>>I’ve been inclined to assume that public health leaders deserved something close to a free pass for those surreal first few months<<
Like you, I feel the same about the first half of 2020. Afterwards, it just felt like a complete failure of the scientific establishment. To see all of the science NOT done was heartbreaking. Despite incomprehensibly large budgets, our public health agencies took 3 years to figure out that cloth masks probably don't do much. People were running outside with masks on and pulling their masks to the side for every bite of food at restaurants-- for almost 3 years!! On top of this, questioning the logic on masking was worthy of cancellation in many circles. Our scientific establishment became a rigid hierarchy of public health officials and 'science communicators', where any questioning of the consensus was strictly forbidden.
Love or hate RFK Jr., it is interesting to see the public health apparatus react to him. Of course, they are incapable of a nuanced interpretation of RFK Jr.'s beliefs, and therefore find themselves defending everything RFK Jr. stands against. So, in an almost-comedic turn of events, I see the same science-communicators who insisted on cloth masking, are now championing Monsanto's Round-Up and red-dye-40. Strange times.
There are substantial pockets within the broad field of public health that are still doing tremendous good, but the administrative centers of the sector writ large have become to an unfortunate extent more pseudo-scientific window dressing to preexisting political agendas--and a variety of slush funds thereof--and thus frequently of depressingly little intellectual value. The Covid response was the most dramatic demonstration of dynamics that have been going on for decades. Even with a lot of reforms I don't really see the nation's prestigious schools of public health as especially salvageable--too many incentives just aren't lined up for legit public service. We'll see how many of those contradictions can be eventually reconciled...!
Public Health has a lot of smart people with really good intentions who feel so strongly about a particular political issue that they just know in their bones it must not be just their opinion but objective scientific Truth. So some of the systemic problems in the field are the typical grant-grubbing and distortion from institutional interests, but there's also a larger dynamic of people so intent on gun control or ending racism or redefining gender etc that they're willing to cut a lot of corners in putting their glossy pamphlets together, and both culturally and bureaucratically that adds up to a single pounding echo chamber of "put us credentialed experts in charge to heal our sick society." Certainly pushing technocratic maximalism is where the most grant money lies, but I tend to think most of the motivations are more idealistic than that. Which makes reforming the field that much steeper a climb.
RFK Jr. was the best possible person we could have hoped for to be nominated as the head of Health and Human Services. This is less an endorsement of RFK Jr. specifically as it is a tacit admission we all know full well Biden/Harris would never have even seriously pretended to consider a secretary with openly negative views about Monsanto. That Trump was willing to make such a concession to get RFK Jr.'s support and Biden/Harris weren't honestly tells you as much as anything about how the two parties view politics right now.
I must admit a certain ambivalence, as Monsanto is a major employer headquartered in my hometown! I do wish RFK Jr. could be a little more disciplined sometimes, as he is probably the best chance for the foreseeable future to address some legit issues that people across the political spectrum have been concerned about for decades.
RFK Jr is a total whack job!.... but he is the face of a "movement" that is long overdue. I don't like the man, but I love who he has coming on board! We need to get back to real science that isn't funded by Big Rx, Big Agra etc.
Might I suggest you read the book, after considering what policy protocols you might feel appropriate, and compare and contrast from there? It's genuinely worth your while!
I was a working scientist for about 50 years, doing applied and fundamental research. I awakened every morning from May 2020 on enraged at what scientists were doing to enable the COVID public health travesty. Fauci, Birx, and Collin’s went against virtually every scientific and public health study in the areas of masking, whether to quarantine, how vaccines worked, how a respiratory virus worked. I am ashamed of so-called science and scientists because of what we allowed to happen.
Thank you! That's been my basic sense but as a journalist I haven't always had every layer of specialist confirmation, appreciate the perspective and insight!
It's good to hear an insider perspective. As a well-informed outsider, I never assumed incompetence. It was clearly malice at a historically unprecedented level.
