#Africa is not a country and it definitely isn't all poor

[erelavent]

I made the mistake of checking the reddit post about Lewis' travels through Africa and to say I am baffled by the racism and classism is an understatement. Let me list a few issues people had with Lewis' post:

It's tone deaf to wear one-off designer clothing he paid thousands for in Africa because everyone in Africa is poor, apparently. It's only acceptable to wear designer clothing in wealthy European countries. Morons in Christ, he doesn't pay for those clothes. He gets paid to wear them and then returns them. Additionally, multiple African countries are stable, safe and middle income. Assuming that they're all poor and that his designer clothes would offend us is stupid and racist.

It's tone deaf to document your luxurious travels through Africa in 4k. Why? Y'all take one Christian service trip to Africa to exploit children and post it incessantly. Documenting the trip of a lifetime for memories is within his right and actually does a service in undermining the image of Africa as a conglomerate with nothing but starving children. His best friends are also photographers and artists who in addition to having a good time are building portfolios out of this. I want to go to Namibia now and ride a hot air balloon and will be doing so as soon as I can get past the planning phase group chat with my friends and you best believe everything I do will be shot in 4k.

We all come from Africa. Lewis isn't special for tracing his roots. You're absolutely right but it appears that your Neanderthal brain has not progressed far enough to understand why some groups of people have a hard time tracing their lineage. Slavery. The answer is slavery.

He's just doing this for clout like A-train in The Boys season 3. To what end? Lewis has a stellar reputation among everyone but racists. What would he need the clout or good press for? The man has literally been booked and busy the entire break. I also find it weird that that a murderous, dysfunctional, money hungry villain from a tv show was your first reference point for Lewis when he's trying to trace his roots but when White people do it, it's something to cry about on 60 Minutes.

So he shows up, has fun and takes pictures and then goes home? What about the people living in abject poverty? I didn't realize that Lewis was in charge of solving absolute poverty. I must have missed that in his job description. However, if it bothers you so much, feel free to become a UN Volunteer and work towards alleviating poverty levels globally. Yes, globally because contrary to popular believe, there are poor people everywhere and not just in Africa.

Edit: the mods on reddit had to delete 18 THOUSAND comments due to the casual and overt racism.

#I lost braincells going through that thread #Africa is not a country and it definitely isn't all poor #People would know that if they visited- like Lewis #f1 #lewis hamilton #formula 1

[missmayhemvr]

I am probably going to ruffle a lot of feathers saying this, but I don't think liberals can actually be allies to anyone. Hear me out on this tho because I don't believe im the first to say this and that those before me often had their meanings or purposes twisted.

So first gotta define what a liberal is, I'd say it's someone that believes in capitalism first and foremost, that it can be reformed or suite the needs of many or that it isn't inherently evil or contradictory. A liberal by this definition can want social changes then right? But this means that capitalism has to remain in the end.

This is a stumbling block, this is a thing that means so much yet in the end it will not ever by definition be able to help us all and will always come back to be an oppressive force on the lives of anyone that has been marginalized, colonized, or harmed for the sake of capital.

For example let's look at wealth distrubution in the US, we all know the top earners and we all know they didn't get there from hard work. When you look at who is the poorest in the nation you see which groups, indigenous people and black people, those historical dispossessed of their land and those dispossessed of their labor. Black people have an average family weath (meaning assets transferable, houses cars, business) of a few thousand dollars. I believe it's similar if not worse for indigenous people here. A liberal thinking themselves an ally would seek to address such ills in the confines of capitalism and political electoralism which means vote for the right people and they will even the playing field (higher taxes on the rich better social safety net end legalized discrimination) all of these things however will only address symptoms and not causes. You can raise the min wage, have good social security and be allowed to vote all you want but it will never give reparations to black folks for the labor or suffering we have been put through, it will never bring the average wealth of us to be that of or white counterparts (unless through a means I'll get to later) and it will never result in the control of the land back to the hands of indigenous peoples here. This is because at the end of the day capitalism naturally prevents these things. Under capitalism is indigenous people want their land back what is their one way of doing that? Purchase, high min wage among a peoples that have faced 100s of years of genocide isn't going to get you the billions or trillions you'd have to pay and that's if they were willing to sell. And even more so if they were willing to hire you.

