Thursday, September 16, 2021

It's Time To Fire Everyone At The Centers for Diease Control and Start Over

I know they added "and Prevention" to their name but they couldn't even get the "Control" bit right so why waste pixels?

From Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution:

Scott Gottlieb’s Uncontrolled Spread is superb. I reviewed it for the WSJ. Here’s one bit:

If there’s one overarching theme of “Uncontrolled Spread,” it’s that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention failed utterly. It’s now well known that the CDC didn’t follow standard operating procedures in its own labs, resulting in contamination and a complete botch of its original SARS-CoV-2 test. The agency’s failure put us weeks behind and took the South Korea option of suppressing the virus off the table. But the blunder was much deeper and more systematic than a botched test. The CDC never had a plan for widespread testing, which in any scenario could only be achieved by bringing in the big, private labs.

Instead of working with the commercial labs, the CDC went out of its way to impede them from developing and deploying their own tests. The CDC wouldn’t share its virus samples with commercial labs, slowing down test development. “The agency didn’t view it as a part of its mission to assist these labs.” Dr. Gottlieb writes. As a result, “It would be weeks before commercial manufacturers could get access to the samples they needed, and they’d mostly have to go around the CDC. One large commercial lab would obtain samples from a subsidiary in South Korea.”....

....MUCH MORE 

If interested see also "Michael Lewis on how to spot a crisis coming"  and our own bit of editorializing on that topic:

Spoiler alert

The CDC and the other three (and four) letter agencies waited their entire bureaucratic lives for this pandemic moment and failed. Utterly and completely failed. I mean the name of the place is "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention." I don't recall when they added the "...and Prevention" bit, they sure didn't rise to the "control" part, much less adding to their responsibility.

And now there is mounting evidence that not only didn't the government scientists have a plan, they obsfucated, prevaricated, and outright lied about what they did and did not know. Time for a house-cleaning.

As Harley Bassman, the Convexity Maven put it back on May 5, 2020:

Most people will remember the 1992 movie, “A Few Good Men”, for the crescendo court scene where Colonel Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson) shouts at J.A.G. Lieutenant Kaffee (Tom Cruise): “You can’t handle the truth”
Depending upon your politics, you were either inspired or offended as Jessup continued: “You have the luxury of not knowing what I know; And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall.”

I was occasioned to think of this scene as I considered our rather haphazard response to this pandemic. It is a primary responsibility of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the NSA (National Security Agency), the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), and likely a few more embedded in the “deep state” to game out any possible national security risk, from Martians to meteors.

So why does it seem there was not a secret folder in the file cabinet labeled: Pandemic response?

There have been over a dozen movies on this topic, so it’s not like the idea of a global pandemic was totally alien (irony intended). And while some will surely blame this entirely on the President, too many people would have known this folder existed for it not to be leaked.

At a bare minimum, the Congressional and Senate intelligence committees would have had this folder delivered to their desks sometime in late December when (our spies at) the World Health Organization(WHO) first received reports from the Chinese about a cluster of 41 deaths from a mysterious pneumonia.

Surely the gears would have been grinding at a dozen Govt Agencies as early as late January when the President closed the airports to flights from China.

I suppose the alternative, of which I am incredulous, is that there was no folder.

Forced to consider the latter, let us not make the same mistake with our investments; perhaps it is time to take the long view and build our own folder.Courtesy of the latest quarterly review from Hoisington Investment Management, the -oriole line-is the quickly expanding Monetary Base, which is projected to reach the -heron dot-of $5.0Tn at month’s end....

And for sticking with us this long, coming up, Harley's latest!