Are our pandemic managers "Jared Kushners"?

Last update: Sunday 9/18/22 

First came the Peter Principle in 1969. According to Wikipedia, " The Peter Principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to 'a level of respective incompetence': employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another." What, say you, has this to do with our management of the COVID pandemic? Patience, dear readers, patience ... :-)

Imposter Syndrome

In 1978 the Peter Principle was followed by the "Imposter Syndrome" which, according to Wikipedia "... is a psychological occurrence in which an individual doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud." One might expect that the primary personifications of the Imposter Syndrome would be the over-promoted beneficiaries of the Peter Principle. If so, happy endings would occur when over promoted imposters resigned from their unearned higher positions. But what made the Imposter Syndrome so intriguing was the high rate of false positives that were quickly identified. 

For example, at top ranked colleges and universities, minority students were the often the victims of false identifications as imposters by majority students. White upper class male students would casually ask Black male freshmen, "What sports do you play" ... their unspoken assumption being that the Black freshmen were unlikely to have been admitted because they had earned straight A's in high school. Sad to say, these casual slurs often triggered debilitating self-doubts among highly qualified Black students.

In the many decades since the Peter Principle was first published, the editor of this blog has come to marvel at its optimism. That people are often promoted to positions for which they are unprepared cannot be denied. But their discovery and subsequent dismissal are rare events. The vast majority of real imposters don't seem to know that they are imposters, so they just keep on keeping on. For example, Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law, was widely perceived to be an imposter, but that never stopped him from taking on more and more responsibilities while President Trump was in office.

• "Jared Kushner is profoundly clueless", Jill Filipovic, CNN, 2019
• "College admissions scam rekindles scrutiny of Kushner's Harvard acceptance, $2.5M pledge", Christal Hayes, USA Today, 2019

The editor has also come to realize that the Peter Principle also applies to public agencies. For public agencies, promotion takes the form of "mission creep" wherein the scope of the agency's operations becomes broader and broader. And as with over promoted individual imposters, most agency imposters also seem to have no clue that they have become incompetent. In the face of past initiatives that failed, they keep on launching similar initiatives, with the same disappointing results.

The CDC as an imposter agency

Our struggle to fight the coronavirus has often been framed as a "total war", a useful metaphor provided that it is not taken literally. As in World Wars I and II, our pandemic struggles have involved all sectors of our society. But we should recall that the leaders of our successful efforts in the world wars were not mere captains or lieutenants who had the skills to lead limited combat offensives; they were multi-starred generals with training and broad experience in the management of far more complex operations. Management skills? Have those words ever appeared in the resumes of CDC directors? 

The directors and other top level members of the CDC's staff have been selected for their medical and bioscience expertise because that's all that was required to lead previous limited offensives against pathogens that only threatened limited segments of our society. When confronting the coronavirus, the CDC leadership merely followed their traditional playbooks by recommending mitigations, lockdowns, and remote learning while issuing no estimates of the catastrophic impacts that their recommendations might have on our local economies and on the education of our children, especially children who came from economically disadvantaged homes.

Real managers would have maintained a strategic focus on the fundamental unchanging reality of the coronavirus pandemic since it began ==> Over 90 percent of all COVID related deaths have occurred among persons age 50 and older, and most of the younger deaths occurred among persons who had underlying health conditions.  Our "total war" against the virus should never have involved everyone. Its mitigations, vaccinations, and treatments should have centered on the vulnerable minority and on their families, friends, and other close associates.   

As the CDC launches its Fall 2022 bivalent booster campaign, public response so far has been muted. Is this another manifestation of widespread COVID fatigue? Or is it the resigned response of a public that has finally perceived that America's pandemic campaigns are being mismanaged by "Jared Kushners"?

Breaking news: On Monday morning 9/19/22, the online edition of the Washington Post reported that at an auto show in Detroit that President Biden -- the same 79 year old president who was in isolation from Paxlovid rebounds for three weeks last month -- had declared that "the pandemic is over." "If you notice, no one’s wearing masks,” he said to CBS News reporter Scott Pelley. “Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing. And I think this is a perfect example of it.” ... LOL  ... ROTF ... LMFAO ... Way to go, Jared!!! ... :-)

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Links to related notes on this blog:  

• "Yes, the CDC must be reorganized asap; but no, it cannot reorganize itself", Last update: 8/18/22