A similar situation becomes clear when you look at the black belt or the hood, you're not gonna make back enough for it to ever matter if you arent Beyonce and even then the structure is working against you.

Finally we look globally towards Africa and south America where regardless of the nation the population size or the volume of rare and pricy minerals or oil, these countries not only remain rather poor but the economy tends to still be run by the very nations or corporations that colonized in the first place. Because by no rule of capitalism will you ever be able to buy your way out of this oppression.

Liberals commitment to capitalism will always be greater than their commitments to people. A system which the only equality it can ever truly provide is by dispossessing few that would be seen as middle class and putting them in the same level of poverty as bipoc. Liberals as such will always push against us when we choose to fight back in meaningful ways and would rather ally themselves with fascist if and when able as they don't challenge the system of capitalism but just reinforce it. You can see it would the people's of various African nations sought to take back the farm land being used for cash crops so they could feed the people and not be reliant on other nations, liberal people and institutes sided with the settlers who stole the land in the first place. You see Biden who is truly the face of liberalism literally holding the hand of an Italian fascist turned pm.

So I don't think bipoc, queer or oppressed nations can trust liberal allyship. As it confines us more than uplifts us.

#black liberation #Indigenous liberation #black lives matter #indigenous lives matter #decolonialism #anti imperialism #socalism #anarchism

[mchiti]

I think the bigger issue is the country he was seen in. It’s at the very least in poor taste to party in a country that has, just recently, exploded a dam making hundreds and possibly thousands homeless in Ukraine . I truly don’t see how anyone who’s not Russian can just go to russia with a clean conscience. I don’t really care much about Quincy tbh like yeah he’s a bit sketchy but that’s not the issue.

just so we're clear on this I wish he didn't go either. But there are many things I wish football organisations (and not a single player yes? football organisations) would not do. I wish they would not sponsor rwanda's puppet government on their shirts while migrants are brought back to africa and incarcerated in actual lagers there. I wish they didn't play against Israeli teams. I wish we didn't let a champions league final be played in turkey with erdogan making a genocide amongst the kurds. I wish all chelsea fans would have been as vocal about their ex president sending millions of funds to israeli settlers as they are now in cancelling a single player who made a poor choice out of ignorance. If you want to cancel Vlahovic for showcasing nationalists symphaties go ahead. If you want to cancel Neymar and Thiago Silva for /politically/ supporting someone who made genocidal policies against indigenous communities and threatened lgbt rights go ahead too. I don't care if I'm accused of whataboutism but there is clearly a pattern on what is considered despicable and what isn't here isn't it. And this is the dark side of football, there are billions of money involved into all these things in the face of poor people and their rights all around the world, which seems more dangerous to me than a single man who definitely should have avoided going (it was not a party tho btw) but probably underestimated the whole thing out of ignorance. The issue is also about promes tho as you can clearly see everywhere on the internet.

[papirouge]

For real, the shtick of racial separatists to dismiss the opinion of any immigrants as "mUh sHeLtErEd bLaCkS LiVIng iN tHe WeSt hAvE nO cLuE aBoUT h0w RACiSt tRUe AfRicAns aRe🤪"

First of all, yall need to understand Africa isn't South Africa. Not every decolonization process got bloody or deprived White settlers from their mean of production since a bunch of colonized country didn't have much White settler population to begin with. Yes decolonization got dirty at times, but colons didn't get kicked out because they were simply White, they were kicked out firstly because they were identified as invaders. They did what every other nation did when invaded. It wasn't an attack against a race. It still doesn't mean decades later, every African is jumping at the throat of any White person they meet. Maybe it's time to catch up with the times and stop with the caricature...

Second : do you think Africans live in a vaccuum? Do you think they don't see White people on the regular? or that White communities aren't a thing in Africa? Do you think we don't have contact with our family who stayed in the continent to have their insight on issues to add nuance in our perspective so they won't be "from sHeLtErEd immigrants" ? This whole "lmao Africans are as racists are Whites so it proves that race weren't meant to mingle together" narrative would make sense if Africans intellectuals would've pulled the same type of literature and policies aiming to dehumanize, segregate and discriminate White/foreign population like Western countries did. But guess what? Africans have more urgent matters to deal with than cuss and make up whole crap theories against the Whites. The biggest ethnic tension of the continent are actually WITHIN Black Africans, so it's ridiculous to state "humans were meant to live only with those looking like themselves", otherwise ethnic wars within populations visibly indistinguishable from each other wouldn't be a thing.

