Politics. The single most important ability of a political leader – president, governor or mayor – is attracting talent. Bureaucracies are sprawling organizations filled with people who know a lot more about any given issue on any given day than any executive and his cabinet. To be successful the executive must appoint to his cabinet, individuals who almost immediately garner respect.
It is a fundamental law of politics and government.
When an executive – in this case the president – cannot attract and keep talent, you get:
Baby formula shortages.
The FDA has become such the target of politics – progressives let it be known early in President Joe Biden’s administration they would not accept Janet Woodcock as FDA Commissioner – that no one wants to work there. After a failed recruiting effort, Joe Biden managed to cajole Dr. Robert Califf back to the agency, over a year after taking office.
Without leadership, bureaucracies everywhere tend to favor inertia. They adhere closely to risk adverse practices that frequently do not consider the facts on the ground like the highly concentrated nature of the baby formula business or a rising out-of-stock rate. Or maybe they do but no one listens
Until the New York Times reports.
To hear the White House tell the story, the problem – one created by the absence of leadership and executive decision making – is being solved by leadership and executive decision making.
To the mind of a young family, battered by school closures and now formula shortages, it probably looks more like government solving a problem it should have prevented.
Policy. Leave it to the nerds at Cornell University to stop the insane “Zero-COVID” bandwagon at American colleges and universities, primarily those on the east and west coasts.
Always an outlier in the Ivy League and far from the Boston-Philadelphia corridor, they seemed to have retained some part of their critical thinking capacity. It was their researchers that took the brave step of investigating whether all the non-pharmaceutical interventions imposed on students and, by some extension, their parents, worked.
It appears they did not.
COVID-19, specifically the Omicron variant, is simply too infectious and, to quote the paper:
“The Omicron variant is highly transmissible, particularly in high-density social settings. Based on analysis of routinely collected population surveillance data, Cornell’s experience shows that traditional public health interventions were not a match for Omicron. While vaccination protected against severe illness, it was not sufficient to prevent rapid spread, even when combined with other public health measures including widespread surveillance testing.”
In other words, virus gonna virus.
All that solitary confinement, masking, and correspondence zoom classes mom and dad paid upwards of $75k a year were useless.
Nice.
Mom and dad just found a line item to eliminate from the philanthropy budget.
Power. Perhaps it will be less of a problem now that Monkeypox is providing a nice distraction for public health Twitterati, but at some point there will need to a reckoning for the bad policy imposed during COVID-19, especially on the young.
The first response appears to be denial. I sat through what has to have been one of the most depressing graduation ceremonies ever at a small liberal arts college in Philadelphia. The school imposed a mandatory mask policy for attendees in the well-ventilated field house and nearly everyone complied.
(I refused. Whereupon my husband told me to stop making a scene.)
The speaker was the daughter of Fred Korematsu, who sued the United States Government for detaining and interning Japanese Americans at camps during World War II. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled in favor of the government.
The Court’s egregious decision has served as the precedent in many states to justify certain non-pharmaceutical interventions like business and school closures. Ms. Korematsu assured us, however, that there is a BIG difference between denying people their freedom and making them stay in the comfort of their home.
Well, ok then. Why hadn’t we thought of that before?
Denial should not work for long, if it is working at all. The damage is too great. The evidence that COVID-19 non-pharmaceutical interventions were anything more than a massive power trip, mounts.
Have a great rest of your weekend.
Emily Evans
Managing Director – Health Policy
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