COVID, FIVE YEARS ON: How It Started: “15 Days to Slow the Spread.”
Remember when everybody had to stop going to school and start living inside their houses? Newscasters started broadcasting from home and everything? All that weird stuff?
And, oh yeah, they broke the economy like snapping a dry twig over their knee.
These people. https://t.co/d9CsJ55TsD
— Daddy Warpig (@DaddyWarpig) March 17, 2023
How it’s going: Make America Healthy Again:
The mass culling of the labor force of the Department of Health and Human Services began on Tuesday morning. And early indications are that it’s a bloodbath.
Multiple officials who work in the department told The Bulwark that entire offices were being eliminated. Much of the focus appeared to be on the administrative side of things. But not all of it. We were sent an email, for instance, that Vence Bonham, the acting deputy director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, told colleagues this morning that he had been “unexpectedly” placed on administrative leave. He had a 20-year career as a researcher and leader at NIH. Within a few moments, it was gone.
To get a fuller sense of the despair, head over to the NIH’s Reddit forum; or the HHS forum. It’s bleak. That’s what happens, we suppose, when a weeks-old administration decides that it will eliminate 10,000 full-time employees from one of its most critical departments.
Elsewhere in HHS, another email we were sent shows that people put on leave were told they would no longer have access to their buildings starting today. That today happened to be April Fools was treated as a nice little sadistic touch. Was this a ruse?
Of course not. In fact, quite the opposite. Colleagues said they were spending their mornings fielding distraught emails and calls from friends whose lives had been upended, while simultaneously checking their own inbox to see if the ax would drop on them.
This news may not be generating the same level of sympathy it’s receiving at Bill Kristol’s Bulkwark:
Or to put it another way:
