Deregulation News

Editorial a couple of days ago in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted:

“We inherited a broken, terrible system …,” Trump told reporters on April 18. “Our cupboards were bare. We had very little in our stockpile.” That was Trump’s attempt, frequently repeated by the president and recycled in White House presentations, to lay responsibility for the inept pandemic response at Obama’s feet, as if three years in office were insufficient for Trump to repair all the supposed damage his predecessor wrought.

Zorro (Douglas Fairbanks) defends Lolita Pulito (Marguerite de la Motte) from Captain Juan Ramon (Robert McKim). Photo courtesy of Orange County Archives, via very relevant essay at Zocalo Public Square.

But then again, as they pointed out, in his budget for fiscal 2017, maybe in response to the 2015 Ebola epidemic,

Obama asked to nearly double his own $40 million outlay for epidemiology and laboratory capacity. Congress balked, but Obama left Trump with that $40 million as a starting point. What did Trump do? In his 2020 budget, he asked Congress to cut that number to: Zero. Zilch. Nothing.

Now some more of the receipts are in, and some maybe more important facts, according to reporting by Brian Mann at NPR, who recounts some of the effort by the Obama Labor Department going back to the H1N1 epidemic of 2009:

making a new infectious disease regulation, affecting much of the American health care system, is time-consuming and contentious. It requires lengthy consultation with scientists, doctors and other state and federal regulatory agencies as well as the nursing home and hospital industries that would be forced to implement the standard.

Federal records reviewed by NPR show OSHA went step by step through that process for six years, and by early 2016 the new infectious disease rule was ready. The Obama White House formally added it to a list of regulations scheduled to be implemented in 2017...

And the Trump administration just dumped the whole thing, practically on entering office:

In the spring of 2017, the Trump team formally stripped OSHA's airborne infectious disease rule from the regulatory agenda. NPR could find no indication the new administration had specific policy concerns about the infectious disease rules.

Instead, the decision appeared to be part of a wider effort to cut regulations and bureaucratic oversight.

They just stopped doing it because they didn't want to, a characteristic Republican response but more fecklessly carried out than the career officers would normally permit, and the nursing homes and hospitals went on doing things the same ways, neither planning nor training for a pandemic and failing to lay in stocks of PPEs, and as a result, more than 60,000 healthcare workers have been infected and almost 300 killed by Covid-19. I can just see Trump crowing, "Less than 300!" as if that was some kind of triumph, but that's not even all, because it seems fairly obvious that the healthcare workers' need to protect themselves so they could keep working without adequate PPE supplies must have led to their doing their work less well, especially in the nursing homes, and contributed to the horrific death rates in those institutions.

It was 11 p.m. on a Sunday in early May when Penny Shaw, a 76-year-old in Braintree, Massachusetts, picked up the phone and reported her nursing home to the local police. The staff on duty had just told her they couldn’t provide any of their usual care because they had no personal protection equipment (PPE). Since the coronavirus pandemic hit, the staff is supposed to wear PPE when helping all patients, but only the home’s administrator, who doesn’t work late on weekends, could give it out. So the certified nursing assistants wouldn’t be able to get masks, gloves or gowns until the morning. (Time)

The nursing homes, of course, are focusing their own lobbying on avoiding legal liability for the situation in which old people are allowed to die because it's not safe to care for them, and you can't even blame them. Though you can blame the Republicans in Congress demanding protection for the nursing home owners as blackmail, in return for cooperating in legislation to save the country from economic collapse, like a captain in a shipwreck refusing to release the lifeboats until the crew promises not to sue the shipowners.

Housekeeping note:

Your host has acquired a new laptop (nice! the keyboard and trackpad on the old one were extremely fritzy, with the caps on the keys—especially a, e, r, i, and backspace/delete—constantly flying off, as I needed to bang them ever harder, sometimes to the floor. Also switched to a new interface devised by Google's Blogger platform with which these effusions have been produced for the past nine years, and it's really gross; the WYSIWYG interface has hidden things I need in much less accessible places, added ridiculous extra steps to the process of using them, and works in bizarrely unexpected ways; the HTML has become crazy opaque but seems to have added a lot of new and to me meaningless elements while abandoning others I'm used to. Productivity may suffer for a while.