5 ms·

It truly is insane how quickly the severity of the crisis ramped up. Monday co-workers on slack were messaging how the flu was more of a worry, after Wednesday

by nprz 7y ago

It truly is insane how quickly the severity of the crisis ramped up. Monday co-workers on slack were messaging how the flu was more of a worry, after Wednesday it was mandatory work from home. And it truly feels like medical authorities were as caught off guard as the rest of us. Who was on guard duty? Was no one monitoring the situation? No one thought to increase production of PPE or RNA tests?

epistasis 7y ago
Being as apolitical as possible, the fault is 100% Trump's. Our pandemic response team was gutted in Spring 2018. One of my favorite science journalists, Ed Yong, wrote this shortly after; there's a lot of contextual history before he starts spitting fire at the president's egotistic idiocy. > Yet even the U.S. is disturbingly vulnerable—and in some respects is becoming quickly more so. It depends on a just-in-time medical economy, in which stockpiles are limited and even key items are made to order. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-the-next-plague-hits/561734/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-th... ^ this is our current system. The people that would have been responsible for activating production had been fired. The CDC bungled the first tests. The FDA prevented anybody but the CDC from performing tests until just recently. The FDA tried to stop the Seattle Flu Study from back testing their samples to find evidence of infections; the scientists defied the FDA and found early evidence that would not have been found earlier. Here's Trump responding to a reporter asking about the risks of firing the pandemic response team, back in 2018: https://twitter.com/public_citizen/status/1239920268979646467?s=21 https://twitter.com/public_citizen/status/123992026897964646... He later denied any knowledge of doing this. And instead of hiring back the people, he called the virus a Democrat hoax. Only later did he even pay attention to it, but there are debates about whether the VP he said was in charge, or his son-in-law is actually in charge. Nobody knows what is going on, every press conference is filled with basic inaccuracies, and he ignores the science. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/dr-fauci-explains-why-he-doesnt-correct-trump-during-press-conferences/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/dr-fauci-explain... It's rotten from the top. We have robbed our government from essential functions, not to really save any money, but because we have an executive that doesn't know what he is doing and is too narcissistic to let anybody stick around that might reveal his inferiority complex. Politicians that know better keep silent for fear of angering this president. This is not a partisan statement, this is a statement of the fundamental distinction of having a bad leader. No corporation would survive like this. For the federal government, which is several orders of magnitude more complex than any corporation, we are absolutely devastated by having such terrible executive leadership. People need to start speaking up and realizing that we must drop the partisanship in order for our country to remain a leader in science and economic power. It took climate scientistS more than a decade to realize that being apolitical meant that the science would be politicized by monied interests; anybody who is interested in truth and science should realize that we must now mobilize against a political force with so large a lust for power that it will acknowledge no external authority, no truth, no empirical reality. These are strange times.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ra5 7y ago
  I think you’re being downvoted because of that very first sentence (no matter how much I hate the guy, laying the blame 100% on his frail shoulders seems a bit hyperbolic). But I don’t see what’s downvotable (if not agreeable) about the rest of what was said
  - epistasis 7y ago
    In defense of my first statement: There's really nobody else to blame that I can see. Perhaps incompetence in the FDA and CDC management, but those are his people, not the rank and file. This is all had management and ignoring expertise, and there is only one person to blame for that. Other countries with more developed healthcare systems and more competent leadership are staving this off quickly, which will let them return to full economic activity much more quickly with proper covid surveillance and tracking. Here in the US, others have stepped up in the absence of the usual leadership that is provided by federal monitoring agencies. It's like we were attacked by invading ground forces, but the president had fired all the generals down to the lieutenants. We have other private individuals stepping up to our defense, but the normal defense infrastructure has been gutted.
- seganddr 7y ago
  "Trump disbanded NSC pandemic unit that experts had praised" https://apnews.com/ce014d94b64e98b7203b873e56f80e9a https://apnews.com/ce014d94b64e98b7203b873e56f80e9a "Quick left amid a bitter U.S. trade dispute with China when she learned her federally funded post, officially known as resident adviser to the U.S. Field Epidemiology Training Program in China, would be discontinued as of September, the sources said. The U.S. CDC said it first learned of a “cluster of 27 cases of pneumonia” of unexplained origin in Wuhan, China, on Dec. 31." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-cdc-exclusiv/exclusive-u-s-axed-cdc-expert-job-in-china-months-before-virus-outbreak-idUSKBN21910S https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-...
- 8bitsrule 7y ago
fragmede 7y ago
The US had a pandemic response team, who's job it would have been to be on guard duty. They were "let go" in 2018 to reduce wasteful government spending.
epistasis 7y ago
I think this single news story is the best answer to your question: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/25/trump-coronavirus-national-security-council-149285 https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/25/trump-coronavirus-n... My other comment on this was flagged, which had far more links. I'm not 100% sure why it was flagged other than the voting revealed it to be very controversial.

