Scarf Lady Screwed the US

Someone put together a documentary on the Government's reaction to Covid19.

Scarf Babe Birx saw Covid19 as another AIDS (!!!) because she "fought AIDS" in Africa (and she was a disaster there, by the way.)

...Rob Montz [Documentary maker]: And it comes out, and this thing, which is mostly based upon surveys with municipal and public health officials in African countries that have been working with Deborah Birx, is a barnburner of an indictment on her management and leadership. It's insane. I mean, anybody can read it. It's not difficult to find. It's just nobody did read it because nobody's curious about it.

John Tierney: Right. This is the first I've seen of it, and it really is a barn burner showing what a horrible administrator she was.

Rob Montz: Everyone's like, she's a dictator. She doesn't listen to feedback. She very quickly becomes myopically committed to a particular paradigm and doesn't change it based upon the facts on the ground. She's dictatorial.

And she specializes in drawing the wrong conclusions.  HooBoy, did she ever!!

 ...she's the chief scientist on the task force. That's the woman. Somehow the mechanics of history are such that she's the person that gets to write the guidelines. And what she does, and again, I don't want to give away everything in the documentary, I want people to have a reason to go watch it, is she essentially makes this 75 IQ instinctual parallel between Covid and AIDS. She makes a certain set of assumptions that the Covid virus and HIV/AIDS virus are the same. And from those parallel assumptions come a certain set of policy prescriptions, including getting to zero cases at any cost, treating Covid as an equal opportunity killer, focusing on children and shutting down schools. This is all based on an HIV/AIDS paradigm....

Ah, yes.  Since Birx used a hammer on the AIDS nail in Africa, Covid 19 was simply another nail.

A bureaucrat who rose past her level of competence.  FAR past it.

One guess who put her in that spot.

You got it:  Mike Pence, another bureaucrat who rose way, way, way past his level of competence.  But the documentary maker has more thoughts about Pence:

...I don't really know his motivations. From a distance, before I'd gotten into this, he'd always struck me as the paradigmatic hollow man elected politician. He just seems like he was grown in a lab and is a soulless political automaton, and he just regurgitates on command GOP Christianist talking points. Are you even a person? Do you have a subjective experience of reality, or are you just a non-player character? So I don't really know what his motivations were. I don't really know....

Pence, like many others, (see, e.g., Brian Hagedorn on the Wisconsin Supreme Court) is the very picture of the "Government Man."  Motto:  if there's a doubt, go with the Government solution, or in favor of the Government's position, or power.

That was his motivation.  He's not really "evil."  He's just an automaton Government Man.

Trump really had no clue how broad and deep Government incompetence really is.  The Augean Stables were a dollhouse compared to the Leviathan of D.C.