How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation. America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness and financial ruin. It has lost its status as a global leader. It has careened between inaction and ineptitude. The […]
Bill Gates on Covid: Most US Tests Are ‘Completely Garbage’
For 20 years, Bill Gates has been easing out of the roles that made him rich and famous—CEO, chief software architect, and chair of Microsoft—and devoting his brainpower and passion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, abandoning earnings calls and antitrust hearings for the metrics of disease eradication and carbon reduction. This year, after […]
America Should Prepare for a Double Pandemic
Seven years ago, the White House was bracing itself for not one pandemic, but two. In the spring of 2013, several people in China fell sick with a new and lethal strain of H7N9 bird flu, while an outbreak of MERS—a disease caused by a coronavirus—had spread from Saudi Arabia to several other countries. “We […]
Hear, see, speak no COVID: Why the Trump administration is bungling the response to the pandemic
At the heart of the Trump administration’s bungled response to the coronavirus pandemic—from its early dismissal of the risks posed by COVID-19 to its failure to acquire sufficient personal protective equipment and diagnostic tests to its haphazard approach to reopening the economy—has been a refusal to properly utilize scientific expertise. As a result, the administration has had an incoherent response to one of […]
Coronavirus and climate change: How to deal with converging crises
The first sign of trouble was more puzzling than alarming: A fan suddenly stopped working. If you put your ear next to it, you could still hear a faint hum coming from the motor. Then a light bulb flickered and went dark. I guess it’s time to change that bulb, I thought. By the time […]