A Different Virus, Conspiracy Theories & Autocracy

“The Chinese billionaire [Alibaba co-founder, Jack Ma] tweeted two pictures of the pallets of goods being loaded on to a plane in Shanghai…Earlier this month he said he would give 500,000 testing kits and one million masks to America.” BBC.com, March 16^th. Embarrassing. As our stock market continue to plunge. While China’s economy is in full reverse and remaining in fear of travelers to China reigniting the COVID-19 outbreak that they have otherwise contained, with Italy imploding in terms of medical issues beyond their healthcare’s system’s capacity to handle as their economy spirals below recession levels, it is interesting to ask what lessons we can learn from these collective events. 

First and foremost, our healthcare/crisis preparedness cannot be sacrificed to implement austerity to fund tax cuts for the rich. The Trump administration’s eliminating the pandemic medical group at the CDC and cutting the CDC budget (rather than even keeping up with the cost of living) by 16% are unforgivable. Even as the President claimed ignorance of these elements, he set the tone and the goals for his entire administration; he is 100% responsible for the cuts. The buck stops at his desk.

Second, without transparency, there likely will be panic and a much higher risk of a more rapid, more severe, outbreak. Trump was so busy denying the severity and the risk of the coronavirus, touting existing test kits that would be made available (they never were remotely at the level and timing pledged), that he effectively postponed an earlier and effective federal governmental response. He was not, as White House coronavirus senior team member, Dr. Deborah Brix, suggested at the March 13^th Rose Garden press briefing, the champion of developing the more effective, newer test kits. He did not even know that they were being developed. 

Even as he pledged on March 13^th that Google would provide a national Website to coordinate the fed’s containment strategy, he just plain made that fact up. Google quickly announced that they would have some local California sites but that they had no intention of going national with that capacity.

Donald Trump’s effort to soothe the stock market and offer payroll tax cuts to restore the economy he was planning to be elected for included a litany of lies that probably delayed an effective federal response by a month or more. Instead, he not only condoned but himself fomented fake conspiracy theories – that the Democrats were the culprits by making the virus appear worse than it was, for example – that further delayed not only a viable federal reaction but the willingness of millions of Americans to take the threat seriously and implement precautions. 

Trump even called one state governor a “snake” for taking massive statewide precautions: Washington State’s Jay Inslee after an elder care facility in Kirkland experienced a massive outbreak with lots of fatalities. There are still conspiracy theorists in this country who do not believe the COVID-13 is remotely serious, even as the World Health Organization and finally the federal government declared international and national emergencies. Trump made a very bad situation so very much worse. Now even Trump admits the crisis could extend well into the summer. Not a “hoax,”huh?

So much for us. We’ve watched China’s government apply censorship and political containment with disastrous results. Results that ultimately resulted in a virtual quarantine of most of China. That seemed to work. But had the issue been addressed openly at the outset, China would clearly have had fewer infections and deaths. 

Autocrats are good for quick decisive action without any debate. Occasionally those actions benefit their people. But more frequently they do not. But they always benefit the autocrat. A government led by an autocrat or an autocrat wannabe, hell-bent on controlling the press and all public information, who lives on destabilizing opponents – cutting off genuine debate – with personal vitriol, raw power and the strategic use of conspiracy theories cannot lead in a crisis which cannot be directly controlled by that ruler. Like natural disasters and pandemics.

We’ve seen this before on other viruses – notably the HIV scourge – but what many of us do not know, autocracies often never give up their efforts to contain the medical truth even decades after the rest of the world has settled down. Russia’s HIV problem is still a plague hindered by lingering government denial and rampant conspiracy theories. Trumpian strategy carried decades forward. Another lesson for us? It has always been inconvenient for Russian leaders to admit AIDS even exists; it is a sign of failure and weakness. It has been relegated as a stigma for social outcasts that should be ignored by the good citizens of Russia. Nothing that Vladimir Putin would want to admit; it would taint his people’s perception of who he thinks he should be. Let’s look at one of Russian city, Novosibirsk in Siberia, that reflects this denial. 