by nprz 7y ago

epistasis 7y ago

Being as apolitical as possible, the fault is 100% Trump's. Our pandemic response team was gutted in Spring 2018. One of my favorite science journalists, Ed Yong, wrote this shortly after; there's a lot of contextual history before he starts spitting fire at the president's egotistic idiocy. > Yet even the U.S. is disturbingly vulnerable—and in some respects is becoming quickly more so. It depends on a just-in-time medical economy, in which stockpiles are limited and even key items are made to order. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-the-next-plague-hits/561734/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-th... ^ this is our current system. The people that would have been responsible for activating production had been fired. The CDC bungled the first tests. The FDA prevented anybody but the CDC from performing tests until just recently. The FDA tried to stop the Seattle Flu Study from back testing their samples to find evidence of infections; the scientists defied the FDA and found early evidence that would not have been found earlier. Here's Trump responding to a reporter asking about the risks of firing the pandemic response team, back in 2018: https://twitter.com/public_citizen/status/1239920268979646467?s=21 https://twitter.com/public_citizen/status/123992026897964646... He later denied any knowledge of doing this. And instead of hiring back the people, he called the virus a Democrat hoax. Only later did he even pay attention to it, but there are debates about whether the VP he said was in charge, or his son-in-law is actually in charge. Nobody knows what is going on, every press conference is filled with basic inaccuracies, and he ignores the science. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/dr-fauci-explains-why-he-doesnt-correct-trump-during-press-conferences/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/dr-fauci-explain... It's rotten from the top. We have robbed our government from essential functions, not to really save any money, but because we have an executive that doesn't know what he is doing and is too narcissistic to let anybody stick around that might reveal his inferiority complex. Politicians that know better keep silent for fear of angering this president. This is not a partisan statement, this is a statement of the fundamental distinction of having a bad leader. No corporation would survive like this. For the federal government, which is several orders of magnitude more complex than any corporation, we are absolutely devastated by having such terrible executive leadership. People need to start speaking up and realizing that we must drop the partisanship in order for our country to remain a leader in science and economic power. It took climate scientistS more than a decade to realize that being apolitical meant that the science would be politicized by monied interests; anybody who is interested in truth and science should realize that we must now mobilize against a political force with so large a lust for power that it will acknowledge no external authority, no truth, no empirical reality. These are strange times.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ra5 7y ago
I think you’re being downvoted because of that very first sentence (no matter how much I hate the guy, laying the blame 100% on his frail shoulders seems a bit hyperbolic). But I don’t see what’s downvotable (if not agreeable) about the rest of what was said
- epistasis 7y ago
  In defense of my first statement: There's really nobody else to blame that I can see. Perhaps incompetence in the FDA and CDC management, but those are his people, not the rank and file. This is all had management and ignoring expertise, and there is only one person to blame for that. Other countries with more developed healthcare systems and more competent leadership are staving this off quickly, which will let them return to full economic activity much more quickly with proper covid surveillance and tracking. Here in the US, others have stepped up in the absence of the usual leadership that is provided by federal monitoring agencies. It's like we were attacked by invading ground forces, but the president had fired all the generals down to the lieutenants. We have other private individuals stepping up to our defense, but the normal defense infrastructure has been gutted.
seganddr 7y ago
"Trump disbanded NSC pandemic unit that experts had praised" https://apnews.com/ce014d94b64e98b7203b873e56f80e9a https://apnews.com/ce014d94b64e98b7203b873e56f80e9a "Quick left amid a bitter U.S. trade dispute with China when she learned her federally funded post, officially known as resident adviser to the U.S. Field Epidemiology Training Program in China, would be discontinued as of September, the sources said. The U.S. CDC said it first learned of a “cluster of 27 cases of pneumonia” of unexplained origin in Wuhan, China, on Dec. 31." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-cdc-exclusiv/exclusive-u-s-axed-cdc-expert-job-in-china-months-before-virus-outbreak-idUSKBN21910S https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-...
8bitsrule 7y ago

fragmede 7y ago

The US had a pandemic response team, who's job it would have been to be on guard duty. They were "let go" in 2018 to reduce wasteful government spending.

epistasis 7y ago

I think this single news story is the best answer to your question: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/25/trump-coronavirus-national-security-council-149285 https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/25/trump-coronavirus-n... My other comment on this was flagged, which had far more links. I'm not 100% sure why it was flagged other than the voting revealed it to be very controversial.