The Smartest Boys In The World

Running this blog all this time has had various impacts on my psyche. I wouldn't say all of the effects have been good! But early on I did learn that plenty of people who were umambiguously "smarter" than me read my blog, and that literally everyone who read my blog was "smarter" (knew more, etc.) about something!

I'm not a supergenius and there are plenty of things I don't know much about.

I don't know how idiots like this get so confident that they are supergeniuses.

“Some of the studies are testing new treatment regimens for drug- resistant tuberculosis,” I explained, hoping I could convey the very real danger in terms that would register with this audience. “Thousands of enrolled patients are at risk now that their lifesaving treatment is stopped. But that’s not the only danger. We only have limited options to treat drug- resistant TB. We’re using our antibiotics of last resort in these trials. Interrupting treatment midstream risks the development of new, even more drug-resistant strains that could be untreatable. For an airborne infectious disease, that is a serious national security risk.”

Adam thought for a moment and then responded, noting that the political appointees at USAID were “not health people.” It would be hard, he surmised, for nonexperts to understand this issue. And so he suggested that we draft a simple, “Barney-style” set of slides to help the political leadership grasp the dangers, referring to the purple dinosaur of children’s television. He recommended that we use the term “Super TB” instead of “drug- resistant TB” to describe the mutations that can develop when treatment is interrupted, because it might be more likely to “catch their attention.”

Adam then made clear that he did not count himself among those po- litical appointees who were not health experts. Though he had no relevant training or experience, he reassured me that he understood the severity of infectious diseases, noting that he had recently read a book about smallpox. Apparently he had watched movies as well.

“One thing I thought of while you were talking,” he added, gesticulating wildly with his hands to conjure the image in his mind. “If you can make one of those maps like they have in Outbreak, where it shows the red growing over time as the disease spreads? You know, like the zombie apocalypse? That would be great, very effective.”

The thought that Adam might have the most health expertise of anyone in the agency’s leadership made me shudder.

Excerpt from Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower's Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID.