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From the article:

> It underscores the country’s fragmented public health systems and its decentralized and underfunded reporting system, which hobbled the U.S. pandemic response.

> a $13 million project that’s been viewed over 2.5 billion times

Does anyone believe the CDC would be able to create and run --for three years-- the equivalent to the JHU pandemic website if we gave them $13 million dollars?

Of course not. That money might not las a week, maybe not even a day.

Funding isn't the problem. It's about incompetence. Fix that first.

You can't throw money at incompetent organizations and make them better, you'll just build a larger incompetent organization.

Note I did not say incompetent people. You can have otherwise competent people as part of an organization that can't find it's way out of a paper bag. This happens more often then people realize.

It is no secret that government organizations are characterized by waste and organizational incompetence. I am reminded of this every time I drive our crumbling roads in Southern California. Money isn't their problem. We have been paying for road maintenance for decades...it just doesn't get done or it is done poorly.

Emergencies have unique ways to quickly highlight competence and incompetence. We need to fix the real problems, not throw money around hoping divine intervention will sort it out.

What happened to that kid who programmed the first COVID tracker and turned down like $8 million for it?
There is a lot of talk about that guy on reddit.

Supposedly he stole the code? Or the dataset? (Very early days of covid so it wasn't widely available) I can't remember exactly.

Then he responded and had a somewhat valid defense from what I read in a separate reddit thread.

The main thing that undermined its credibility was weighing numbers from the Chinese Communist Republic equally with those from other countries.
Not just weighing the CCP’s numbers equally, but pushing their agenda in general. There was a lengthy time period where anyone that even admitted that the lab leak theory was a real possibility became deplatformed with extreme prejudice.

They promoted many narratives that they knew were lies…such as 2 weeks to flatten the curve or that the vaccine will prevent you from getting sick with COVID. I also remember at the very beginning we were told don’t wear cloth masks, anything less than an N95 is ineffective, but once enough masks were commercially available we were literally killing grandma if we didn’t wear one everywhere.

The CDC has lost almost all of their credibility.

"almost all" <- you're so close