Gamble

Although operation warp speed was successful, at least in comparison with Europe’s efforts, part of its victory came down to luck. If the vaccines that the U.S. scooped up so many doses of, by Moderna and Pfizer, had failed clinical trials, “the U.S. would look extraordinarily stupid right now,” [Scott] Greer[, a health-policy professor at the University of Michigan,] says.
The One Area Where the U.S. COVID-19 Strategy Seems to Be Working

I suppose that it's part of how people tend to see the world, but the conflation of unlucky and stupid (especially in many modern contexts, where "stupid" is a descriptor of moral, rather than intellectual, failing) has struck me as being unfair for some time. Part of me wonders if this viewpoint is a cause of people being loss-averse or an effect of same, but the outcome is the same: the expectation that bad outcomes are always predictable. There is some irony, I think, in the fact that one of the "unfair" things about the world is that so many people believe that the world is in fact, "fair." If one inhabits a world where the difficult events that befall other people are generally of their own making, then it makes sense that the person who gambles and loses has revealed that they are of flawed character, even if the precise nature of the flaw remains unknown.

But there is something else that occurred to me when I read Professor Greer's words; that hint of mistrust that people often have for one another, especially people who work in the corporate world. Had Moderna's and Pfizer's vaccines not turned out to be effective, I suspect that a lot of people would have been prepared to claim that the companies had acted in knowing bad-faith; understanding all along that either the task before them was impossible, or, since the money was theirs either way, not worth the expense of doing well. Bad faith and ill-intent are things that many people pride themselves on being able to suss out in others, despite the fact that people generally are quite poor at it.

In any event, there is always an understanding that people need not really ever deal with uncertainty. The person who gambles and wins is credited with being able to put together all of the clues that pointed to an inevitable outcome. The person who rolls the dice and loses is faulted for not having seen the same.

It's interesting that Operation Warp Speed was deemed a success because the vaccines turned out to work. One wonders if that was actually the criteria when it was proposed. After all, the whole point behind funding research and development into anything is to try out a number of different approaches and ideas and see not only what works, but what doesn't. In that sense, even if the program hadn't directly lead to a single effective intervention, it still would have been useful, in pointing out the blind alleys quickly. It does a disservice to forget that.