If you think pandemic response is the key issue, Dr. Harder is a highly experienced doctor who used to run the Oregon Medical Board. Medical and policy experience: maybe you still think your guy will be better, but by how much?
The FDA has hundreds of highly -experienced doctors and still had such a disastrous response to the pandemic they probably caused millions of extra deaths. They completely blocked challenge trials and delayed vaccine deployment by six months. What matters is not whether the people in government are doctors, it’s the policies on how the government behaves when an important problem arises. And crucially, the key issue isn’t pandemic response, it’s pandemic prevention. Carrick Flynn is the only congressional candidate I know of who’s running on that.
Thanks. I agree—you can debate who would be most effective on pandemic prevention! But it is debatable and I’d love for everyone here to factor that into their back of envelope effectiveness calculations.
But I also want to convince you all that your focus is way too narrow. This is not an election for pandemic czar, it’s an open seat several decades in the making and the representation for >650k Oregonians. So it rankles to see the race turned into an experiment to see if huge amounts of money can buy it for somebody who seems disinterested in most issues facing the district.
Hmm I fear there might be a cultural clash here. Many people on this forum believe that pandemic response (and especially prevention) was a massive and avoidable bipartisan failure on the part of the US, and a massive failure internationally on behalf of our institutions, experts, and governments overall (see here for an anonymous take). Many people on the forum don’t believe in the “overwhelming and avoidable failure” narrative, but at least they’re sufficiently familiar with this story that this is a common starting point of debates around here.
I think in contrast, many Americans (and I think this is more true of the elite than the public) would rather put the current pandemic behind us. And for those still concerned, a common pattern is to blame members of the other party. And I especially don’t like the typical attitudes of the Western intelligensia, which tends to blame the public for what is primarily the faults of our institutions and experts (zeynep’s take, my response).
The FDA has hundreds of highly -experienced doctors and still had such a disastrous response to the pandemic they probably caused millions of extra deaths
(Note that this has to include non-US mortality as well in the metric).
The FDA has hundreds of highly -experienced doctors and still had such a disastrous response to the pandemic they probably caused millions of extra deaths. They completely blocked challenge trials and delayed vaccine deployment by six months. What matters is not whether the people in government are doctors, it’s the policies on how the government behaves when an important problem arises. And crucially, the key issue isn’t pandemic response, it’s pandemic prevention. Carrick Flynn is the only congressional candidate I know of who’s running on that.
Thanks. I agree—you can debate who would be most effective on pandemic prevention! But it is debatable and I’d love for everyone here to factor that into their back of envelope effectiveness calculations.
But I also want to convince you all that your focus is way too narrow. This is not an election for pandemic czar, it’s an open seat several decades in the making and the representation for >650k Oregonians. So it rankles to see the race turned into an experiment to see if huge amounts of money can buy it for somebody who seems disinterested in most issues facing the district.
Hmm I fear there might be a cultural clash here. Many people on this forum believe that pandemic response (and especially prevention) was a massive and avoidable bipartisan failure on the part of the US, and a massive failure internationally on behalf of our institutions, experts, and governments overall (see here for an anonymous take). Many people on the forum don’t believe in the “overwhelming and avoidable failure” narrative, but at least they’re sufficiently familiar with this story that this is a common starting point of debates around here.
I think in contrast, many Americans (and I think this is more true of the elite than the public) would rather put the current pandemic behind us. And for those still concerned, a common pattern is to blame members of the other party. And I especially don’t like the typical attitudes of the Western intelligensia, which tends to blame the public for what is primarily the faults of our institutions and experts (zeynep’s take, my response).
(Note that this has to include non-US mortality as well in the metric).