A deep negligence

“It should be borne in mind that there is nothing more difficult to arrange, more doubtful of success, and more dangerous to carry through than initiating change.” — Niccolo Machiavelli

This ( https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/17/us/anderson-cooper-full-circle-mobile-app/index.html ) is Anderson Cooper interview with Michael Lewis regarding Lewis’ book “The Premonition: A Pandemic Story”. For all Americans it should be a chilling story because it describes how the Trump administration and especially the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) pretty much abdicated all responsibility for controlling the Coronavirus pandemic to each of the fifty states, resulting in a chaotic chase to control a virus that caused the infection of 33 million and the deaths of over 595,000 Americans.

Key to these developments was the attitude of Trump who said “one day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear…We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows.”

The fact that trump could say “Nobody really knows” is because he would not talk to the people who did really know. While trump and his courtiers were content telling themselves ‘nothing could be done to stop the spread of the virus’ Lewis says the “appalling” U.S. response in the early days of the pandemic reflected “a deep negligence of our own population.” ( https://apple.news/AX1wg0mPhSBacGcZL24b48Q ).

Lewis chronicles the ferocious efforts of a group of medical doctors and epidemiologists known as “The Wolverines” .