Dysfunction Is Us

 Short post today. We are experiencing an increasing number of cases of Covid-19 with rises also in hospitalizations and (this will be later) deaths. As one who devoted a career to infectious diseases and their prevention and cure, I am both frustrated and angry. Zeynep Tufecki has written a guest essay this morning in the New York Times whose title, “American Dysfunction Is the Biggest Barrier to Fighting Covid” is the best summation of the moment of where we stand and why. I simply recommend today reading her essay and thinking about our country. We collectively got ourselves into a jam with how this pandemic was approached in the first place. I am reading I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. Our nation remains saddled with the debris from Trump’s corrupt, incompetent mismanagement not only of the pandemic but of this attempt to subvert our democracy. His administration bears responsibility for over 600,000 dead Americans and an ongoing public health disaster. Sorry, Trumpers: your hero is a villain of the first magnitude.


The concluding words of Tufekci’s essay lay out the tough work ahead:


“Our moral obligation is to make vaccines available for as many people as possible and as fast as possible and to do everything we can to save the lives and health of people who don’t yet have that protection.”


Let’s get to work, get everyone in our nation vaccinated, and then begin vaccinating the world. ID doc out.

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