To Xavier Becerra: Nominee for Health & Human Services (HHS)
As you prepare to take up your position as HHS Secretary,
there is a relevant opportunity that depends upon quick attention and prompt
action. With the transition to the Biden Administration, the fight against the
COVID-19 pandemic will be a most significant and difficult challenge. It is
thus imprudent to not recognize and seize an appropriate strategy to avert
criticism and blame for results that are pre-ordained by the laws of physics
and our STEM-based knowledge and understanding of the virus.
As surely as the sun rises in the east under the laws of
physics; the continued transmission, hospitalizations, deaths, and other associated
damage that will be done by the Corona virus will proceed according to the
forces that have been at play for months. More importantly, given the dynamics
of the disease, what will happen for the next several weeks and months are to a
large degree set in stone. This points to a clear and key strategy in
establishing smart and informed expectations for the Biden Administration’s
goals in combating the virus.
The most effective way to do this is to provide a clear
messaging on what HHS’s forecasts are for key COVID-19 metrics and to present
them in terms of two or three delineated time-periods. The CDC and other public
health agencies have forecasts for a number of the metrics that are monitored,
reported upon and used to plan going-forward efforts and decisions. At a
minimum HHS should provide a projections on key metrics based on these three
categorizations. As an example, the number of ‘new’ COVID cases forecast for
the next 3 or 4 weeks these should be termed as explicitly “Inherited From
Trump” (IFT) projection, then a “Transition to Biden” (TTB) projection (perhaps
4 weeks, based on policy and plan changes that are put into effect), and
finally after meeting key implementation conditions/requirements the metrics
would fall into a COVID-19 “Biden Era Science & Technology” (BEST)
policy(ies).
The purpose of these intervals is to establish for the public a connection
between efforts and policies taken by the Biden Administration and the inherent
delay required before these actions can show results in the daily data and news
coverage of COVID-19. In relying upon the science to guide public policy, it is
also necessary to place those decisions and policies into the context of a
“cause and effect” perspective. Politics does not change the laws of physics
and a change in Administration does not mean that the changes that it will make
happen until those laws of physics produce their outcomes in the time-periods
which they require. In releasing an arrow, the arrow doesn’t hit the target
until the necessary time has passed; so it will be with actions taken by the
Biden Administration.
This same reasoning and reality apply as much to America’s
COVID-19 conditions as it does to a decision to any other changes that the
Biden Administration brings about.
It should also be
noted that where there are regions, states or jurisdictions which choose to
reject, resist or follow different policies then those differences provide a
form of ‘natural experiments’ against which to measure the effectiveness of
competing policies, decisions and actions. It would thus behoove HHS to require
that regions or states that choose to follow paths that you see as contrary to
the nation’s interests that those regions/states provide the appropriate
forecast for their polices, efforts and goals. Just as the Biden
Administration’s HHS should not be solely accountable for the first three to
four weeks of ‘new’ COVID cases, HHS should not be the primary accountable
entity for those who act on their own approaches.
If you and HHS do not seem the wisdom of providing a
definitive forecast based on these three categorized intervals, then by default
you are accepting the accountability for the COVID-19 data starting on Jan. 21,
2021. I can see no logic in such a decision or in the failure to have considered
this aspect of the situation which the Biden Administration is inheriting.
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