1970 was unquestionably an inflection point for academia in general, as federal grants and tenure became the dominant source of money and power.
But the crazed zealots were already invading public health a century ago. Ibsen's play 'An enemy of society' depicts one such zealot who sounds remarkably similar to the modern witch hunters.
Ha, yeah it's a recognizable character type dating back at least to the industrial era, if not far earlier with other notions of hygiene. The term "technocracy" was coined roughly a century ago and when you look back at those characters and their rhetoric it's all also strangely familiar.
That's an excellent point about 1970 as a systemic inflection point, Columbia had burned so many federal bridges with the embarrassments of '68 that it was probably more NYC bohemian cultural idealism that instilled most of the rot in those years, but looking at the bigger picture of higher education the die was perhaps cast at that moment.
I'm just not sure about "malice"... the results were malicious, malicious instincts were unconsciously indulged, but part of being a "crazed zealot" is the unironic messiah complex. Even most of the more dubious characters at Columbia Public Health were completely sealed in their self-aggrandizing epistemic bubbles.
This is a tough one for me. I generally agree with this failure. But I lived in Texas during the pandemic, there were a lot of very ignorant people who also believed that COVID wasn't real. These are just people I met, I have no agenda. How do I square the lies of the left with the true ignorance of some of the people on the ground?
That's an important point to keep in mind, that some of the overreaction to Covid was exacerbated by flippant underreaction that did indeed cost at least tens of thousands of lives that might have been saved. I've mentioned before that I could only talk to my Dad through a window as he was dying in a nursing home, and fundamentally I think that policy made sense to protect the other residents no matter how personally upsetting it was for me.
When it comes to lay people trying to navigate conflicting information in a fluid situation, I can't necessarily blame them for religiously trusting the credentialed experts who are supposed to know things. But David Zweig extensively documents the extent to which the credentialed experts in charge jettisoned time-tested best practices and previous expert consensus in pushing remote K-12 with remarkably little regard for how it might impact students. My takeaway was that the most flattering conclusion is that people like Anthony Fauci were egregiously negligent, but I find it more likely given my experience with the public health industry/racket that they were deliberately, cynically, opportunistically exploiting the crisis in service of advancing a preexisting political agenda. In my view, Fauci deserves to be remembered as either a completely incompetent hack at best or quite possibly as a cackling villain.
Part of the problem is that epidemiology is such a broad category that it can mean vastly different things. There are brilliant epidemiologists doing incredible life-saving work and there are silly epidemiologists whose output subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge (and then many somewhere in between!). The field writ large needs to face much more skepticism and scrutiny to help prevent the activists from enjoying an undeserved aura of scientific seriousness, but unfortunately I think a stubborn streak of managerial progressivism is probably permanently baked into the field. No doubt we'll see more public health crusaders attempting to medicalize their political hobbyhorses and exploit any opportunities to the hilt.
We have been here before. Not so much with public health but certainly with the larger medical community. I call your attention to eugenics, lobotomies, phrenology, bleeding to restore the humours, and the defenestration of Semmelweis.
Given your moniker and the topic of the post, I am obliged to mention another prominent Ivy Exile. When the practice of dentistry began to emphasize academic preparation, a member of the leading edge of this movement was John Henry (Doc) Holliday, a graduate of Penn's dental college. He even contributed some scholarly research on the topic.
Yes, a good reminder to be critical of so-called experts and hold them to account, but also to listen carefully when they might well have a damn good point.
Halons razor is super useful for dealing with incompetent people. The idea does not work when dealing either people competent enough to elbow their way to the very top of society like Senators, serious contenders for POTUS, or billionaires, if they were incompetent they wouldn’t be where they are.
On one hand I entirely agree, on the other I sort of think incompetence is so richly and thoroughly marbled throughout all the establishment that the basic lesson still must apply! Not that there isn't a ton of nepotism and narcissism and nihilism and so forth involved, but that lots of characters are actually sort of well-meaning in their ruthless career advancement... Few people like to see themselves among the league of super-villains, but sometimes it works out that way beyond any conscious intentions.