The simple fact people claim being against multiCULTURALISM yet jump to point fingers at RACES just show how inconsistent they are. Culture matters. Multiculturalism fails at that it imports cultures from poor and clashing cultures - not races. Cultures aren't depending on race. A wealthy immigrant from Nigeria coming to the US will always make less trouble than a broke social outcast who's White and lives there since 10 generations.

Africans live rent free in the head of salty racialist but I can tell ya White people definitely are NOT in the mind of Africans like that... They have to tackle much more important and significant issues in their life to whine online about people living at the other hemisphere of the planet.

#papi watch #colonization

[xtruss]

Biden Poised to Repeat Mistakes that Led to COVID Pandemic, Biosecurity Experts Say

— By Fred Guterl | 08/18/21 | Newsweek

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY NEWSWEEK; SOURCE IMAGES BY GETTY

The COVID-19 pandemic may have made a future pandemic more likely. In a terrible irony, nations eager to get a handle on the virus and its variants are building high-containment laboratories at a brisk pace, ensuring that more scientists continue to experiment on dangerous pathogens even after the current threat fades—increasing the likelihood of future lab accidents that could release dangerous pathogens. Regardless of whether the current pandemic got its start in a laboratory in Wuhan or in animals—a mystery that may never be resolved—the mere fact that it's possible is reason enough to take precautions against any future occurrence, biosecurity experts say.

"Without a doubt, COVID-19 has changed the threat landscape," says Peggy Hamburg, former FDA commissioner and now vice president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank on global security.

Yet despite the rising risk of a new, future pandemic caused by a lab leak—or one that emerges from a bioterrorist attack or even natural causes, for that matter—the U.S. government, under the leadership of Joe Biden and Congress, seems on course to repeat the mistake made by nearly every one of its predecessors for the past several decades: failing to take all possible steps to strengthen America's response to a future pandemic or prevent one from happening in the first place.

One year ago, as SARS-CoV-2 raged through an unprotected population and vaccines were still months away from authorization, workers were wondering how they'd protect themselves through the long winter months and parents were fretting over how they'd hold down a job while their kids stayed home all day learning in front of a laptop. Now, despite the widespread availability of vaccines, the surge in COVID cases due to the Delta variant is raising fears and uncertainties about the prospects of a second pandemic winter among a war-weary public.

The upside of a nation of people bummed out about new mask mandates and public health restrictions for another school year is a rising understanding of how much pandemics suck and how important it is to prevent them. With the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic still in full swing, public awareness should be at a historic high. One poll, by the progressive group Data for Progress, shows that 71 percent of the public—including 60 percent of Republicans—supports a $30 billion pandemic-prevention plan recently floated by President Biden.

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris met with senators earlier this year to discuss the infrastructure bill, which did not contain funding for the president’s pandemic prevention plan. DOUG MILLS/POOL/GETTY

The White House's plan hits the right notes. It would improve response time to develop therapeutics and vaccines, beef up the national stockpile and tighten regulations on risky lab research. But just because Biden proposed it doesn't mean Washington politicians are tripping over themselves to implement it. The bipartisan infrastructure package did not include funding for the plan, and it's not clear the $3.5 trillion spending bill that Democrats hope to pass without Republican support will include that money, either—Democrats are reportedly considering paring down funding to 20 percent of the original proposal. On this omission, Biden has so far been silent.

Having resources to regulate hazardous research may be critical. "The discussions about the Wuhan lab underscore that this is a theoretically plausible risk—that there could be a global pandemic that emerges because of work going on in a laboratory," says Dr. Hamburg. "We may never know the origins of this particular virus, but it shines a very bright light on the need to address some broader, very critical biosecurity concerns."

Former FDA Commissioner Peggy Hamburg, who says, “COVID-19 has changed the threat landscape.” ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG/GETTY

Slow Learners

Keeping the world safe from deadly pathogens isn't something the U.S. can do alone. But the top levels of the executive branch need to ride herd on the disparate departments and agencies of the federal government to prevent a crisis and respond when one occurs.

