Personally, I believe this to be a fallacy, but it’s hard to explain the real dynamic. It’s something along the lines of “top government officials get the important/accurate information they need when they have a clear view of what they want done, and a determination to do it, regardless of the type of government.” Different types of governments might have different goals, so the type of information that gets to the top might be different in each system. The problem arises when it isn’t clear whether the government really wants to do something (prevent pandemics at all costs), or if they just want to look like they take it seriously for PR reasons. In the latter case, in both systems, people will try and hide things, but the government may in fact be okay with that because they’d rather the matter stay quiet and never intended to act on it.
In this case, I believe CCP leadership was terrified of another SARs-like situation—who wouldn’t be? They were determined to get the next one under control. That doesn’t mean everything was done perfectly everywhere, but I have a feeling it was known they were serious about it. So if there was a problem, employees might be terrified to admit it, but they also knew that if they put in a call to a party insider, someone important would get back to them and get right on it. The system allowed decisive action where that was the case. They’d be too busy dealing with the emergency and would need the information from the informant too badly to punish him or her (presumably someone from the lab). If the lab worker was able to help them solve the issue or at least play along with a cover story, it could even end well for his or her career. If not, maybe there would be severe punishment later, but I don’t think the CCP’s main concern was saving face to the point where they would rather have not heard about the problem and simply crushed the informant. They *wanted* to know about this, and were willing to take it very seriously. While they did go after whistleblower doctors, this seems to have been mainly about avoiding panic and perhaps international embarrassment, because they hoped they could get it under control—they weren’t insulted that someone suggesting that there was a problem, but were responding with extreme and practical measures. Secrecy was not a sign of denial of the problem, but of minimizing outside awareness.
With the U.S., things were more complicated. It’s not that the U.S. government leaders didn’t want to prevent a pandemic, obviously. But they didn’t seem to see it as a serious threat, in part probably because SARs wasn’t in their consciousness in the same way. There just seemed, for several administrations, to be a faith in things continuing as they had, and we didn’t get pandemics anymore. Of course, people who worked for the CDC and such didn’t all think that way, but it sounds like they were never taken very seriously. It wasn’t a risk that got a lot of attention at the top. The last 10 years have seen an increasing obsession with the stock market/economy as the main barometer, with things so efficient and interconnected economically that there was no resilience in the system. Everything about the U.S. leadership class, to me, seemed to be aimed at avoiding disruptions to consumer confidence. And so I get the impression that in planning for an outbreak elsewhere in the world, the goal was less concretely “subdue the pandemic,” and more to manage it by calmly following the procedures of the CDC and WHO regarding pandemics, which had worked with SARs and others. They weren’t thinking of a major pandemic as a real possibility. So the health authorities were generally just complacent—following guidance but not really thinking about whether it was trustworthy. They’d essentially outsourced concern, not thinking strategically. And in that case, you don’t get the information you should have—this sort of disconnect does just as much damage to information quality as the fear in totalitarian regimes. Leadership didn’t want to hear bad news unless it was clear it wasn’t alarmism. Because they weren’t optimizing for “subdue the next pandemic,” not taking it seriously, they didn’t view information as helpful, but as “bad optics” if it got out. In this case, the silence pretty much *was* denial, mixed with some suppression of things that could upset the public.
Personally, I believe this to be a fallacy, but it’s hard to explain the real dynamic. It’s something along the lines of “top government officials get the important/accurate information they need when they have a clear view of what they want done, and a determination to do it, regardless of the type of government.” Different types of governments might have different goals, so the type of information that gets to the top might be different in each system. The problem arises when it isn’t clear whether the government really wants to do something (prevent pandemics at all costs), or if they just want to look like they take it seriously for PR reasons. In the latter case, in both systems, people will try and hide things, but the government may in fact be okay with that because they’d rather the matter stay quiet and never intended to act on it.
In this case, I believe CCP leadership was terrified of another SARs-like situation—who wouldn’t be? They were determined to get the next one under control. That doesn’t mean everything was done perfectly everywhere, but I have a feeling it was known they were serious about it. So if there was a problem, employees might be terrified to admit it, but they also knew that if they put in a call to a party insider, someone important would get back to them and get right on it. The system allowed decisive action where that was the case. They’d be too busy dealing with the emergency and would need the information from the informant too badly to punish him or her (presumably someone from the lab). If the lab worker was able to help them solve the issue or at least play along with a cover story, it could even end well for his or her career. If not, maybe there would be severe punishment later, but I don’t think the CCP’s main concern was saving face to the point where they would rather have not heard about the problem and simply crushed the informant. They *wanted* to know about this, and were willing to take it very seriously. While they did go after whistleblower doctors, this seems to have been mainly about avoiding panic and perhaps international embarrassment, because they hoped they could get it under control—they weren’t insulted that someone suggesting that there was a problem, but were responding with extreme and practical measures. Secrecy was not a sign of denial of the problem, but of minimizing outside awareness.
With the U.S., things were more complicated. It’s not that the U.S. government leaders didn’t want to prevent a pandemic, obviously. But they didn’t seem to see it as a serious threat, in part probably because SARs wasn’t in their consciousness in the same way. There just seemed, for several administrations, to be a faith in things continuing as they had, and we didn’t get pandemics anymore. Of course, people who worked for the CDC and such didn’t all think that way, but it sounds like they were never taken very seriously. It wasn’t a risk that got a lot of attention at the top. The last 10 years have seen an increasing obsession with the stock market/economy as the main barometer, with things so efficient and interconnected economically that there was no resilience in the system. Everything about the U.S. leadership class, to me, seemed to be aimed at avoiding disruptions to consumer confidence. And so I get the impression that in planning for an outbreak elsewhere in the world, the goal was less concretely “subdue the pandemic,” and more to manage it by calmly following the procedures of the CDC and WHO regarding pandemics, which had worked with SARs and others. They weren’t thinking of a major pandemic as a real possibility. So the health authorities were generally just complacent—following guidance but not really thinking about whether it was trustworthy. They’d essentially outsourced concern, not thinking strategically. And in that case, you don’t get the information you should have—this sort of disconnect does just as much damage to information quality as the fear in totalitarian regimes. Leadership didn’t want to hear bad news unless it was clear it wasn’t alarmism. Because they weren’t optimizing for “subdue the next pandemic,” not taking it seriously, they didn’t view information as helpful, but as “bad optics” if it got out. In this case, the silence pretty much *was* denial, mixed with some suppression of things that could upset the public.