perhaps the Chinese scientists were afraid to speak openly because talking to bourgeois media journalists is in the best case pointless and in the worst case they will lie and distort what you said

Monitoring, however, was not easy. For one thing, we had a hard time finding out what was really going on in China because doctors and scientists there appeared to be afraid to speak openly, for fear of retribution by the Chinese government

Death to America

Monitoring, however, was not easy. For one thing, we had a hard time finding out what was really going on in China because doctors and scientists there appeared to be afraid to speak openly, for fear of retribution by the Chinese government.

Meanwhile you just know that if China had given detailed reports with precision breakdowns of every case in every province with tracking numbers and as much data as humanly possible, this ghoul would go full and accuse them of obfuscating data

Oh wait

This basically fucking happened

But this was how I became the public-health official who, very early in the pandemic, instructed people not to wear a mask.

This was a supposed "white lie" to try to preserve ppe for medical professionals, which was stupid because a lot of nurses and doctors took it to mean they didn't need ppe, and as far as I know the government didn't even try to secure any ppe for medical professionals or make sure they were available.

We knew it was airborne by how quickly it was spreading. The WHO knew it was airborne and immediately started upgrading their offices to filter the air, even while they told the world it wasn't airborne. The reason they didn't say it was airborne was because it would mean hospitals would have to take more strict measures to protect everyone, and it would cost a lot and make the job harder.

It's insulting to be told that the evidence at the time showed that it wasn't warranted to take airborne measures.

also he's doing this because of

Lol, my libbed up aunt named her cat Obama back in the day

I mean, he basically blames his abdication of the principles of public health on "how science is supposed to work", which is an outright lie. Precautionary principle dictates behavior that he signed on to abandoning and continues to justify refusing to enact. Also, he still refuses to recognize the larger failure, namely trying to spread the disease to the vulnerable in the hopes of a manageable die-off and quick return to normal (10k cases a day in his estimation), the one that's given all his readers a high risk of long term effects, because that's still not very well known. He only admits to the failures that people already recognize, which is defensiveness, not accountability.

He doesn't really take any accountability for his part in the failure, though. The article is mostly him placing the blame on the Trump administration and "political division"