I hope we do a serious review of the cdc when this is all over. For all the money we give them, they totally failed to "control" the outbreak. It feels like it's devolved into an academic institution and we have enough of those.
IDK the US that well, but if you don't have coercitive power over politicians what can you do. I'm aware that CDC has been criticized for other stuff as well, but in the end they seem to not have that much power.
In my country (Spain) it has been a shitshow. Everyone who warned about the upcoming situation was ridiculed and/or insulted in a coordinated effort between government and media. Now the same people is being called captain after the fact. It's pretty sad to see, and I've been subject to this myself despite not being a public figure.
Everything has turned into a political shitshow. When you have medical professionals in TV insisting that the government is right, and that this is just a flu, when you have your lead epidemiologist in TV with absurd claims, when you have your OSHA-spanish-equivalent in National Police fired for buying masks (and the list goes on and on), then how can anyone trust the institutions.
I mean, my regional government which is corrupt, and sometimes hilariously inept has done a better job. What the *@^- man.
If I can offer a piece of advice in that direction, it is to remember that the US is in fact a union of 50 states, and those states actually have a fair amount of power. The federal government, as powerful as it appears to be, really does lack authority in many areas. While they could absolutely have done a 1000% better job leading the response to the coronavirus, it was always going to fall mostly on the states to do the actual heavy lifting. It's the nature of our political system.
Speaking from the Netherlands, it seems clear that about 40% of Americans lost their marbles in this grand collective paranoid fantasy starting around Nixon, growing through Reagan, and then really taking off around the end of the W. Bush administration.
They started to believe these terrible and terribly false things about their fellow citizens, about science, about pretty well everything.
And they purchase hundreds of millions of weapons.
> And yet America managed two world wars just fine.
Sure, defense is one of those things that is definitely the purview of the federal government.
But for many things that the feds haven't managed to figure out how to control yet, the tenth amendment is very much in play. For pandemic response this is definitely true. It was true in 1918, remains true today. The states are in charge.
Given recent history (in particular, as it relates to your 40%), I expect that the states may actually start asserting more authority, instead of continuing to cede it bit-by-bit to the federal government. Which perhaps does lead to your final comment ;-).
> By media? Does it mean the Spanish government owns the majority of newspapers and TV stations? That's not the idea I had from Spain.
Well, that's what happend, IDK if that has anything to do with ownership or not, but I mean, the message of the government was followed by media to the inch, with very few exceptions here and there.
> I wonder how a regional government with no power, as the central government took it from them, could have done a better job at anything.
Because before the central government took control they already buyed masks, gloves, respirators and put some protocols in place. In fact later on some of this stuff was sent to Madrid.
Not to mention that there was a lot of arguments between the central government and some regions on how to manage the situation, and some disobedience too.
No, it's worse. It devolved into a political institution. Any academic institution would have trivially been able to get the PCR test right (and academic institutions did). Bur our agencies gave into political pressures, were defunded and declared in critical moments, etc, leading to the failure of the federal government we see now
People don't like getting fired, blame the politicians for threatening and firing anyone who disagrees with them, don't blame the people whose jobs were in jeopardy.
This same thing happened here in the UK (with similar results). Scientists scared of being ostracised if they spoke against the government. So they just went along with all the dumb decisions. We also have an group of scientists ‘Sage’ who are meant to be our best minds, who gave similarly useless and inconsistent advice because it was politicised.
There was an interview with one of the scientists who laid it all out. He has terminal cancer himself and therefore said he doesn’t care about future access.
While I think that politicians are primary people to blame, I dont think the "I was afraid for my job" is good enough answer from high level leadership figures. That answer is acceptable from janitor or low level worker.
I think that culturally, both in business and in politics, we are locked in set of values that makes opposition or disagreement against someone higher in hierarchy or with power as inappropriate and subservience as virtue. It then amounts to massive system of enablers who feel good about themselves and even criticize non-enablers wherever narcissist appears.
We praise people who manage to climb the ladder no matter how they got there and what they do there. We devalue people who make ethical decisions when said decision hurts their career.
