Covid 19
At some point you’d sorta hope that these people would stop and think for a moment. If the aim here is to be able to control more of other peoples’ money with no care for the effectiveness of output perhaps they are thinking. If the aim is to care about shit getting done they clearly aren’t:
The world should have been better prepared for a pandemic. From the Sars outbreak of 2003 to the Mers outbreak of 2012, it was apparent that coronaviruses could not only could make successful species jumps, but that they would result in human-to-human transmission – and that these novel viruses could prove deadly. The chaotic response to the Ebola outbreak in west Africa in 2014 showed just how poorly prepared the world was to tackle known, let alone novel, pathogens.
OK, we’ll specify that’s true without bothering to examine it all that much.
The current architecture is not fit to prevent a future pandemic. The World Health Organization has recorded its latest failure: bedevilled by bureaucracy and chronically underfunded, it has been reduced to yet another arena for the diplomatic contest between the United States and a rising China. Its response to Covid-19 was too slow, and was inhibited by a reluctance to be seen to be “taking sides”.
But in truth, the WHO has never possessed either the capacity or capability to tackle a global pandemic, even if it had acted more decisively.
OK, so the global bureaucracy we set up to deal with global health problems – pandemics, yes, among them – is shit and incapable. OK, we’ll agree that’s true.
So, what to do about it?
We now need a global foundation for health security – an institution whose purpose is to monitor threats and take steps to counter them. A properly funded global institution would invest in scientific research around the world and create the platforms needed to rapidly invent new vaccines. It would coordinate the efforts in universities and other research institutions, working alongside national governments.
So the solution to the failure of a global bureaucracy is to have another global bureaucracy, is it? Without even slowing own to consider whether the problem is inherent to a global bureaucracy?
This is Einstein’s definition of insanity, doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result. And ain’t that a great way to spend our money on running the world?
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One thing we know about global bureaucracy is that it will take any required steps to perpetuate itself, and cast the same in "science," whether the panicky Covid computer game from Imperial College or the "science" (without a human-free Earth as a control) regarding man-caused* runaway* heating or cooling. A more basic problem is the assumption that Earth offers anyone "security," with or without a global cabal of parasites.
As always, when a gov't or quasi-gov't entity fails it wasn't "adequately funded". A few billion more and we'd have handled things great, but with only 60 people in the office of diversity, equity and inclusion and only 3 full-time sushi chefs in the cafeteria what did you expect?
I wonder why Northcote Parkinson's studies aren't taught in more schools. Probably for the same reason that Julian Simon's aren't either.
The former pointed out that bureaucracies are self-perpetuating, and they never close down after the issue that they were set up to address has been solved. Instead, they often expand their remit into an area which will continue to justify their existence.
However, there is another approach to maintaining themselves. That is to continualy fail at solving the problem, thereby ensuring that they always have a job. In fact, they can subtly make the problem worse whenever they need more money - since they are both close to the problem and the origin of all data about it.
A good example here is the 'War on Drugs' - which has managed to raise drug usage from a minority elite vice to an endemic corruption of youth across the Western world. The 'War on Terror' has spawned a vast army of bureaucrats checking every aspect of an aircraft flight - and that certainly won't go away any time soon.
Following this theory, an ideal head of any bureaucracy would be a weak individual with tunnel vision who could always be relied upon to make the wrong decision at all times - thus justifying more and more work to clean up the inevitable catastrophes. Which precisely describes the actors in the current government 'War on Flu'....
Dodgy and Esteban above call to mind the mismanagement of the Covid-19 epidemic. Actions to-date have done nothing but extend flu season into midsummer (and undo Trump's entire economic legacy). Every uptick in the declining contagion curve is the fault of "red states reopening too quickly" calling for new lockdowns. The decline itself calls for "leaders" like Joe Biden to contrive new national mandates to "get it down to zero" [sic].
With the current state of knowledge vaccine development is measured in days/weeks, but regulatory approval is measured in months to years.
See imperial college vaccine.
A few days ago I saw a report on Russia Today that they are preparing to begin testing their Covid vaccine 'Sputnik V' (I kid you not) on humans.
Will all those who want to give it a go please form an orderly queue........