Read on Twitter
"The Plague Year" is so monumental that it has taken me weeks of scraps of time to read it carefully—I finally printed out all billion pages so I could focus. I'm going to thread some of the things that particularly caught my attention. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/the-plague-year
I knew this had happened, but not how dead-on it turned out to be…
Things the federal government knew in 2019:
(I see @alexismadrigal is doing the importance of the polio with his morning coffee, this is the inevitable result of extended brainshare https://twitter.com/alexismadrigal/status/1353005512388796416 )
Here's what grabbed me. This paper strongly suggesting asymptomatic (or, sure, pre-symptomatic) transmission was published on *March 26, 2020*.
The knowledge dynamics around early asymptomatic transmission data are so wrenching from here, all these infections and deaths later.
Then we get to the testing kits.
People within CDC knew there was a problem with the kits that could cause the to fail 33% of the time. They sent them anyway.
This it the referenced @propublica article https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-the-fall-of-the-cdc)
But then, after public health labs figured out the problem and asked for a workaround, they got nothing but silence.
I have to direct you to the article for the next part—the section beginning "On February 10th, the F.D.A. learned that ten labs working with C.D.C. test kits were reporting failures." Wright outlines a headspinning series of blunders and obstructions. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/the-plague-year
This is the clearest and most damning timeline I've seen of failures by the FDA and especially the CDC to get working covid test kits made, or to speedily authorize alternatives. We lost the battle before it started.
And as Fauci said as the fall/winter surge caught fire, we never returned to a low baseline in a way that would allow us to get control. https://twitter.com/newday/status/1335939012327038980
There's so much in this piece: Hollowed-out stockpiles, the seized PPE, NYC hospitals, WH refusal to fund the obvious things. Here's @EbonyJHilton_MD on racial disparities and the info vacuum. CDC released some of the data after being sued—in July.
The section on mask messaging—something that's already been weirdly distorted in group memories since last spring—should really be its own whole article.
The Birx stuff, though! I feel like there's a LOT here that has never been public before. There's the known parts:
Then there's a lot more. Interagency data squabbles that would just be office politics if they weren't about competing approaches to monitoring an entire pandemic.
Then we get to the part where Birx and her chief epi from her AIDS work in Africa go on a road trip mid-pandemic to try to persuade governors to enact public health restrictions, one by one. Completely wild and worth reading.
"Birx and Zaidi racked up twenty-five thousand miles as they crossed the country eight times, visiting forty-three states, many more than once."
This goes so much against the orthodox POV that Birx was nothing more than a useless enabler or a petty tyrant.
It's disorienting to realize that Fauci's brilliant, 24/7 work as America's One-Man PSA happened in parallel with a Birx persuasion tour. I've heard so much contempt for Birx, and none of this is a full-on rehabilitation, but there's a lot more complexity there than I knew.
