JOHN GALT COMES FOR THE CORONA TYRANTS.

Many years ago, The Washington Monthly ran a short article titled something like "The Gold in the Garbage:  What the Left Can Learn from Ayn Rand."  The article is really old, dating to the Carter administration.  [Late Ford administration, actually, and James Fallows to boot -- Ed.]  Neither has the magazine made it available in their digital archives nor did I in a few minutes noodling with search engines locate any references to it.  [A colleague found it -- Ed.] I dig into these memories, though, as a way of introducing a contemporary story.

That old article devoted some time to the behavior of bureaucrats.  The short form of the story (in Randian fashion, it runs nearly a hundred pages) is the episode of the diesel failures on the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, and the issuance of a ukase permitting a steam locomotive to run through the eight mile long Taggart Tunnel.  The steamers were in even worse shape than the diesels, and, predictably, everybody died.  Not, though, before the relevant bureaucrats, whether in government or among the rent-seeking management of Taggart, issued memoranda demonstrating their blamelessness in what happened.

Discussing new rules for risky virus research when they were finalized a few years ago, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci acknowledged, “I don’t think this is going to be foolproof, things are going to slip through.”

As senators sparred yet again with Fauci at a congressional hearing last week, he stated that his agency has followed the regulations for funding “gain of function” research, which can make certain viruses more deadly or transmissible. But he obfuscated how he played a role in creating those same regulations, which officials and some scientists say are too weak.

Ayn Rand at least credited Wesley Mouch's bureaucrats with a modicum of good sense. The original rule was "no steam locomotives in the Taggart Tunnel."  Somebody had to authorize the work-around.

“The guide rails for what can be done were not established by me, they were by a three-year process led by the Office of Science and Technology at the White House,” Fauci said of gain-of-function research at the hearing.

After some high-profile lab accidents, in 2014 the U.S. government paused federal funding of gain-of-function research. In 2017, the research resumed under a new Potential Pandemic Pathogens Control and Oversight (P3CO) Framework, with a review committee established within the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) to oversee federal funding of such research.

But during those three years, with Fauci’s input, the review committee was stripped of its power to veto proposed research, as The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Willman and Madison Muller noted in an in-depth investigation last year. The definition of the research the panel reviews (the definition that Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and other senators keep arguing about with Fauci) was also narrowed to exclude some potentially dangerous viruses.

And thus, dear reader, does the steam locomotive couple to the Taggart Express, while there's no ultimate responsibility for the disaster that follows.