Look at the people who caused a public disaster like the Watergate scandal, the S&L debacle, the housing bubble, the Vietnam War. They were all highly competent at doing the wrong thing.
"The best and the brightest!" I mention 'the fog of war' in the piece, there's a great documentary by that name with Robert McNamara reflecting on the blunders of the Vietnam era.
"It was not that people such as Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Francis Collins were monsters"
"*Profoundly* disagree with that sentence, and nor would I give them a pass on the first few months. I think they knew from the start that they were lying, and I think this was 100% about being able to feel as important as they have spent their whole lives believing they should be, especially by extracting public obeisance. People were just things to them from long before COVID19.
For me the category of "monster" implies a level of malign intent and some degree of conscious recognition that one might be doing wrong, and from my experience with a lot of public health evangelizer types I'm not convinced they tend to have that much self-awareness. There are some great people in public health, but the ones that tend to reach leadership or get the biggest grants often earnestly believe in the desirability and inevitability of global governance managed scientifically by enlightened credentialed experts like them, they truly buy into their own rhetoric.
As of early 2016 it looked like Dems had a lock on the presidency/soon the Supreme Court and that the E.U. was firmly in charge, so for that sort of public health technocrat it seemed like history had ended and the future was inevitably their class of people rightfully ruling, forever. It's difficult to exaggerate how Brexit and then Trump delivered a profoundly shocking and incomprehensible psychological break for a lot of people I covered, like the fabric of reality had been torn asunder, and spurred determination that the natural order of things had to be restored at any cost. Certainly there's a ton of vanity and narcissism involved, but if you truly believe in your bones that a golden future awaits just beyond the selfish neanderthals standing in your way, then you may feel you have a moral obligation to restore enlightened scientific administration by any means necessary and deal with the collateral damage later. That's one of the scarier things, that self-righteous good intentions can lead to unfathomably monstrous behavior.
I probably mostly agree with you on the others, but I think your description of monster really does apply to Fauci, and have thought so since seeing him during the Aids crisis. Love your writing.
Yeah, Fauci was such a creature of D.C. bureaucracy that he's the likeliest of the three to have been driven by sheer amoral power mongering without so much of a streak of utopian fantasy.
I think they spent a fair amount of time and effort trying to hide their own involvement in the creation of the Wuflu because they did in fact fund a fair chunk of it and had to know that the origin was almost certainly a lab leak from research they helped fund.
I'm not sure if that counts as monstrous behavior, but it certainly isn't praiseworthy and makes me less likely to give them a pass about anything else. It is also entirely possibel that, because they knew of its artificial origin, they believed it was much more lethal than it actually was. Hence they let the panic cause the politicians to do stupid things instead of doign the actual science and seeing that for most people under 60 or so, it was just a nasty flu
Traditionally my presumption had been that (other than denying their likely involvement in the research that may well have engineered the virus) public health authorities had initially acted in good faith and become increasingly opportunistic only over time and especially with regard to sanctioning the George Floyd protests/riots, but Zweig's book has made me question that. He discusses how pandemic planning had long been a hot topic in public health circles and an official updated pandemic playbook had just been adopted in 2017. School closures had been discussed but not to be indefinite, and certainly not just writing off concerns by claiming "kids are resilient."
My reading of the facts in the book is that almost from the beginning key players in the public health establishment had an attitude of circling the wagons and not letting the crisis go to waste in terms of instituting priorities they'd dreamed of for years. Some of that was in reaction to Trump being seen as such an aberration to the "arc of history," and I suspect that were Hillary or Jeb in office things might have played out very differently.
Yes, we need a better class of Public Health officials. No, that, by itself, would not prevent future disasters. What is needed is better management of the public health establishment by the elected authorities.
As many public health decisions as possible need to be determined on the state or even local level, so that officials who are too strict or too lackadaisical in responding to crises have some accountability nationally via people being able to vote with their feet. Certainly during Covid that was true to an extent, with blue states keeping schools shut generally for much longer than red, but the federal government put huge thumbs on the scale that made much more sense in certain contexts than others.