Sabra Ayres, writing for the March 16^th Los Angeles Times, tells us the sad truth, one that infects other areas all over Russia today: “The day Svetlana Sumina was diagnosed with HIV, she went home and turned on the television to a program called ‘Inexplicably, but a Fact.’… The host explained that the virus was fake, and the drugs prescribed to treat it would destroy her organs… Sumina became convinced and vowed never to take the medications, a promise she kept for nearly a decade. She and her HIV-positive husband would throw away the drugs the Russian government provided or sell them on the black market… ‘We felt fine and were happy,’ she recalled.

“Then in 2016, Sumina became pregnant and began to wonder whether the doctors were right: ‘What if this was real and I could give it to my child?’… She started taking the drugs and months later gave birth to a healthy girl… Her husband never changed his mind about HIV and soon became gravely ill. He died at 37 less than a year later of complications from AIDS.

“Much of the world has been making progress slowing the spread of HIV, thanks to targeted prevention programs and improved access to testing and treatment that dramatically reduces transmission of the virus. The number of new infections each year dropped roughly 16% over the last decade… Russia has been moving in the opposite direction.

“In 2018, it logged 103,995 new diagnoses, or 71 for every 100,000 people, according to the government. That is one of the highest rates in the world outside sub-Saharan Africa — where the epidemic has caused the greatest devastation — and a 78% increase over 2010. Experts say HIV conspiracy theories — a thing of the past in many other countries — continue to thrive in Russia and significantly hinder efforts to combat the virus… ‘HIV denialism is indeed a dangerous phenomenon since it directly affects a person’s decision to start or abandon antiretroviral therapy,’ said Alexander Goliusov, regional director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia at UNAIDS.

“After years of complicity, the Russian government may finally be starting to recognize the need for spreading accurate information about HIV. In November 2019, the Health Ministry introduced a bill to prosecute those engaged in disinformation campaigns… The problem is especially rampant far from Moscow. Novosibirsk, the Siberian city of 1.7 million where Sumina lives, has one of the worst infection rates in the country…

“On VKontakte, Russia’s most popular social media site, a group called ‘HIV/AIDS: The biggest conspiracy of the 20th century’ has more than 18,000 members… Conspiracy theories about HIV date to the earliest days of the epidemic. In Africa, rumors spread that the virus was a form of population control… When the first case was reported in the then-Soviet Union in 1987, the media there suggested the virus was a biological weapon the U.S. had developed to help it win the Cold War.

“Drugs to suppress the virus went on the market in the mid-1990s, but they did not become widely available in Russia until 2002, when the World Bank stepped in to fight rising infection rates… It didn’t help that infections were concentrated among intravenous drug users, gay men and prostitutes — groups the government did its best to ignore.

“Rather than shoot down conspiracy theories, the government more often than not seemed to promote them. The television program that Sumina watched in 2008 aired on Kremlin state media… The government also put a chill on HIV education efforts with a 2012 law that required nonprofit organizations receiving international funding to register as “foreign agents,” subjecting them to scrutiny and stigma.

“Among the nearly 1.1 million Russians diagnosed with HIV, just 41% are taking antiretroviral medications — among the lowest rates in the world… The treatment gap — combined with increasing annual infection rates — contributes to a rising death toll. In 2018, the Russian government reported that 36,868 HIV patients died, up 15.6% from the previous year.”

Denial, reinforced by falsehoods, alternative explanations (i.e., conspiracy theories) and active suppression of a free press should vaporize quickly in a true democracy, where open debate and opposing viewpoints are freely exchanged. That it took over a month for the COVID-19 truth to come out, even as Trump administration spokespeople continue to provide roiling inaccuracies, suggests that the United States cannot call itself a true democracy. Even the autocratic People’s Republic China accepted their truth much faster than did the US federal government. Today, in Russian cities and towns like Novosibirsk, the requests for HIV tests and treatment are finally soaring. And Russia was hardly spared a COVID-19 outbreak!

            I’m Peter Dekom, and I do not know why anyone believes that we are finally in good hands as the Trump administration appears to accept the COVID-19 outbreak as reality.