Ezra Klein was chatting with Zeynep Tufekci from the New York Times, who said:
If the world was vaccinated, if people for whom vaccines didn’t work as well had immediate access to functioning antivirals that were really effective, maybe we could develop antivirals for other things too. And then we had airborne mitigation so that the burden from influenza and other diseases also fell.
It’s amazing. You’re not just getting rid of the pandemic part. You’re also preparing yourself for a much better future. And here’s the part that always gets me. We are in such a wealthy moment in history, and our science and our technology is so advanced, relatively speaking, obviously, is that there is nothing but getting over our dysfunction that’s holding us back.
If you’re in 19th century, and you’re just puzzling over yellow fever, and you don’t even have germ theory, and you don’t understand mosquito vectors— it’s hard. It’s really hard. I read those histories, and I’m kind of going, it’s the mosquito. I want to give them clues, but they’re looking around, and they — of course, it’s hard. They can’t do it.
But right now, we have everything in place. You literally have the cake making thing. You just need to sort of stir it the right way. And it’s our dysfunction that’s holding us back. It’s the global, political dysfunction, our US-specific dysfunction. It’s our — it’s the whole thing. And, of course, every kind of obstacle is terrible, but that is just stomach pain kind of level painful because we could do it. We have the tools. And just need to kind of get our act together, which this is not — this is potentially hopeful.
It's just fucking sad; it's like at the end of Don't Look Up when Leo simply says, "We really did have everything, didn't we?" Is it just human nature to fucking ruin everything for no real reason?
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