Humans have invented some amazing things, like science, love, and the rule of law. Humans have also invented some idiotic things, like government bureaucracy.
Normally, when I write online about the incompetence of our governing institutions, I am talking about the decade it takes to redevelop Douglas Promenade, or the failure of the Government to hire enough teachers to operate schooling, or the clown show of the NSC waterslides.
Those things are irritating, but ultimately trivial by comparison to some other civilisational incompetence that we endure.
This blog post by the CEO of Stripe, Patrick Collison, highlights a civilisational failure which “could easily mean that hundreds of thousands of people die needlessly.” That is, the way that the fake eXpErTs who run our global public health regulatory machine are restricting the development of medicine which have the potential to be game changing at combating a range of diseases.
Pan-variant vaccines are a $1 trillion dollar bill on the sidewalk. Some combination of a lack of basic institutional seriousness and self-imposed straightjackets mean that we will probably get these vaccines much later (perhaps years later) than we otherwise could. It is intellectually internally consistent to believe that COVID doesn’t matter and that we consequently shouldn’t care about any of this. But it is not consistent to think that COVID matters and that this situation is anything other than crazy.
We could have universal COVID vaccines very soon — if we urgently reform the process
This is an opportunity for a small and ambitious jurisdiction: to save hundreds of thousands of lives by allowing science to happen.
