Lessons Learned

 In Bioethics we're reading, in Michael Lewis's The Premonition, of the pandemic planning task force hastily assembled in 2005 by Rajeev Venkayya, a young White House staffer tabbed by George W. Bush to head the "Biodefense Directorate" of the Department of Homeland Security. (What odd names for agencies of the U.S. government, they somehow sound more suited to the old U.S.S.R.)

Bush, it may surprise some of us to learn, had read a book. Or at least had read the portions of a book that staffers had highlighted for him, pointing out the country's state of utter unpreparedness should anything like the influenza pandemic of 1918 ever be repeated. If it happened on his watch his presidential legacy would suffer. On the heels of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, WMDs in Iraq (not), et al, that got Dubya's attention.

Venkayya's first hire was a Vandy grad named Richard Hatchett, who left a promising path towards a career in poetry for med school. "Writing is too hard." He gave us "social distance" as we've come to know it today, not knowing its anthropological significance as a kinship marker or its track record from 1918. "I just didn't know any better." Pandemic planning turns out to be hard, too.

Then came Dr. Carter Mecher, a Chicagoland native whose father encouraged his medical path: "If some other dumb fuck can do it, so can you." Thanks, Dad.

"Very few medical students shared his enthusiasm for human beings on the brink of death." He sounds like a soulmate for the Santa Barbara public health director Charity Dean, who we read in the previous chapter used to soothe herself in childhood reading and thinking about the Bubonic Plague.

Dr. Mecher is quite right, it's good to learn from our mistakes but "best to learn from other people's mistakes."

And what great lesson has he learned about how people do and do not learn hard lessons? "The gist of it was that people don't learn what is imposed upon them but rather what they freely seek..."

Right! And since it's time for us to begin thinking about midterm report presentation topics I urge you all, classes, not to wait for me to impose on you. Take a glance at the syllabus for February and freely seek the subject you can't wait to share. If some other !@#$%! can do it, so can you.