Whenever some kind of disaster hits, there is always somebody who has been warning about it for years. This is because there is always somebody warning about everything. If a giant fireball from space destroyed St. Louis, it would turn out that someone had been warning for years that Midwest cities were vulnerable to mysterious fireballs from space. And reporters would eat it up.
I'm starting to see the same thing with pandemic reporting, and I'd urge everyone to take it with a grain of salt. We're all suckers for stories about heroic but downtrodden scientists who fought the establishment and finally won, but those are easy to write with the benefit of hindsight. Just by chance, someone was bound to be more right and someone else was bound to be more wrong. The question, as always, is whether either side had good reason for its beliefs and whether either has a track record of always being right (or wrong). The problem is that this is usually much more complicated and doesn't always make for a blockbuster story.
With the exception of Michael Lewis, this is not aimed at anyone in particular. Just be careful about this stuff. There are exceptions, but "visionary hero vs. hidebound establishment" happens less often than you might think. That's why the real cases are so famous, after all.
The difference between fail safe and catastrophic failure is anticipation of an eventual failure and putting into place a mechanism to fail safe. Likewise, it doesn't matter if you eventually guessed right, but that people took the necessary actions to ensure that everything resulted in fail safe.
This is analogous to preventative planning to avoid compounding a natural catastrophe with a failed response. With the Trump administration, much of the mechanisms that were left in place to help support the recovery or avoidance of a natural catastrophe, were removed or ignored.
That's my criticism of Trump and the folly of incompetence.
I think it *is* fair to say that there are a pile of people who have legitimately been warning that our preparation for a pandemic is in bad condition, and not just one off fear mongers. Gates has done many talks on this for example.
SARS/MERS did give us pretty significant context on how bad our prep was, so it's unsurprising that people took note of that in the wake of those outbreaks.
Not that it'll probably do much good, but, the country probably needs to do a post-911-style commission at the behest of Congress (could this perhaps already be in the works?) to look into what went wrong, perhaps followed by legislation. Ideally it should involve some form of "Look at what Australia did and make sure that's legally possible and practically plausible for America to do this next time we're *struck."
If you had asked me two years ago, I would have assumed federal public health planners regularly do "war games" to practice for a pandemic, so that, you know, it's not all brand new when the real thing arrives. But it sure doesn't seem like it.
*IANAL, but my understanding is, if you look into the weeds deeply enough, the executive branch's emergency powers already do allow them to mount an Australia/NZ-style pandemic response, but I could be wrong, and in any event mere legal/constitutional authority alone isn't enough if the structures and resources aren't in place beforehand.
Hmm. I wonder if Republicans will be on board with this idea, or reject it as a witch hunt designed to malign His Royal Highness of Mar-a-Lago...?
The only heroes are the ones who work at Pfizer, Moderna, and their suppliers / co-developers. Also, of course, the hospital and ICU workers. Without them, we’d be going through wave after wave with many more thousands dead. My mom died in December and she was infected by incompetent nursing home workers. This government is incompetent. All levels. They just made it all worse across the board.
Michael Lewis is indeed an asshole.
& that motherfucker gets to plow Tabitha Soren on the regular!
Why is he an asshole? Honest question I'm not overly familiar with his work. I just know him as writer of best-sellers (usually non-fiction, right?). Haven't read any of his works. He must be a zillionaire. I did skim the transcript of his interview with Ezra Klein. It wasn't very compelling or insightful from what I saw.
I knew Michael Lewis when he lived in Jersey. He seemed like a pretty level headed guy compared with the other rich finance people who lived in our town. That isn't a very high bar but he cleared it easily.
I haven't seen him in at least 15 years and doubt we'd recognize each other if passed by in the street.
What has he done that has been so wrong?
He's a more journalistic Malcolm Gladwell.
Would that also include this story?
https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2021/02/12/brutal-science-system-mrna-pioneer
also here:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/16/us/katalin-kariko-covid-19-vaccine-scientist-trnd/index.html
I dunno. The 'pandemic narrative' seems pretty simple to me. The triumph of science over the right wing proclivity to politicize any issue, should they deem doing so would redound to their benefit.
What am I missing?
You're not missing much, except, I think it's clear in retrospect Trump/MAGA's decision to ignore/fight the science in favor of politicization didn't help them politically. To vast swaths of Americans, Trump had become something of a God-Emperor by early 2020, and I think there's zero doubt the vast bulk of them would have done as they're told even if it meant doing as Bill Gates or some other liberal Goody Two Shoes advised.
Trump's decision to fight reality because he was afraid doing so would "spook the market" (and reduce his chances of reelection) will go down as the biggest political own goal in US history. That election in retrospect was eminently winnable for MAGA. Had the US achieved a Canada-Germany level of pandemic response (I have a hard time believing Australia/NZ was ever in the cards given various problems with governance in the USA), Trump would probably still be president.
Trump and MAGA are ignorant. They're also smugly stupid.
Mask America Great Again! was right there.
How blind are El Jefe, Javanka, El Jefecito, Stephen Miller, et. al.?
Why has there been no retrospective discussion of last year’s fad for herd immunity which took up so much energy and time? Seems to me it’s now clear the Hoover Institution, Scott Atlas, etc, diverted attention enough to allow new variants to emerge, thus killing tens of thousands and costing many billions in economic output. Thanks Fox.
I see Kevin's point but I'd like to raise Nate Silver here. "visionary hero"? Of course not. But how bout Silver as someone saying "the emperor has clothes? You're sure about that? Cuz I'm trusting my own analysis here & I ain't seeing it".
I've seen several academic epidemiologists express annoyance with Silver's free thinking, but more often than not Silver simply makes sense.
The only thing I have to say about Lewis is that it's a sure bet that his book will become a major motion picture. I tend to think of his books as parables, exploiting real-life people in the production of moral fables.