Bush Administration's recommendations on Avian Flu

So the White House, a while back, released its recommendations for how we should prepare for an Avian Flu pandemic. This was done as a web site called PandemicFlu.gov. Most of us aren't in a position to set government planning policy, so the section on "Individual Planning" is of most relevance to most of us.

I started reading the recommendations, and among the recommendations for Individuals and Families was this little jewel of wisdom:

Prepare backup plans in case public gatherings, such as volunteer meetings and worship services, are canceled.

It seems to me that if your church services have been shut down because of a pandemic threat, the dumbest thing you can do is fall back on your "backup plan" for getting together. Not only does that completely dissolve any health protections gained by closing the church, it also makes it much more difficult for the CDC and other health professionals to contain and track the spread of infection.

To be fair, most of the content on the site looks reasonable, and matches up with the content on the CDC Avian Flu site. But one has to wonder, when the Bush Administration actively replaces science, research, and evidence with politics in other topics such as global warming, evidence for WMD, number of dead killed in Iraq, whether or not anyone foresaw the levees breaking, etc., whether this was a recommendation laid down by fiat, as opposed to a recommendation based on sound science.