Once, I believed that the world is run by experts who know what to do. I believed that the best answer to a crisis is to listen to the experts and do what they say because they know best and can be trusted to have our interests at heart.

Yeah, I was an idiot. In my defense, I was young. Now I know better. …

The latest example is the government’s handling of monkeypox, which the Biden administration just declared a public-health emergency. As The New York Times recently reported, the US government had 20 million doses of monkeypox vaccine less than a decade ago. (It’s actually a smallpox vaccine called Jynneos, also effective against monkeypox.) But when we needed it, the so-called National Strategic Stockpile had only 2,400 doses on hand, enough to vaccinate just 1,200 people.

How did this happen?