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The question is Noam Chomsky? The answer is, he is obfuscating that he does not know what he is talking about, and is so obtuse in his words they can be construed to have any meaning he wants, especially afterwords when criticized. In which case, he will misrepresent to the point of lying what he actually said and clearly meant, and what his critics said repeatedly to defend himself by confusing the issue.

Most people who have Covid-19 and get on a ventilator die, so arguing over them is a little pointless. It is also pointless to have ventilators if there are not people who could operate them.

My mother was a nurse all her life and recently told me a story. When she was a acting head nurse early on in her career, the management of the hospital she was working was going to get ventilators. My mom pointed out that there was no one trained to use them, and that she would quit if her staff was made to use ventilators they did not know how to use. If de Blasio and Cuomo want tens of thousands of ventilators, they need several thousand people trained to run them.

In this case, neoliberal capitalism has nothing to do with government policies that restrict the number of hospital beds, or equipment purchased by state legislatures. That's government, not greedy corporations. The government in New York and California are run by Democrats.

Going over the interview:

"Nor the fact that the U.S. has the worst record in responding to the crisis."

This is a lie. Trump mentioned he was already talking to China during the SOTU on Feb 4, when Pelosi was preparing to tear up the SOTU on camera. The fact is, China was and is lying about how bad it was, and health experts did not realize how bad it was going to get because of this. The U.S. has been leading, while due to politics, the news media and Democrats are trying to blame the President because it is a election year.

"But scientific understanding is not enough. There has to be someone to pick up the ball and run with it. That option was barred by the pathology of the contemporary socioeconomic order. Market signals were clear: There’s no profit in preventing a future catastrophe. The government could have stepped in, but that’s barred by reigning doctrine: “Government is the problem,”"

Barak Obama was President during Swine Flue, and MERs, and had Senate and House majorities at times during his Presidency. He did not act on this. The SARS outbreaks under Bush were contained in a few months. So the systems Chomsky says neoliberal capitalism tried to destroy were already in place and working in those cases.

No one expected a country where a epidemic started to try to cover it up and give a disease a one to two month head start. The decisions of the Chinese government have nothing to do with domestic U.S. political and business policies.

"The depth of the pathology is revealed clearly by one of the most dramatic — and murderous — failures: the lack of ventilators..."

Once again, Chomsky is selective about doing his homework before he makes his pronouncements, so he can make any accusation and conclusion he wants.

Medtronic responds to NY Times story about failed ventilator contract

"By 2014, there were no ventilators delivered to the government, and the government canceled the contract after Covidien expressed its desire to be free from it, according to the Times report.

"Medtronic claims that the article lacked important information regarding Newport’s contract with the government.

"Medtronic’s statement outlined that after Covidien became aware of Newport’s contract with the government, it learned that the company’s work on the ventilator design had “significant gaps” between the promises made to the government and what the company was capable of delivering, on both the cost of production and product performance fronts. That, according to Medtronic, made Covidien question Newport’s ability to complete the project as agreed.

"Covidien was unable to address the gaps it saw and recognized that it could not deliver the product close to the target cost required by the contract. On top of that, the ventilator did not win FDA approval for use in neonatal populations, which was required in the contract, according to Medtronic’s statement.

The contract failed because Covidien could not deliver what it promised and wanted out, not because the government stopped funding a successful project. That is different than "pathological" refusing to prepare because it costs too much. Also, Since Obama was President in 2014, he did not seek to find a solution to this either. Now compare this to Trump getting GE, Ford and GM to make ventilators.

Back to Chomsky. "The current administration had ample warning about a likely pandemic. In fact, a high-level simulation was run as recently as last October."

That sounds nice, except it is misleading. Running a simulation and having warning of a specific event are not the same thing. For a linguist, Chomsky's arguments confuse connotative and denotative meanings frequently, in addtion to being really selective with facts.

The rest of the article is based on the assumption that corporate america and Reaganomics are to blame, without, and in spite of actual evidence.

This is my longest post on FR, so I'll stop now.

The current administration had ample warning about a likely pandemic. In fact, a high-level simulation was run as recently as last October

Thoroughly misrepresenting the matters at hand for political purposes. You don't even need "ample warning" I will wager everything I own that a black swan type event will occur in the future. It is absolutely, positively guaranteed. We don't know when or what type, but it absolutely will occur. But there is no 'profit' in trying to prepare for it. Politicians and bureaucrats and even most major corporations are plagued with short term thinking, feel goodism, and sychophancy.

And when the black swan does occur, there will have been some "warning" written by some well meaning functionary deep inside the alphabet swamp, and totally ignored by his or her superiors because, as Chomsky himself informs us, there is no profit in paying heed to dire warnings that don't provide immediate "profit" to the people who stand to be rewarded for more short term and simple minded endeavors.

There was a warning that terrorists would attack the WTC. Heck, they attacked it in 1993. Someone wrote a paper suggesting planes could be used to attack vital infrastructure. Someone wrote a book about the risk of a pandemic. These volumes fill up libraries inside the swamp and are always ignored.