Closing the schools was an error. But I'm not convinced it rises to the level of gross negligence given what was known at the time. On a smaller scale I compare Cuomo sending elderly Covid patents out of hospitals and back into nursing hime settings and I think that was gross negligence.
On the bright side, the amazing rapidity of getting a vaccine was a triumph. So to me, Operation Warp Speed overcomes all the errors combined.
I was not allowed to hold my dying father's hand due to Covid protocols, and I'm basically at peace with that because sick elderly people were at such heightened risk that the isolation made collective sense even as it no doubt hastened his individual decline. But, even with the perhaps somewhat jaundiced perspective on the field of public health that I developed at Columbia, I was still stunned and outraged by many of the revelations in David Zweig's book.
Scary respiratory pandemics had been extensively gamed out for decades, and in more sober less politicized moments there was a strong consensus among experts that had been pretty thoroughly planned and systematized. And yet when the rubber hit the road, at least given the political moment, almost all of that was thrown out the window. I highly recommend giving Zweig's book a read, I was much more shocked than I expected. The evidence warranted at least some further conversation.
The staff at my Dad's nursing home were always amazed that he had such a parade of visitors, more than the rest of his floor combined. Enjoying conversations and treats from the outside kept him going for a long time, without Covid isolation there's no doubt in my mind he would have had at least several more months.
>>I’ve been inclined to assume that public health leaders deserved something close to a free pass for those surreal first few months<<
Like you, I feel the same about the first half of 2020. Afterwards, it just felt like a complete failure of the scientific establishment. To see all of the science NOT done was heartbreaking. Despite incomprehensibly large budgets, our public health agencies took 3 years to figure out that cloth masks probably don't do much. People were running outside with masks on and pulling their masks to the side for every bite of food at restaurants-- for almost 3 years!! On top of this, questioning the logic on masking was worthy of cancellation in many circles. Our scientific establishment became a rigid hierarchy of public health officials and 'science communicators', where any questioning of the consensus was strictly forbidden.
Love or hate RFK Jr., it is interesting to see the public health apparatus react to him. Of course, they are incapable of a nuanced interpretation of RFK Jr.'s beliefs, and therefore find themselves defending everything RFK Jr. stands against. So, in an almost-comedic turn of events, I see the same science-communicators who insisted on cloth masking, are now championing Monsanto's Round-Up and red-dye-40. Strange times.
There are substantial pockets within the broad field of public health that are still doing tremendous good, but the administrative centers of the sector writ large have become to an unfortunate extent more pseudo-scientific window dressing to preexisting political agendas--and a variety of slush funds thereof--and thus frequently of depressingly little intellectual value. The Covid response was the most dramatic demonstration of dynamics that have been going on for decades. Even with a lot of reforms I don't really see the nation's prestigious schools of public health as especially salvageable--too many incentives just aren't lined up for legit public service. We'll see how many of those contradictions can be eventually reconciled...!
I wonder if all the pseudo-scientific shit is due to "publish or perish", appeasing big business (Rx Agra etc) or both?
Public Health has a lot of smart people with really good intentions who feel so strongly about a particular political issue that they just know in their bones it must not be just their opinion but objective scientific Truth. So some of the systemic problems in the field are the typical grant-grubbing and distortion from institutional interests, but there's also a larger dynamic of people so intent on gun control or ending racism or redefining gender etc that they're willing to cut a lot of corners in putting their glossy pamphlets together, and both culturally and bureaucratically that adds up to a single pounding echo chamber of "put us credentialed experts in charge to heal our sick society." Certainly pushing technocratic maximalism is where the most grant money lies, but I tend to think most of the motivations are more idealistic than that. Which makes reforming the field that much steeper a climb.
"our public health agencies took 3 years to figure out that cloth masks .."
Utter nonsense.
