> Yet even the U.S. is disturbingly vulnerable—and in some respects is becoming quickly more so. It depends on a just-in-time medical economy, in which stockpiles are limited and even key items are made to order. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-th...
^ this is our current system. The people that would have been responsible for activating production had been fired. The CDC bungled the first tests. The FDA prevented anybody but the CDC from performing tests until just recently. The FDA tried to stop the Seattle Flu Study from back testing their samples to find evidence of infections; the scientists defied the FDA and found early evidence that would not have been found earlier.
Here's Trump responding to a reporter asking about the risks of firing the pandemic response team, back in 2018:
https://twitter.com/public_citizen/status/123992026897964646...
He later denied any knowledge of doing this. And instead of hiring back the people, he called the virus a Democrat hoax. Only later did he even pay attention to it, but there are debates about whether the VP he said was in charge, or his son-in-law is actually in charge. Nobody knows what is going on, every press conference is filled with basic inaccuracies, and he ignores the science. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/dr-fauci-explain...
It's rotten from the top. We have robbed our government from essential functions, not to really save any money, but because we have an executive that doesn't know what he is doing and is too narcissistic to let anybody stick around that might reveal his inferiority complex.
Politicians that know better keep silent for fear of angering this president.
This is not a partisan statement, this is a statement of the fundamental distinction of having a bad leader. No corporation would survive like this. For the federal government, which is several orders of magnitude more complex than any corporation, we are absolutely devastated by having such terrible executive leadership.
People need to start speaking up and realizing that we must drop the partisanship in order for our country to remain a leader in science and economic power.
It took climate scientistS more than a decade to realize that being apolitical meant that the science would be politicized by monied interests; anybody who is interested in truth and science should realize that we must now mobilize against a political force with so large a lust for power that it will acknowledge no external authority, no truth, no empirical reality. These are strange times.