Every so often, I highlight tweets that deserve attention because they say something important, usually in a clever and succinct fashion.
- Best-ever tweet about inequality.
- Best tweet about capitalism vs socialism.
- The most depressing tweet.
- Trump’s worst-ever tweet.
- The best-ever counter-tweet.
Today, I’m highlighting what I consider to be the year’s best tweet.
The tweet is from Matthew Lesh of the Adam Smith Institute in London and it shows the big difference between private sector results and government incompetence.
Some readers may wonder if he is being unfair? Is the tweet merely libertarian-style grousing?
Well, consider this recent story from the Washington Post, which details how government incompetence at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) greatly delayed testing capacity.
On Jan. 13, the World Health Organization had made public a recipe for how to configure such a test, and several countries wasted no time getting started: Within hours, scientists in Thailand used the instructions to deploy a new test. The CDC would not roll out one that worked for 46 more days.
…The agency squandered weeks as it pursued a test design far more complicated than the WHO version and as its scientists wrestled with failures… The CDC’s response to what became the nation’s deadliest pandemic in a century marked a low point in its 74-year history. …Without tests to identify the early cases, health authorities nationwide were unable to isolate the infected and trace the rapid spread among their close contacts. …120 public health labs were without a government-approved test of their own and, with few exceptions, depended wholly on getting the CDC’s kits. …companies had no incentive to navigate regulatory hurdles and mass-produce kits.
The above story describes how the CDC screwed up at the start of the pandemic.
In her December 27 column for the Washington Post, Megan McArdle highlights a new example of CDC incompetence.
…the now-infamous November meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices…unanimously agreed that essential workers should get vaccinated ahead of the elderly, even though they’d been told this would mean up to 6 percent more deaths.
This decision was supported in part by noting that America’s essential workers are more racially diverse than its senior citizens. …the discussion of whether to prioritize essential workers was anything but robust. …not one of those 14 intelligent and dedicated health professionals suggested adopting the plan that kills the fewest people. …for the past nine months, public health experts have insisted that minimizing deaths should override other concerns, even quite important ones. So how, in this case, did equity conquer death?
Let’s close with some excerpts from Aaron Sibarium’s article on the same issue for the Washington Free Beacon.
The committee openly acknowledged that its initial plan would result in more deaths than “vaccinating older adults first.” But, the panel said, the plan would reduce racial disparities—something they deemed more important than saving lives…
The result was an explicitly race-conscious plan that would have prioritized shrinking the case gap between races over saving the most lives. …All of this—the exclusions, the contradictions, the moral redundancies—helped disguise the agenda that it justified, giving unscientific value judgments an air of scientific assuredness.
The really amazing aspect of this story is that there almost surely would be more minority deaths if this this approach was implemented.
But the “woke” bureaucrats though that would have been okay since there would have been an even-greater increase in white deaths.
This is healthcare version of their warped view that it’s okay to support policies that reduce income for poor people so long as the rich incur even greater losses.
Anyhow, I guess we should “congratulate” the CDC for showing it can compete with the WHO in the contest to see which bureaucracy had the worst response to the coronavirus (we already had plenty of evidence that the FDA is incompetent).
We can add this column to my series (here, here, here, and here) on how government blundering magnified the coronavirus pandemic.
P.S. If I had the flair for self-promotion that you often find in D.C., I would have been tempted to claim that my tweet from earlier today deserves some sort of recognition.
But I don’t need attention and affirmation. I simply want people to understand that it’s reprehensible that we have cossetted international bureaucrats (who get lavish, tax-free salaries!) pushing sloppy and ideological nonsense that will make the world less prosperous.
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Image credit: Raed Mansour | CC BY 2.0.