Past presidents have learned and unlearned this lesson many times. President Bill Clinton appointed a team headed by Kenneth Bernard, a medical doctor and rear admiral, to the National Security Council in 1998. Bernard's office helped coordinate the response to the HIV/AIDS crisis and was instrumental in establishing a national stockpile of vaccines against smallpox, neutralizing the smallpox virus as a potential bioweapon. But George W. Bush eliminated the office early on, only to reverse course after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, when anthrax-laden envelopes started arriving in the mailboxes of prominent politicians and media organizations. A year or so later, Tom Ridge, head of the newly formed Department of Homeland Security, brought Bernard back as part of a five-person White House biosecurity team.

The H1N1 influenza pandemic arrived in the early days of the Obama administration, before Kathleen Sebelius could be confirmed as head of HHS. As a result, it was criticized for being slow in developing a vaccine and for its public health messaging. The mildness of the H1N1 virus let the Obama administration off the hook.

Still, when the Ebola crisis arrived in 2014, the Obama White House was caught flat-footed. After being criticized for a slow response, Obama tapped Ron Klain, former chief of staff to vice-presidents Biden and Al Gore—and now to President Biden—to take a high-profile role coordinating the U.S. Ebola response.

A plan is vitally needed to stave off another epidemic, like Ebola (pictured), experts say. JOHN MOORE/GETTY

Klain coordinated the disparate departments and agencies of the federal government. The White House ultimately sent thousands of troops to the front line of the epidemic in West Africa to help contain the outbreak. "I was brought in not because I knew about public health or pandemics but because I had experience in making the different arms of the government work together and making them work effectively and quickly," Klain told Wired in 2015. "That really was the challenge—coordinating between the different agencies.

That lesson was codified after the crisis was over by a junior member of the White House staff named Beth Cameron, who helped draft the Obama playbook for use in future pandemics. Among its recommendations: Create a permanent pandemic office in the White House's National Security Council—a pandemic czar who would sound the alarm about a biological threat long before most White House officials, distracted by myriad day-to-day problems, would typically notice, and then wield the enormous power of the office of the president to force the vast federal bureaucracy to focus on an invisible threat and take swift action.

Obama followed this advice, appointing Admiral Timothy Ziemer, a veteran of AIDS and malaria programs in Africa. Ziemer stayed through the first half of the Trump administration only to be fired in 2018 by John Bolton, the new national security adviser. Bolton disbanded the staff and shifted responsibility for coordinating pandemic response to HSS.

When news of COVID-19 started coming in from China in early 2020, there was no pandemic czar on the White House staff to galvanize the pandemic response or point out how important it was to push China to be more forthcoming with information on the outbreak's origins. "The problem with Bolton eliminating the office was not so much that he disbanded the team but that he fired the pandemic czar," says Bernard. "If you can't advocate for an issue with the boss with a walk-in-the-office mandate, then you are, by definition, lower priority."

Ziemer insists that Bolton's reorganization made sense but allows that a pandemic czar would have helped. "Had I been there," he says, "I'd have been pounding on [chief of staff] Mick Mulvaney's desk saying I needed $8 million to fund this team."

Biden acted quickly upon taking office to correct this omission. He appointed Cameron, the author of the pandemic playbook that Bolton ignored, as head of the National Security Council Directorate on Global Health Security and Biodefense. Cameron is charged with establishing a U.S. center that will act as an early-warning system for disease outbreaks, reduce the time that it takes the government to respond to new biological threats and to review "the existing state of our biodefense enterprise and [determine] where gaps remain," according to a senior government official at the White House. "We must urgently prepare for and ultimately try to prevent the next pandemic by strengthening biopreparedness at home, bolstering health security in every country, and building the international pandemic architecture we need to prevent, detect and rapidly respond to emerging biological threats." (Cameron declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Biden gets high marks for his appointment of Cameron from Bernard and Ziemer. "It shows that the Biden administration gets it," Ziemer says. Gerald Epstein, a physicist who worked in national security in the Clinton administration, says "the White House has hit the ground running and has great people." He calls the Biden plan "ambitious."

The pandemic czar now faces a daunting task. She will have to find a way to effectively regulate the most risky research performed in the U.S. labs and those financed by the U.S. government, many of which take place abroad. And she will have to push to get the commitment of other nations to follow suit and to agree on international mechanisms to monitor for outbreaks and investigate them once they occur.

