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People were far less likely to blame a health officer for what she didn’t do than what she did. Sins of commission got you fired. Sins of omission you could get away with, but they left people dead.
“The whole thing assumed you would know how bad the pandemic was. And that was a really bad assumption. This fog, this not knowing, is such a big part of it. You almost need to be clairvoyant.”
“None of the people who had been involved in the last fifteen years of thinking about pandemics were in the conversation. They were deep state.”
“She called me at nine at night and started screaming at me about having put it in an email,”
He’d noticed a pattern that he’d first identified in the private sector: in any large organization, the solution to any crisis was usually found not in the officially important people at the top but in some obscure employee far down the organization’s chart. A case in point was the day the software used by the State Department to process visa applications stopped working. That day the U.S. government simply lost its ability to issue visas. Park sent in a team to figure out why. “They called me and said, ‘Six layers down from the people in charge we found two contractors who actually understand
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Joe had been shocked by just how slow the society was to realize what science might do for it: it was as if tanks had been invented before the Civil War and the generals couldn’t figure out their purpose. “Our federal government should be doing this in a coordinated way,” he said. “At the very least, our state government should be doing this. That’s what you would do in a rational society. But the system is broken. It’s so broken.”
