This is an important question, because we want to find out what was done right organizationally in a situation where most failed, so we can do more of it. Especially if this is a test-run for X-risks.
There are two examples that come to mind of government agencies that did a moderately good job at a task which was new and difficult. One is the UK’s vaccine taskforce, which was set up by Dominic Cummings and the UK’s chief scientific advisor, Patrick Vallance and responsible for the relatively fast procurement and rollout. You might say similar for the Operation Warp Speed team, but the UK vaccine taskforce overordered to a larger extent than Warp Speed and was also responsible for other sane things like the simple oldest-first vaccine prioritization and the first doses first decision, which prevented a genuine catastrophe due to the B117 variant. (Also credit to the MHRA (the UK’s regulator) for mostly staying out of the way.)
This is why there was no serious vaccine plan — i.e spending billions on concurrent (rather than the normal sequential) creation/manufacturing/distribution etc — until after the switch to Plan B. I spoke to Vallance on 15 March about a ‘Manhattan Project’ for vaccines out of Hancock’s grip but it was delayed by the chaotic shift from Plan A to lockdown then the PM’s near-death. In April Vallance, the Cabinet Secretary and I told the PM to create the Vaccine Taskforce, sideline Hancock, and shift commercial support from DHSC to BEIS. He agreed, this happened, the Chancellor supplied the cash. On 10 May I told officials that the VTF needed a) a much bigger budget, b) a completely different approach to DHSC’s, which had been mired in the usual processes, so it could develop concurrent plans, and c) that Bingham needed the authority to make financial decisions herself without clearance from Hancock.
This plan later went on to succeed and significantly outperform expectations for rollout speed, with early approval for the AZ and Pfizer vaccines and an early decision to delay second doses by 12 weeks. I see the success of the UK vaccine taskforce and its ability to have a somewhat appropriate sense of the costs and benefits involved and the enormous value of vaccinations, to be a good example of how it’s institution design that is the key issue which most needs fixing. Have an efficient, streamlined taskforce, and you can still get things done in government.
The other example of success often discussed is the central banks, especially in the US, which responded quickly to the COVID-19 dip and prevented a much worse economic catastrophe. Alex Tabarrok:
So what lessons should we take from this? Lewis doesn’t say but my colleague Garett Jones argues for more independent agencies in his excellent book 10% Less Democracy. The problem with the CDC was that after 1976 it was too responsive to political pressures, i.e. too democratic. What are the alternatives?
The Federal Reserve is governed by a seven-member board each of whom is appointed to a single 14- year term, making it rare for a President to be able to appoint a majority of the board. Moreover, since members cannot be reappointed there is less incentive to curry political favor. The Chairperson is appointed by the President to a four-year term and must also be approved by the Senate. These checks and balances make the Federal Reserve a relatively independent agency with the power to reject democratic pressures for inflationary stimulus. Although independent central banks can be a thorn in the side of politicians who want their aid in juicing the economy as elections approach, the evidence is that independent central banks reduce inflation without reducing economic growth. A multi-member governing board with long and overlapping appointments could also make the CDC more independent from democratic politics which is what you want when a once in 100 year pandemic hits and the organization needs to make unpopular decisions before most people see the danger.
I really would like to be able to agree with Tabarrok here and say that, yes, choosing the right experts and protecting them from democratic feedback is the right answer and all we would need, and the expert failures we saw were due to democratic pressure in one form another, but the problem is that we can just look at SAGE in the UK early in the Pandemic or Anders Tegnell in Sweden, who were close to unfireable and much more independent, but underperformed badly. Or China, which is entirely protected from democratic interference and still didn’t do challenge trials.
Just saying the words ‘have the right experts and prevent them from being biased by outside interference’ doesn’t make it so. But, at the same time, it is possible to have fast-responding teams of experts that make the right decisions, if they’re the right experts—the Vaccine Taskforce proves that. I think the advice from the book 10% less democracy still stands, but we have to approach implementing it with far more caution than I would have thought pre-covid.
Suppose the UK had created a ‘pandemic taskforce’ with similar composition to the vaccine taskforce, in February instead of April, and with a wider remit over things like testing and running the trials. I think many of your happy timeline steps could have taken place.
One of the more positive signs that I’ve seen in recent times, is that well-informed elite opinion (going by, for example, the Economist editorials) has started to shift towards scepticism of these institutions and a recognition of how badly they’ve failed. We even saw an NYT article about the CDC and whether reform is possible.
Among the people who matter for policymaking, the scale of the failure has not been swept under the rug. See here:
We believe that Mr Biden is wrong. A waiver may signal that his administration cares about the world, but it is at best an empty gesture and at worst a cynical one.
...
Economists’ central estimate for the direct value of a course is $2,900—if you include factors like long covid and the effect of impaired education, the total is much bigger.
This strikes me as the sort of remark I’d expect to see in one of these threads, which has to be a good sign.
The background of their author, however, seems fairly consistent with an “established experts and institutions largely failed” story:
Zeynep Tufekci, a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, writes about the social impacts of technology. She is an assistant professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, and a former fellow at the Center for Internet Technology Policy at Princeton. Her research revolves around politics, civics, movements, privacy and surveillance, as well as data and algorithms.
Originally from Turkey, Ms. Tufekci was a computer programmer by profession and academic training before turning her focus to the impact of technology on society and social change.
It is interesting that perhaps some of the best commentary on COVID in the world’s premier newspaper comes from a former computer programmer whose main job before COVID was writing about tech issues.