What to Do About Risky Lab Research

Scientists and policymakers have been issuing warnings of the risk of a pandemic starting with a lab accident for many years. The history of accidents in U.S. labs that perform research with dangerous pathogens, with poor safety practices and minimal oversight, has been well documented.

Cracking down on this research will be tricky, not least because the federal government is not in the habit of policing the work of research virologists, who in turn are understandably reluctant to be policed. For the vast majority of research, this is not a problem. For a tiny portion of research, it is—and all it takes is one incident to start a pandemic.

In recent months, the argument over whether the pandemic started with a lab leak or arose naturally from animals has taken on the characteristics of a schoolyard shouting match—two sides each insisting they're right on the basis of little or no evidence. We may never have clear evidence either way.

Settling the matter would require the discovery of compelling new information—either a genetic trail from bats to humans via some intermediate mammal—a so-called zoonotic origin—or lab notes and interviews with researchers and other employees of the Wuhan laboratories, which could happen only in the event that those records have been retained and that China chooses to cooperate, or copies of those records exist at the Wuhan lab's U.S. collaborators, funders or publishers and that the U.S. chooses to investigate. The 90-day intelligence report that President Biden has requested is not expected to reveal a smoking gun or even anything profoundly new.

A security guard stands by as WHO officials visit the Wuhan lab earlier this year. HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP/GETTY

What's needed are standards of biosafety for the research on pandemic viruses that could result in trouble if a lab leak occurred—not so much a ban on risky research as an effective system of regulation that would require a consideration of benefits versus risks at the outset of research, says Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers and an expert in biosafety. "This would be put in place for high-consequence research—research that increases the transmissibility, or pathogenicity, or ability to overcome immune response, or ability to overcome drugs or vaccines of a pathogen," he says.

The current structure of oversight is inadequate, says Ebright, mainly because the funding agencies police themselves. After a moratorium on research that involves increasing the infectiousness or virulence of potential pandemic pathogens, in 2017 the federal government required the HHS to establish a committee to review proposals for such "gain-of-function" research to determine whether the benefits outweigh the risks. It also required the NIH and other funding agencies to flag such proposals to the committee. The committee cleared three proposals, says Ebright, after which no further proposals were flagged for review, essentially nullifying the policy.

Instead, analysts say, oversight should fall to an independent group that can assess the benefits and risks objectively. "It has to be carried out by a federal entity that does not perform research and does not fund research, with expertise in national security issues, biomedical research and formal quantitative risk-benefit assessment," says Ebright. "And it has to be carried out by an entity that is open and transparent in its membership and its proceedings."

The process would be similar to what now occurs with research involving human test subjects. If risks are found to outweigh the benefits, the research is not simply denied funding. It isn't allowed to proceed at all.

Processes are also needed to deal with the pandemic threats posed by bioterrorism—and by nature, which has shown itself perfectly capable of delivering diseases even nastier than COVID-19. For proof, one need look no farther than smallpox, which kills 30 percent of its victims. Inexpensive genetic tools have made it relatively easy and cheap to manipulate viruses like smallpox to resist vaccines, and even manufacture new viruses from scratch.

An International Response

To prevent an accidental pandemic, it's not enough to get a grip on U.S. research. The Biden administration will have to use its leadership abroad to establish international biosafety standards. It will also have to get other nations to agree to standards of behavior in a crisis, including sharing information about outbreaks and agreeing to allow international inspectors to gather information in the early days of an outbreak.

A COVID-19 patient on a ventilator in a Minneapolis hospital. AARON LAVINSKY/STAR TRIBUNE/GETTY

Cameron is well aware of the need for such agreements. Prior to her appointment in the White House, she was an organizer of an exercise held in 2019 in Munich designed to identify shortcomings in the world's biosecurity. For a few days, she and a broad range of experts from several nations held war games that focused on "deliberate high-consequence events"—in a word, biowarfare. The group wanted to assess how well the U.S. and the rest of the world would fare if, say, a terrorist group were to release a dangerous pathogen on an unprotected population.