RFK Jr. was the best possible person we could have hoped for to be nominated as the head of Health and Human Services. This is less an endorsement of RFK Jr. specifically as it is a tacit admission we all know full well Biden/Harris would never have even seriously pretended to consider a secretary with openly negative views about Monsanto. That Trump was willing to make such a concession to get RFK Jr.'s support and Biden/Harris weren't honestly tells you as much as anything about how the two parties view politics right now.
I must admit a certain ambivalence, as Monsanto is a major employer headquartered in my hometown! I do wish RFK Jr. could be a little more disciplined sometimes, as he is probably the best chance for the foreseeable future to address some legit issues that people across the political spectrum have been concerned about for decades.
RFK Jr is a total whack job!.... but he is the face of a "movement" that is long overdue. I don't like the man, but I love who he has coming on board! We need to get back to real science that isn't funded by Big Rx, Big Agra etc.
Thank you for writing this. I just bought Zweig's book. I'm afraid of what I'm about to find out.
As familiar as I thought I was with the topic, I could only read 10 or 15 pages at a time, it was that unfathomable and enraging!
I’ll let you know about my experience, but I’m expecting similar. Maybe with a stiff drink in hand.
Quadruple, neat.
You seem highly enrageable. Maybe that's just your schtick.
Might I suggest you read the book, after considering what policy protocols you might feel appropriate, and compare and contrast from there? It's genuinely worth your while!
I'll give it a shot.
I was a working scientist for about 50 years, doing applied and fundamental research. I awakened every morning from May 2020 on enraged at what scientists were doing to enable the COVID public health travesty. Fauci, Birx, and Collin’s went against virtually every scientific and public health study in the areas of masking, whether to quarantine, how vaccines worked, how a respiratory virus worked. I am ashamed of so-called science and scientists because of what we allowed to happen.
Thank you! That's been my basic sense but as a journalist I haven't always had every layer of specialist confirmation, appreciate the perspective and insight!
"a sickening sense of recognition..."
Yep.
It's good to hear an insider perspective. As a well-informed outsider, I never assumed incompetence. It was clearly malice at a historically unprecedented level.
1970 was unquestionably an inflection point for academia in general, as federal grants and tenure became the dominant source of money and power.
But the crazed zealots were already invading public health a century ago. Ibsen's play 'An enemy of society' depicts one such zealot who sounds remarkably similar to the modern witch hunters.
http://polistrasmill.blogspot.com/2021/06/continuing-on-wholeofsociety.html
Ha, yeah it's a recognizable character type dating back at least to the industrial era, if not far earlier with other notions of hygiene. The term "technocracy" was coined roughly a century ago and when you look back at those characters and their rhetoric it's all also strangely familiar.
That's an excellent point about 1970 as a systemic inflection point, Columbia had burned so many federal bridges with the embarrassments of '68 that it was probably more NYC bohemian cultural idealism that instilled most of the rot in those years, but looking at the bigger picture of higher education the die was perhaps cast at that moment.
I'm just not sure about "malice"... the results were malicious, malicious instincts were unconsciously indulged, but part of being a "crazed zealot" is the unironic messiah complex. Even most of the more dubious characters at Columbia Public Health were completely sealed in their self-aggrandizing epistemic bubbles.
This is a tough one for me. I generally agree with this failure. But I lived in Texas during the pandemic, there were a lot of very ignorant people who also believed that COVID wasn't real. These are just people I met, I have no agenda. How do I square the lies of the left with the true ignorance of some of the people on the ground?
That's an important point to keep in mind, that some of the overreaction to Covid was exacerbated by flippant underreaction that did indeed cost at least tens of thousands of lives that might have been saved. I've mentioned before that I could only talk to my Dad through a window as he was dying in a nursing home, and fundamentally I think that policy made sense to protect the other residents no matter how personally upsetting it was for me.
