The Failure of Peacetime Governments in Wartime: COVID and Climate

In the startup world we sometimes talk about the difference between being a peacetime CEO and a wartime CEO (cf this famous essay by Ben Horowitz). While some people may be turned off by this martial metaphor, it is profoundly relevant to the government’s failure to properly deal with the COVID crisis. We must take a close look at this, if we want to stand a real chance of fighting the climate crisis, which is substantially more difficult to address.

I am writing this in late in 2021, essentially two years into the COVID crisis. And here we are with a shortage of at home testing, a lack of availability of antibody treatment, minimal access to antiviral pills and an insufficient vaccination rate. This is an abject failure of government here in the US and in pretty much most other democracies. To be clear, since I sometimes get accused of being partisan, the Biden administration had plenty of time to fix this and they have failed just as badly as the Trump administration did before them.

What should have been done instead? The FDA should have been instructed to approve at home tests and these should have been manufactured at scale under the Defense Production Act. I and many others wrote about the importance of pervasive testing (to break transmission chains) in, checks notes, yeah April of 2020. The same goes for antibody treatment and antiviral pills. The FDA should have fast tracked all of these and production should be at wartime scale through government-led procurement. I have a whole section in the Appendix to my book “The World After Capital” on how quickly we can ramp production when governments really commit to it. Here is a picture of Ford’s famous Willow Run factory which at the peak of production completed one B-24 bomber every hour:

It was of course also known from the get go that the virus will mutate. Duh. That’s what viruses do. So the other crazy part here is that we aren’t massively sequencing here in the US and new variants are detected late and/or in other places. More importantly, we then start the whole slow process over, instead of jumping into fast action. What would fast action look like? Immediately start new batches of vaccines. mRNA technology makes this possible. Run challenge trials right away to assess their safety and efficacy (this could be done in weeks). Same goes for making new monoclonal antibody treatments. 

This must be government directed. The private market moves too slowly, especially given that the FDA is still taking way too long. Yes you may want to fault Pfizer for not making tons of doses of Paxlovid before being granted a EUA by the FDA. But that’s simply wishful thinking. The second there was any inkling that Paxlovid might be effective the government should have placed a large order to remove the risk from Pfizer. In war, if you have a new weapon, you don’t wait around to produce it. 

So what is the lesson? We have peacetime governments, but we are in wartime. And that sucks. It means we cannot rely on government to defend us. And as always, when that’s the case, the impacts are disproportionately born by those most in need of protection, such as the poor and the ill.

And it is sadly the same for the climate crisis. We should be in wartime mode but governments are stuck in peacetime mode instead, conducting business as usual while the world is burning.

I am not saying this to bum everyone out at Christmas. Rather understanding this distinction is crucial for figuring out how to engage. If more people get that we need to be in wartime mode, it will let us apply pressure to governments to switch gears entirely, instead of wasting our energy fighting one grinding battle after the other.