Thursday Morning

Like every single person on this planet — including it would seem, people who are supposed to be experts at this kind of thing — I have no idea how bad or threatening the coronavirus is or may be. It's one of those times when in my head, I hear the Mel Brooks song, "Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst."

What we need of course is for science to save us, primarily doctor-type folks who are even now figuring out how to handle this pandemic. At any time, this would be a scary thing but it's scarier because we have leaders now who don't believe in science and who have slashed funding for exactly the kind of response we now need. Laurie Garrett, a former senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, lays it all out in this article and I'll quote just this much of it…

For the United States, the answers are especially worrying because the government has intentionally rendered itself incapable. In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government's entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure. In numerous phone calls and emails with key agencies across the U.S. government, the only consistent response I encountered was distressed confusion. If the United States still has a clear chain of command for pandemic response, the White House urgently needs to clarify what it is.

That was written almost a month ago and it still applies. Trump has put Mike Pence in charge of coordinating the White House efforts, which sure suggests he's treating this as a political problem and a threat to his own popularity, not as a medical problem and a threat to human lives. We've been saying on this blog for months now that the 2020 Presidential Election would be about all sorts of scandals and issues that were not yet on our radar. Here's one that nobody was mentioning a few weeks ago.