Throwing Jared Under the Bus

VanityFair has a long piece about Jared Kushner’s Covid-19 task force. You probably won’t be surprised to find that it consisted of old college roommates who went into business, a celebrity, some former FDA commissioners, a single doctor from the Rockefeller foundation and a whole lotta brain trusts from Tech. 🙄

What did it NOT include? Epidemiologists, biologists, virologists, you know, nerdy people who don’t have MBA’s. What do THEY know about supply chains and contracting (probably more than you think considering how many of them have to fend for themselves to get their work done these days).

So, I guess it should come as no surprise that this happened:

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said.

On April 27, Trump stepped to a podium in the Rose Garden, flanked by members of his coronavirus task force and leaders of America’s big commercial testing laboratories, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, and finally announced a testing plan: It bore almost no resemblance to the one that had been forged in late March, and shifted the problem of diagnostic testing almost entirely to individual states.

If Jared had been listening to the doctor even, he would have gotten a lecture on how you can’t order a virus to stay in the states of your perceived enemies, followed by a hard dope slap.

I think we always knew that this was the White House strategy. Now there are people in the know leaking documents and improperly purchased test kits without government contracts. You’d think they would cover contracting stuff like that at Wharton or Silicon Valley. But no, the whole shebang was done very poorly and probably illegally.

Anyway, it looks like Jared is being thrown under the bus. And I would happily be the first to back up over him afterwards if it weren’t for the fact that I can’t believe even Jared would be that stupid to not see how viruses actually travel and infect.

That there has all the grubby fingerprints of Annoying Orange.