When it comes to lay people trying to navigate conflicting information in a fluid situation, I can't necessarily blame them for religiously trusting the credentialed experts who are supposed to know things. But David Zweig extensively documents the extent to which the credentialed experts in charge jettisoned time-tested best practices and previous expert consensus in pushing remote K-12 with remarkably little regard for how it might impact students. My takeaway was that the most flattering conclusion is that people like Anthony Fauci were egregiously negligent, but I find it more likely given my experience with the public health industry/racket that they were deliberately, cynically, opportunistically exploiting the crisis in service of advancing a preexisting political agenda. In my view, Fauci deserves to be remembered as either a completely incompetent hack at best or quite possibly as a cackling villain.
The charlatanism was obvious from the beginning. Epidemiology is more akin to phrenology than science.
Part of the problem is that epidemiology is such a broad category that it can mean vastly different things. There are brilliant epidemiologists doing incredible life-saving work and there are silly epidemiologists whose output subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge (and then many somewhere in between!). The field writ large needs to face much more skepticism and scrutiny to help prevent the activists from enjoying an undeserved aura of scientific seriousness, but unfortunately I think a stubborn streak of managerial progressivism is probably permanently baked into the field. No doubt we'll see more public health crusaders attempting to medicalize their political hobbyhorses and exploit any opportunities to the hilt.
We have been here before. Not so much with public health but certainly with the larger medical community. I call your attention to eugenics, lobotomies, phrenology, bleeding to restore the humours, and the defenestration of Semmelweis.
Given your moniker and the topic of the post, I am obliged to mention another prominent Ivy Exile. When the practice of dentistry began to emphasize academic preparation, a member of the leading edge of this movement was John Henry (Doc) Holliday, a graduate of Penn's dental college. He even contributed some scholarly research on the topic.
Yes, a good reminder to be critical of so-called experts and hold them to account, but also to listen carefully when they might well have a damn good point.
By all accounts, he was a good dentist. It was just that patients didn't like someone with TB coughing on them
Halons razor is super useful for dealing with incompetent people. The idea does not work when dealing either people competent enough to elbow their way to the very top of society like Senators, serious contenders for POTUS, or billionaires, if they were incompetent they wouldn’t be where they are.
On one hand I entirely agree, on the other I sort of think incompetence is so richly and thoroughly marbled throughout all the establishment that the basic lesson still must apply! Not that there isn't a ton of nepotism and narcissism and nihilism and so forth involved, but that lots of characters are actually sort of well-meaning in their ruthless career advancement... Few people like to see themselves among the league of super-villains, but sometimes it works out that way beyond any conscious intentions.
Look at the people who caused a public disaster like the Watergate scandal, the S&L debacle, the housing bubble, the Vietnam War. They were all highly competent at doing the wrong thing.
"The best and the brightest!" I mention 'the fog of war' in the piece, there's a great documentary by that name with Robert McNamara reflecting on the blunders of the Vietnam era.
"It was not that people such as Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Francis Collins were monsters"
"*Profoundly* disagree with that sentence, and nor would I give them a pass on the first few months. I think they knew from the start that they were lying, and I think this was 100% about being able to feel as important as they have spent their whole lives believing they should be, especially by extracting public obeisance. People were just things to them from long before COVID19.
For me the category of "monster" implies a level of malign intent and some degree of conscious recognition that one might be doing wrong, and from my experience with a lot of public health evangelizer types I'm not convinced they tend to have that much self-awareness. There are some great people in public health, but the ones that tend to reach leadership or get the biggest grants often earnestly believe in the desirability and inevitability of global governance managed scientifically by enlightened credentialed experts like them, they truly buy into their own rhetoric.
As of early 2016 it looked like Dems had a lock on the presidency/soon the Supreme Court and that the E.U. was firmly in charge, so for that sort of public health technocrat it seemed like history had ended and the future was inevitably their class of people rightfully ruling, forever. It's difficult to exaggerate how Brexit and then Trump delivered a profoundly shocking and incomprehensible psychological break for a lot of people I covered, like the fabric of reality had been torn asunder, and spurred determination that the natural order of things had to be restored at any cost. Certainly there's a ton of vanity and narcissism involved, but if you truly believe in your bones that a golden future awaits just beyond the selfish neanderthals standing in your way, then you may feel you have a moral obligation to restore enlightened scientific administration by any means necessary and deal with the collateral damage later. That's one of the scarier things, that self-righteous good intentions can lead to unfathomably monstrous behavior.