The group started with an outbreak of a respiratory ailment in the fictional country of Vestia, riven by civil war. Medicines turn out to be ineffective against the pathogen, Yersinia pestis, a plague bacteria engineered by a terrorist group to resist known antibiotics. The outbreak spreads to Europe and the U.S. The director-general of the World Health Organization declares a public health emergency.

It's not exactly how the COVID-19 pandemic transpired a year and a half ago, but it's similar in many respects. It makes little difference whether or not SARS-CoV-2 was natural or engineered or whether it was deliberately or accidentally released. In both the tabletop scenario and the real event, the pathogen was novel, meaning the nearly 8 billion people on Earth had no immune resistance to it, and there were no known treatments or vaccines against it.

The other similarity between the game and the reality is that the world was woefully unprepared and cumbersome in its response. Having lived through the current pandemic, it's not hard to understand the reasons why: Nations are unwilling to share information and forced to cobble together an ad hoc response and governments lacked transparency and consistent messaging. One prominent obstacle the tabletop exercise didn't foresee was the hyper-politicized environment of public health measures, but two out of three ain't bad.

When the pandemic struck in late 2019 and early 2020, the international scenario played out as poorly in real life as it did on the tabletop. China snapped shut like a trap, silencing clinicians who sounded the public health alarm and destroying early samples that could have helped trace the origin of the virus. The World Health Organization, which the Trump administration had recently abandoned, was left to deal with a situation that was beyond its capacities and its mission.

What the world needed at that moment was a "joint assessment mechanism to investigate high-consequence biological events of unknown origin," says Jaime Yassif, a senior fellow for global biological policy and programs at NTI, who worked for Cameron at the time. That would be an independent agency of the United Nations similar to the International Atomic Energy Commission, which oversees agreements on nuclear proliferation, including supplying inspectors to police the nuclear agreement with Iran.

Had China, the U.S. and other nations put such a group in place prior to early 2020, a team of investigators with the ability to explore the "naturally emerging" and "lab accident" hypotheses would have been at the ready, along with international agreements and protocols to smooth their way in gathering information, working with a network of labs to evaluate samples and conduct a thorough investigation. They might have explored, in a scientific, evidence-based way, all the open questions about origins. The U.S. would have had a way of rapidly deploying an investigative team to get more reliable information about the origins and try to understand the cause.

As it was, the void was filled by the WHO, whose mission is to investigate natural outbreaks. Any notion that the WHO was equipped to investigate the possibility of a lab leak is belied by the fact that it took a year to send a team of investigators, who came to the dubious conclusion that no further investigation into the lab-leak theory was warranted—a claim later contradicted by the U.N. Secretary-General.

Had the outbreak clearly been a biological attack or other deliberate misuse of biological agents, the responsibility for investigating could have fallen to the Secretary-General, under the auspices of the bioweapons convention. Because the origin of the outbreak was ambiguous, it fell through the cracks.

With no responsible organization in place to take action at the moment of crisis, a yawning information gap opened up. It was quickly filled with finger pointing, racism and conspiracy mongering, particularly in public exchanges between the U.S. and China. "If we had had a mechanism in place," says Yassif, "perhaps we could have avoided a lot of the uncertainty and politicization of this question, and perhaps we could have gotten a higher confidence assessment of the origins early on."

That assessment, of course, is hypothetical: There's no guarantee China, even were it to sign on to such a mechanism, would honor it at the moment of crisis. But even so, it would have had to commit a clear violation of a standard of behavior that it had agreed to. The fact of noncompliance would itself have been useful information.

Now that the world has seen what havoc can result from a nasty bug, says Yassif, "they may be more interested now than they were in the past of exploring the prospect of using biological weapons to advance their strategic or tactical aims. It's getting easier and easier for malicious actors to theoretically carry out a biological attack deliberately. COVID has highlighted these risks and may even have exacerbated them."

A Question of Leadership

To have a chance at getting all this done, the pandemic czar has to have a laser-focus on the issue of pandemic preparedness as well as the full support of the president of the United States. The key question is, will Cameron get the support she needs to shake up the administration?

The role of a pandemic czar is as much about national security and policy as it is about science. Questions about closing schools and airports, implementing mask mandates and closing businesses are political decisions that can only be made by somebody who has the ear of the president, as Ron Klain did during the Ebola crisis. It's not clear, says Bernard, that Cameron has that kind of authority.

