Whistleblower Nicholas Enrich fills in the details of the stupid in a new excerpt from his book Into The Wood Chipper on The Handbasket, describing a meeting with USAID Chief of Staff Joel Borkert, deputy administrator Ken Jackson, Adam Korzeniewski, the White House liaison to USAID, and others, none of whom had any idea what USAID actually did, and did not even bother to Google and find out before showing up to close the place down.
[At the meeting,] Enrich went on to explain,
“Some of the studies are testing new treatment regimens for drug-resistant tuberculosis. […] Interrupting treatment midstream risks the development of new, even more drug-resistant strains that could be untreatable. For an airborne infectious disease, that is a serious national security risk.”
Adam thought for a moment and then responded, noting that the political appointees at USAID were “not health people.” It would be hard, he surmised, for nonexperts to understand this issue. And so he suggested that we draft a simple, “Barney-style” set of slides to help the political leadership grasp the dangers, referring to the purple dinosaur of children’s television. He recommended that we use the term “Super TB” instead of “drug-resistant TB” to describe the mutations that can develop when treatment is interrupted, because it might be more likely to “catch their attention.”
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