I probably mostly agree with you on the others, but I think your description of monster really does apply to Fauci, and have thought so since seeing him during the Aids crisis. Love your writing.
Yeah, Fauci was such a creature of D.C. bureaucracy that he's the likeliest of the three to have been driven by sheer amoral power mongering without so much of a streak of utopian fantasy.
I think they spent a fair amount of time and effort trying to hide their own involvement in the creation of the Wuflu because they did in fact fund a fair chunk of it and had to know that the origin was almost certainly a lab leak from research they helped fund.
I'm not sure if that counts as monstrous behavior, but it certainly isn't praiseworthy and makes me less likely to give them a pass about anything else. It is also entirely possibel that, because they knew of its artificial origin, they believed it was much more lethal than it actually was. Hence they let the panic cause the politicians to do stupid things instead of doign the actual science and seeing that for most people under 60 or so, it was just a nasty flu
Traditionally my presumption had been that (other than denying their likely involvement in the research that may well have engineered the virus) public health authorities had initially acted in good faith and become increasingly opportunistic only over time and especially with regard to sanctioning the George Floyd protests/riots, but Zweig's book has made me question that. He discusses how pandemic planning had long been a hot topic in public health circles and an official updated pandemic playbook had just been adopted in 2017. School closures had been discussed but not to be indefinite, and certainly not just writing off concerns by claiming "kids are resilient."
My reading of the facts in the book is that almost from the beginning key players in the public health establishment had an attitude of circling the wagons and not letting the crisis go to waste in terms of instituting priorities they'd dreamed of for years. Some of that was in reaction to Trump being seen as such an aberration to the "arc of history," and I suspect that were Hillary or Jeb in office things might have played out very differently.
Yes, we need a better class of Public Health officials. No, that, by itself, would not prevent future disasters. What is needed is better management of the public health establishment by the elected authorities.
As many public health decisions as possible need to be determined on the state or even local level, so that officials who are too strict or too lackadaisical in responding to crises have some accountability nationally via people being able to vote with their feet. Certainly during Covid that was true to an extent, with blue states keeping schools shut generally for much longer than red, but the federal government put huge thumbs on the scale that made much more sense in certain contexts than others.
Closing the schools was an error. But I'm not convinced it rises to the level of gross negligence given what was known at the time. On a smaller scale I compare Cuomo sending elderly Covid patents out of hospitals and back into nursing hime settings and I think that was gross negligence.
On the bright side, the amazing rapidity of getting a vaccine was a triumph. So to me, Operation Warp Speed overcomes all the errors combined.
I was not allowed to hold my dying father's hand due to Covid protocols, and I'm basically at peace with that because sick elderly people were at such heightened risk that the isolation made collective sense even as it no doubt hastened his individual decline. But, even with the perhaps somewhat jaundiced perspective on the field of public health that I developed at Columbia, I was still stunned and outraged by many of the revelations in David Zweig's book.
Scary respiratory pandemics had been extensively gamed out for decades, and in more sober less politicized moments there was a strong consensus among experts that had been pretty thoroughly planned and systematized. And yet when the rubber hit the road, at least given the political moment, almost all of that was thrown out the window. I highly recommend giving Zweig's book a read, I was much more shocked than I expected. The evidence warranted at least some further conversation.
My mother was already gone by then but not seeing people would have killed her for sure.
The staff at my Dad's nursing home were always amazed that he had such a parade of visitors, more than the rest of his floor combined. Enjoying conversations and treats from the outside kept him going for a long time, without Covid isolation there's no doubt in my mind he would have had at least several more months.