"Before they named Klain during Ebola, it was a disaster," recalls Bernard. "Our response was disjointed and stovepiped. Defense wasn't talking to Health and Human Services. USAID was arguing with CDC. It was a mess—and then Ron came in and pulled everybody together. That's what's needed. That's what's missing even today at the White House."

Biden Chief of Staff Ron Klain, who won high marks for overseeing the Obama administration response to the Ebola crisis in 2014. RICKY CARIOTI/THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY

The task requires a leader who can act in the president's name and get senior people from all departments of governing to come to the table. The lack of clear authority has hampered pandemic responses not just during COVID-19 but in other outbreaks as well. A pandemic response requires high-level-policy meetings with the Defense Department, State Department, Health and Human Services, USAID, the Treasury and Commerce.

"They all have to be in the room because if they're not, you miss something because they're all interrelated when it comes to a global pandemic," says Bernard.

Cameron's rank in the White House is Special Assistant to the President. This sounds impressive, but it's lower in the hierarchy than Press Secretary or National Security Adviser, who are Assistants, and lower than Deputy Assistants. Bernard says it is "not senior enough for running a U.S. government-wide process."

The highest ranking science adviser in the White House is not Cameron but Eric Lander, the first science adviser to hold cabinet rank. Lander has a reputation as a brilliant scientist and administrator and has assembled a highly-regarded staff. As the former head of the Broad Institute in Boston, Lander knows as much as anybody about the science and is known to be pushing for better oversight of research on risky pathogens. But as head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, his responsibility is far broader than preparing for the next pandemic, which means he lacks the single-minded focus a pandemic czar needs.

Eric Lander, being sworn in last June as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, making him the administration’s highest ranking science adviser. ANNA MONEYMAKER/GETTY

Even if Cameron gets the full backing of Biden, Ziemer worries that COVID-19 has been so politicized that it will be difficult for the Biden administration to get anything done. "The current government bureaucracy, the inability to move money quickly in response to a changing landscape, will keep the government handicapped on where we need to go in the next five years," he says. "We need to depoliticize COVID and have an adult discussion about how to plan, fund and remain agile in preparation for the next pandemic."

So far, Biden has taken few steps to address the next pandemic. He made public statements calling China to task for its lack of transparency over the origins of the virus. He signed an executive order to create a center for epidemic forecasting and outbreak analytics that would track viruses and watch for early signs of an outbreak in the U.S. And Cameron is reaching out to other governments to talk about cooperation.

If history is any guide, now is the moment of maximum political will to prevent and prepare for the next pandemic.

The failure of the U.S. government, and those of other nations, to prepare for the possibility of a sudden, catastrophic pandemic—something scientists had warned about for years before the coronavirus struck—arguably cost millions of lives, trillions of dollars in lost wages and ruined livelihoods, and immense human suffering. It would be unthinkable to allow that to happen again.

[aish-rai]

Lion also made me (Indian-American) uncomfortable although I loved the story. Like the last time we saw this much of Dev Patel, pretty much the only "Indian" actor Americans know, he was literally in /Slum/dog Millionaire. My complaint isn't with the story but with the fact that the west only pursues & values/watches stories that exoticize India (/Exotic/ Marigold Hotel, Eat Pray Love) or pimp poverty in poor pitiable slums. But it happens with all "foreign" stories, "Africa," "Muslim" countries

woah sorry this got much longer than anticipated

Dev was also on The Newsroom. I didn’t watch the show, but landing a role in an Aaron Sorkin show is a pretty big deal. And I don’t think The Man Who Knew Infinity ended up really going anywhere, but I did hear a bit about it leading up to it. And I hate to bring this up but even though the movie was a piece of shit...The Last Airbender still could have been a pretty huge opportunity....

Aside from Slumdog, I just don’t think his career has been defined by an exotified version of India. We forget how young he is. He’s only 26 and he’s already been in an Oscar Best Picture-winning film, on an iconic television series (Skins), on a critically acclaimed series (The Newsroom), a big-budget cartoon adaptation (ATLA), and now another Oscar-nominated film that earned him a personal nom as well. Like, Hollywood is notoriously unkind to young male actors in terms of recognition...for a 26-year-old, and especially a young South Asian man, he’s doing REALLY well for himself. Hell, he’s doing pretty well by almost anyone’s standards, given that he’s not like....on the CW or some shit.

