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Worse than outdoor diffusion was spraying surfaces. Everybody knew, or should have known, that COVID was spreading aerially. Remember the much-publicized cruise ships where they all got sick despite staying in their rooms and washing their hands? It was coming in the ventilation system. I'd imagine that it would be trivial for a microbiologist to use a microscope and see 'oh this is a very small particle so it's spreading by air as opposed to surface contact'. Or they could do experiments to quickly find out. Even from a symptoms perspective - it wrecks your lungs so clearly it has a method of getting in there. What more obvious way to get into someone's lungs than being breathed in?
And yet everyone was spraying surfaces like a maniac, until 'the science changed' about a year in, if not longer. A close friend (who has an obsessive trust in the media) was spraying her own shoes with disinfectant after going shopping. I was made to spray the surface of my table after eating communal meals by my institution. How much toxic chemicals were we spreading around, how many man-hours were wasted globally? People were doing the same things in elevators, spraying down surfaces three times a day.
Few were thinking about ventilation, I can't recall anyone doing anything about that outside Japan, where they had machines measuring CO2 concentration as a proxy for ventilation. I conclude that most people just obey instructions without thinking about them. I also conclude that the medical communications apparatus is completely useless and should face serious consequences.
In the Seven Years War, 1756, the British Admiral Byng was sent out to relieve Minorca which was being besieged by the French. His ships were in poor condition, local forces were inadequate, the whole operation was ill-concieved and he then lost the battle with the French. Minorca fell. Byng was relieved of his command and executed for 'failing to do his utmost'. It was a bad start to the war, Britain was losing on several other fronts and there were food riots. So they decided to find a scapegoat.
Many have criticized the decision as unjust and politically motivated. But since then, British naval commanders were much more aggressive. In Voltaire's words:
I'm not calling for a massive Stalinist-style purge. But if our ancestors could kill Byng, a man who really did nothing wrong other than failing to provide a superhuman performance whilst set up to fail by his superiors... We can kill officials who completely drop the ball and totally fail to provide rational advice, wasting enormous amounts of time with nonsense like spraying surfaces as opposed to useful recommendations. We can kill the reckless and highly suspicious Ecohealth people, who look like they have megadeaths on their hands from negligent gain-of-function coronavirus/furin-cleavage-site insertion. Even if they weren't responsible, it would certainly encourage other researchers not to tempt fate and court death, a valuable boon.
People must have skin in the game, especially in matters of vast importance. There should be prizes for success, punishments for failure. The British retook Minorca in the peace treaty of 1763 - we will never get back all those who died.
If you want to talk about the incentives this creates, consider how many people will try to avoid jobs where they have any real responsibility, lest they be executed because someone somewhere suspects that they didn't do everything perfectly. A plane crashes and it cannot be determined conclusively whose fault it was? There go the thousands of engineers who worked on it, every technician who inspected or serviced it, and the entire management of the airline.
I think it's reasonable to assume that they were doing their best and their mistakes can be attributed to the need for a fast response in a complicated and novel situation. In other words, no one could have (realistically) done better.
Outside of internet conspiracy theories, is there any indication they actually did anything wrong?
I specifically stated I wasn't calling for Stalinist style mass purge. The whole point of 'responsibility' as a concept is that it incentivizes people to do a good job. That's why it exists, it balances the wealth and status that these people get.
If you sell someone an aircraft that thinks it's a Stuka and sometimes automatically nose-dives and hundreds of people die, you deserve severe punishment. $20 billion in fines is not enough, it's not like executives are paying from their own pockets. They need a stronger incentive to balance the enormous wealth they receive from the company, an incentive that has them actively pursue a culture of precision and care.
At any rate, this disastrous error would only cause a few thousand deaths over thirty years, it's a nothingburger compared to COVID. A prison sentence for the one who oversaw the 737 MAX project would be appropriate.
There's a tonne of evidence. These people (Daszak and Ecohealth) were asking for money to put furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses, they were importing them from Laos, they were training them on humanized mice. Lo and behold we get a bat coronavirus with a furin cleavage site whose closest known biological predecessor is from a bat in Laos, well adapted to human biology.
And then Daszak has the temerity to go rally together some scientists to publish a Lancet paper accusing everyone of publishing dangerous conspiracy theories unless they accept that some unknown sick bat from Laos got to Wuhan, infected a pangolin and then a human - where none of these animals have been found. By far the most parsimonious explanation is that of gain-of-function research and a lab leak. But of course the medical establishment is going to drag this out as long as possible lest they be smeared with the blame for the disaster they negligently caused. Donald Trump would never find Donald Trump to be criminally negligent and responsible for the greatest disaster of the century thus far - why would we expect anyone else to admit responsibility even if it's clearly their fault? They can find specious technical arguments against a lab-leak and hide behind their status as experts. Daszak delenda est.
I could have done better. From the Diamond Princess and Ruby Princess onwards I was confident that it was spread primarily by air, cleaning surfaces was a waste of time. I wouldn't have gone for the 'oh masks don't work' angle either and then backflip - it's obvious that masks work. That's why doctors wear them! They took months and years to fix these stupid, inexplicable errors, it's not a snap decision like those of the battlefield. They created doubt in their own wisdom and effectiveness - then they complained that people weren't trusting them sufficiently. Why would you trust anyone who gets away scott-free for lying to you, wasting immense amounts of time and creating the crisis in the first place?
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Which, to be fair, was a completely valid assumption... and then they started supporting the protestors/rioters intentionally violating their rules because they support a political cause they favor while simultaneously prosecuting everyone else for the same kinds of gatherings.
The deadliest job in history is "politician" for a very, very good reason; not only do they get summarily executed from time to time (be it partisan action or not), but hilariously there are even some countries that actively encourage their citizens to retain the capacity to do this. The only crime they need commit is "fail to be seen to have done the utmost", and that definition is not only pretty vague, but can be retroactively defined to mean just about anything that any person or group with the resources to impose it wants it to.
And honestly, that's probably OK; not only do they know the price of hilariously gross failure, but the rewards (though they need not be completely monetary nor immediate) are generally enough that it's worth taking the risk.
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All this would achieve is dramatically reducing the number and quality of applicants to civil service positions.
There needs to be a balance between reward and punishment. If you get things done quickly and effectively, there should be a bonus. If you save the state millions of dollars, there should a significant prize. But if you make a huge disaster like the Afghanistan war, you should be punished severely. Not a single general or politician has been so much as imprisoned, let alone executed. Why should we expect them to do any better in the future without skin in the game?
Quality is already abysmally low. We have people squandering vast amounts of money on all manner of things, pursuing terrible policies incompetently. We need a shake-up.
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