You know what this reminds me of? The disaster at Chernobyl. The apparatchiks realized they had an unprecedented disaster on their hands and their only concern was to limit the political damage. They had to realize at some level that the disaster was too big to keep quiet, but everyone involved was too frightened for their own job to say or do anything. The party apparatus was too big and unfocused to make an effective decision. I was listening to Dr. Malone who said he hadn’t had any response to his warning emails, so he called people he actually knew at the CDC. They told him that the warnings he’d issued were “not politically acceptable and they wouldn’t forward them.”
I think that the disaster has already gone from a few people making very bad decisions to lots of people hiding and changing data. The former is probably “forgivable,” or at least politically survivable. The latter borders on criminal murder.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984