I guess this is a separate point from the discomfort you’re expressing lol I just wanted to point out that I think Dev’s career isn’t being defined by playing exotified roles. And it’s obviously not good enough to just have ONE (or two, if you count Suraj Sharma) young South Asian actors working in the industry, but I still think he’s making a good go of it. 

Idk, for me it’s always really hard to know what to think of this topic because what they’re showing IS a reality, I mean it’s not all there is to those countries but...it’s real. But on the flipside, there are a ton of stories to be told that don’t focus on poverty porn. I think a movie like The Lunchbox, for example, could have shown that in-between, middle class reality...but everyone involved dropped the ball there, and it was a missed opportunity because Hollywood was definitely ready the embrace that movie.

....I think what I’m trying to say is that exclusively showing both extreme poverty or extreme wealth is equally damaging and an ineffective way of representing a culture, but it seems to be slowly improving, people just need to play their cards right.

#Anonymous

[papirouge]

i dont understand when you say christians are given health protection by god... some christian countries were hit very hard during the pandemic. some countries that are not christian came out pretty good too. i see no correlation. i also wonder about the black death in europe. the jews were protected by better standards of hygiene whereas christians were suffering more

Christian countries being more affected than non-Christian ones doesn't say anything in whether the people who caught the virus were Christian themselves. God looks into hearts, not nationalities. I personally do not consider the West as authentically Christian anymore anyway ; these countries are just culturally Christian (you know, do christianese stunts like celebrating Christian and swearing on the Bible on Court lol). It's been a while since God retrieved His hand off Europe & North America, and you can currently the result right now : both of these continents are undergoing the most accelerated form and decadence & degeneracy. Right now, Christianism is booming in Asia and Africa (it is said that by 2060, 6 of the countries with the top 10 largest Christian populations in the world will be in Africa) : the western world is a decaying Christian space. And the c0v*d number perfectly translated this spiritual switch.

Yeah of course a better sense of hygiene will prevent diseases. Jews, and especially Muslims, have a compulsory good sense of hygiene, so it makes sense they weren't affected by the type of plagues that affected medieval Europeans who were f i l t hy.

You seemingly missed the part where I said I wasn't against medicine and that I myself took medicine. Even in the Bible Paul advises Timothy to take some wine to help him deal with his stomach issues (1 Timothy 5:23), so yes, you are right, medicine is good (and I personally think God used & inspired doctors to bring game changing solutions into the world to help humanity) But c0v*d isn't a simple occasional disease, it is a pandemic, and I actually elaborated how "pest" or "plagues" (the old-fashioned way to talk about pandemics) had a peculiar significance biblically speaking. They were used by God as a judgement, a punishment onto the World and/or His people (=Israel) for disobedience. Notice that I didn't only bring up the consequence of this virus health wise, but also the social and economical ones. What happened since last year had a purpose for the whole world, but also particularly for Christians. It was not surprising to see the World not get it, but for Christians....it is much more concerning ; this trial completely flew over heads. They totally missed the whole point. They were either cussing against governmental policies, fearmongering about churches closing (as if God needed churches to reach out to His people... SMH) or a full on panic about catching the virus.... (idg how or why would Christians fear death anyway - death is supposed to be a relief, allowing us to finally get back to God). This panic made them totally forgot the promises made by God about health and all around protection. Sad.

christians donate money to charity etc so people can live in better hygiene. yes some diseases are the result of fast food and not exercising because the body is a temple of god but why would we blame people instead of the food industry and big pharma asking a lot of money for medicine...

I don't think the Christians who donate to charity are the type of Christians the meme was calling out. A Christian giving to charity won't try to argue giving money to the poor is socialism and that poor people are just lazy freeloaders who don't deserve to get free stuff... They're most definitely NOT the same groups lol

I am not "blaming" anything. IDK why you're going on a tangent about fast food when I always talked about spiritual health and how it was the key for physical health - not the other way around. Yes, God allows even his faithful servants to get sick and have disabilities (Moses, Jacob, Paul, Job...) but I have yet to see a righteous biblical character fall down because of a pest or a plague. As I said, these phenomenons had ALWAYS been used by God to condemn sin and rebellious. Those are totally different from a regular "health issue".

#answered #health #Christian