(Though note that this is my super unsystematic impression. I’m not reading a ton of COVID commentary, neither in the NYT nor elsewhere. I guess a skeptical observer could also argue “well, the view you like is the one typically championed by Silicon Valley types and other semi/non-experts, so you shouldn’t be surprised that if you see newspaper op-eds you like they are written by such people”.)
One is the UK’s vaccine taskforce, which was set up by Dominic Cummings and the UK’s chief scientific advisor, Patrick Vallance and responsible for the relatively fast procurement and rollout.
Fast rollout would be vaccinating every wiling citizen by July or August 2020. That what you would have gotten if you would have asked who can provide the vaccines by that point, put up prices and get the regulatory barriers out of the way. Stoecker vaccinated himself in March 2020. His company was then selling COVID-19 tests because it was allowed to do so. If it would have been allowed to sell vaccines with regulations that are as easy as selling tests it would likely also have sold those.
That task force might have gotten a D and not an F but calling it a moderately good job is a huge stretch.
This is an important question, because we want to find out what was done right organizationally in a situation where most failed, so we can do more of it. Especially if this is a test-run for X-risks.
There are two examples that come to mind of government agencies that did a moderately good job at a task which was new and difficult. One is the UK’s vaccine taskforce, which was set up by Dominic Cummings and the UK’s chief scientific advisor, Patrick Vallance and responsible for the relatively fast procurement and rollout. You might say similar for the Operation Warp Speed team, but the UK vaccine taskforce overordered to a larger extent than Warp Speed and was also responsible for other sane things like the simple oldest-first vaccine prioritization and the first doses first decision, which prevented a genuine catastrophe due to the B117 variant. (Also credit to the MHRA (the UK’s regulator) for mostly staying out of the way.)
See this from Cummings’ blog, which also outlines many of the worst early expert failures on covid, and my discussion of it here:
This plan later went on to succeed and significantly outperform expectations for rollout speed, with early approval for the AZ and Pfizer vaccines and an early decision to delay second doses by 12 weeks. I see the success of the UK vaccine taskforce and its ability to have a somewhat appropriate sense of the costs and benefits involved and the enormous value of vaccinations, to be a good example of how it’s institution design that is the key issue which most needs fixing. Have an efficient, streamlined taskforce, and you can still get things done in government.
The other example of success often discussed is the central banks, especially in the US, which responded quickly to the COVID-19 dip and prevented a much worse economic catastrophe. Alex Tabarrok:
I really would like to be able to agree with Tabarrok here and say that, yes, choosing the right experts and protecting them from democratic feedback is the right answer and all we would need, and the expert failures we saw were due to democratic pressure in one form another, but the problem is that we can just look at SAGE in the UK early in the Pandemic or Anders Tegnell in Sweden, who were close to unfireable and much more independent, but underperformed badly. Or China, which is entirely protected from democratic interference and still didn’t do challenge trials.
Just saying the words ‘have the right experts and prevent them from being biased by outside interference’ doesn’t make it so. But, at the same time, it is possible to have fast-responding teams of experts that make the right decisions, if they’re the right experts—the Vaccine Taskforce proves that. I think the advice from the book 10% less democracy still stands, but we have to approach implementing it with far more caution than I would have thought pre-covid.
It seems like following the 10% less democracy policy can give you either a really great outcome like the one you’ve described, and like we saw a small sliver of in the UK’s vaccine procurement, or a colossal disaster like your impossible to fire expert epidemiologists torpedoing your economy and public health and then changing their mind a year late.
Suppose the UK had created a ‘pandemic taskforce’ with similar composition to the vaccine taskforce, in February instead of April, and with a wider remit over things like testing and running the trials. I think many of your happy timeline steps could have taken place.
One of the more positive signs that I’ve seen in recent times, is that well-informed elite opinion (going by, for example, the Economist editorials) has started to shift towards scepticism of these institutions and a recognition of how badly they’ve failed. We even saw an NYT article about the CDC and whether reform is possible.
Among the people who matter for policymaking, the scale of the failure has not been swept under the rug. See here:
This strikes me as the sort of remark I’d expect to see in one of these threads, which has to be a good sign.
There were some other recent NYT articles which based on my limited COVID knowledge I thought were pretty good, e.g. on the origin of the virus or airborne vs. droplet transmission [1].
The background of their author, however, seems fairly consistent with an “established experts and institutions largely failed” story:
It is interesting that perhaps some of the best commentary on COVID in the world’s premier newspaper comes from a former computer programmer whose main job before COVID was writing about tech issues.
(Though note that this is my super unsystematic impression. I’m not reading a ton of COVID commentary, neither in the NYT nor elsewhere. I guess a skeptical observer could also argue “well, the view you like is the one typically championed by Silicon Valley types and other semi/non-experts, so you shouldn’t be surprised that if you see newspaper op-eds you like they are written by such people”.)
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[1] What do you do if you want to expand on this topic “without the word limits” of an NYT article? Easy.
Fast rollout would be vaccinating every wiling citizen by July or August 2020. That what you would have gotten if you would have asked who can provide the vaccines by that point, put up prices and get the regulatory barriers out of the way. Stoecker vaccinated himself in March 2020. His company was then selling COVID-19 tests because it was allowed to do so. If it would have been allowed to sell vaccines with regulations that are as easy as selling tests it would likely also have sold those.
That task force might have gotten a D and not an F but calling it a moderately good job is a huge stretch.