers. “Now, communications have to be multimodal. Turning on the three broadcast news outlets is not going to reach everybody any more.”

Err, nothing to see here, good citizens of springfield.