Loss of capacity at high government levels
What went wrong? No battery in the smoke alarm:
The disastrously tardy, inadequate, confused, and (for many citizens) confusing response of the federal government to covid-19, both before and after the first case, derives from too many factors to list here, but I’ll mention two: failure to appreciate the sars and mers warnings, both delivered by other coronaviruses; and loss of capacity at high government levels, within recent years, to understand the gravity and immediacy of pandemic threats. The result of that loss is what Ali Khan means by lack of imagination. Beth Cameron, a former head of the Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense on the National Security Council staff, calls it the absence of “the smoke alarm.” Those in power who are charged with “keeping watch to get ahead of emergencies” need to smell the smoke and smother the fire while it’s small, Cameron told me. “You’re not going to stop outbreaks from happening. But you can stop outbreaks from becoming epidemics or pandemics.” She led the directorate from its establishment, following the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, until March, 2017. It survived under her successor for a little more than a year, and then, after John Bolton became the national-security adviser, it was dissolved. A smoke alarm doesn’t work when the battery has been removed.
Dennis Carroll, a former research virologist, led a pandemic-threats unit at the U.S. Agency for International Development for almost fifteen years. In 2009, he created a large program called predict, dispersing about two hundred million dollars in grants to support discovery of potentially dangerous new viruses before they spill over into humans. That program is ending, due to “the ascension of risk averse bureaucrats,” he told the Times, last October. He mentioned the White House closure of the N.S.C. health directorate as a parallel instance, and said that both Congress and the Administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama were “enormously supportive,” but then came the current chill winds.
“Chill winds” is a very emollient substitute for “brainless greedy crook who understands nothing but money that flows to him.”
Risk averse is an odd phrase in this case, since you would think risk averse individuals would want a task force to deal with risks like pandemics. I think ‘intelligence averse’ would be more like it, and ‘not profiting Trump enterprises averse’ and ‘Obama believed in this averse’. Risk averse just doesn’t really work here. I know what they’re talking about, but it makes the entire thing sound like it is somehow thought through rather than being the knee-jerk anti-Obama action it was.
Trump & Co. didn’t just tremove the battery from the smoke alarm; they took the smoke alarm down altogether, then disbanded the fire department, leaving trucks, pumps and hoses to rot in storage.
And set a few things on fire.
iknklast:
They mean “risk averse” in the peculiar way it’s always meant in relation to security spending: the risk of a disaster is low, so the risk of ‘wasting’ money on detecting, preventing or mitigating the disaster is high.
You’ll find this attitude in virtually every decision on security spending of any kind because it’s perfectly rational in the short-term from the point of view of the person usually making the decisions. The CEO of a company could spend a large amount of money making their product secure or could gamble on a big security disaster not happening until they’ve jumped ship with an enormous bonus for cutting costs. Even if the gamble doesn’t pay off and a disaster happens on the CEO’s watch, it probably won’t affect the bonus all that much. Look at the CEO of Equifax who presided over arguably the worst data breach in history and retired with a bonus of $90m.
It didn’t even affect profits very much, in the general scheme of things. From the point of view of the shareholders and the CEO, that decision was very risk averse. And just to belabour the point and terrify anyone not already hiding under the bed: this is how virtually all decisions about security are made.
latsot, I see that sort of “risk averse” thinking in relation to the environment, too. The problem comes when the only risk you won’t take is with money. Weighing all the risks accurately (or as accurately as we can ever predict something that hasn’t happened yet) is not done, or the opposite risks (pandemic, environmental catastrophe, unsafe product) is often underestimated, while the costs of taking action to prevent those risks is overestimated. Yeah, risk averse in one sense. Foolhardy in another.
ikn:
Yes, exactly the same kind of problem.