ET – “Vaccination represents a failure to eliminate it in the first place, a failure of policy.”
And an utter failure of leadership.
I’ve never before really seen a situation that called for large scale leadership, but this was it. The public needed to be told: that elimination was desirable and possible; that elimination was to be our objective; how we were going to do it; and then daily national and especially regional update reports, rather like what is now at last happening with vaccination. The public needed to understand the strategy in order to implement it. Instead, we got silence, then procrastination and spin, and finally a massive and utterly confusing U-turn in which a load of rules were very suddenly imposed upon us.
Widespread cooperation cannot be imposed from the top downwards. It has to be evoked from the bottom upwards, because a pyramid is always widest at its base. To do things well, people need to know why they need to be done.