In response to a retirement interview with Dr. Francis Collins as head of the National Institutes of Health, Steve Benen soberly assesses failures in philosophy:
The Post spoke to a senior official in the Biden administration who said, “We have all the tools. The science has delivered. There has to be a resignation that there is something deeply broken in this country. The administration has done everything it can do. We’ll see how we respond this time. Virtually all these deaths have been preventable since April.”
It’s hard not to wonder about the alternate timeline. Imagine where we’d be right now as a society if the right had spent the year aggressively telling rank-and-file conservatives to roll up their sleeves and end the pandemic. Imagine what the health landscape would look like if, instead of trying to undermine the Biden administration’s vaccine policies, Republicans tried to take credit for them. Imagine if the United States had become the world leader on vaccinated populations.
It’s a missed opportunity for the ages.
And I say, Blame it on former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) and his ideological allies, and their explicit rejection of expertise:
“That is the key difference between ourselves and the progressives: We do not believe we should be governed by elites. We do not believe that there are experts or elites who should steer us in their preferred direction. We see that sense of organization as condescending, paternalistic, and downright arrogant. We know it’s wrong.
I find it impossible not to connect this silly statement by someone who once laid claim to being one of the smart and leading members of the party – a virtual summary of his stance on the importance of experts, or lack of importance – and the “everyone is an expert” chaos that has lead to a health system in which ER docs plead tearfully for better behavior by the populace, calls for the murder of experts by cable news half-wits who sense wealth in the offing, and the deaths of thousands who’d rather cling to their ideology, an ideology that makes them the equal of experts who’ve trained for years and decades, without an ounce of training or effort on their part, than admit they cannot keep up with said experts in their fields.
There is blood on the former Speaker’s hands. A lot of it.
