Darwinian Science versus a Tsaristic Model

Science is often successful when it is conducted in an adversarial and competitive manner. Just look at Watson and Crick. Big science is not often successful, just look at the CDC. The Guardian reports on the "investigation" into the WHO. They note:

The assembly also heard repeated expressions of support for the WHO’s central role in overseeing the pandemic, as well as calls to end the “hit and miss” funding of the UN body. Donald Trump has suspended all payments to the WHO pending a review into its alleged “China-centric leadership” and ineffectiveness. Speakers from nations including France and Germany also insisted that any eventual vaccine must be the product of international cooperation and treated as a public good that is available to the whole world. In a hard-hitting speech, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, said recent weeks had seen many expressions of international solidarity, but very little practical action. “We are all paying the price for implementing contradictory strategies,” he said. He warned the disease had spread across the world, and was now heading for developing countries where he predicted it would be even more devastating.  He said the WHO was irreplaceable and needed enhanced support, arguing: “We are as strong as the weakest health system.”

Now these "contradictory"  strategies are the way one optimally deals with complex and uncertain challenges. A single organized approach is usually fatally flawed and dominated by incompetent players who have alternative objectives. Thus any WHO dominated and controlled approach may very well doom civilization as we know it. Frankly even in the US with state options we seem to have a 50 state set of laboratories on how to deal with the crisis. Clearly the New York approach of sending the sick to Long Term Care facilities just resulted in massive deaths, as it did in New Jersey which seemed to follow the New York model.

Other states have done other strategies and many of these alternatives have had positive results and are clear model for New York which seems to have been a colossal failure. I suspect it will just get worse. For example in New York if a cancer patient needs to see their physician or get some procedure then the patients must wait outside the facility until called in. This will be a Bataan Death March in July with hundreds of terminally ill lined up in the sweltering streets waiting to get the call while spreading the disease amongst the crowd. Again it appear that New York is setting a model for human downsizing and doing so with an expertise matching may previous such actions.