Some commentators are quick to lay complete blame for these institutional failures on Donald Trump’s shoddy leadership. While it’s hard to imagine a president doing a worse job than Trump of leading the country through the crisis, if you examine closely the CDC’s missteps, you’ll find that they were serious, operational, and at multiple stages—the kinds of failures that happen in the lab or office. These weren’t political failures so much as an organization being asked to do things that it theoretically existed to do but didn’t have the actual experience or muscle memory to execute urgently in
...more
