Origins of Covid

When you have to sue the government to get them to share legally available information, it almost always means they know more than they want you to know. Whatever the origins of Covid, policy makers have behaved from the outset of the pandemic in ways that can only be described as curious. Their frequently irrational behavior, and contradictory pronouncements, have spawned any number of theories as to why they have flailed the way they have.

One thought I have had is that the folks at the CDC have behaved in ways someone would if they were afraid that this virus might not act like a naturally occurring virus. It isn’t as if we haven’t had corona viruses in the world before. And we generally know the course a viral outbreak takes through a population. Sure, maybe this one has a marginally higher mortality rate for certain segments of the population. But some of the behavior of policy makers has suggested their behavior is born out of a concern, not just for mortality, but for the possibility that the entire pandemic course with this one could somehow be…different.

Such puzzling behavior has prompted all manner of attempts to explain their inconsistent, and often ridiculous, policy prescriptions. Hanlon's razor is always the most likely explanation: Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Or perhaps the popular explanation on the right, that the bureaucrats are power mad, is correct. Perhaps some combination of stupidity and a lust for power offers the magic decoder ring.

The delusional view of the left, that the government is a benevolent caretaker of the citizenry, and only wants what's best for us, should have died as the last planes left Afghanistan, abandoning the remaining American citizens to their fate. But they'll be telling us again that we should trust our well-being to the government before the week is out. They're incapable of learning from experience. (The determination of the poobahs of social media to decorate the posts of their users with ubiquitous assurances of the probity of the government's pronouncements on Covid is a case-in-point.)  

The fact that the federal government routinely demonstrates its indifference to the welfare of American citizens, however, doesn't really explain the epidemic of bureaucratic bumbling and burbling.

I've been long haunted by the thought that we should at least consider whether the wacky behavior of the bureaucrats might suggest that some of them suspect something, and have been haphazardly reacting out of fear that the virus could behave in ways for which there is no natural precedent.

Just wondering.