I admit I am a history buff, an
affliction that ramped up well after I graduated from college. Having been the
stepson of US Foreign Service Officer, posted in my teenage years to Beirut, my
curiosity began in the Middle East. After law school, as the United States and
particularly the entertainment industry where I plied my craft remained
Eurocentric, I began to explore the changing world in Asia, starting with
Japan, then China… and then I was drawn to the hidden catastrophes of the 20th
century.
One huge event, the outbreak of the co-called
“Spanish Flu” (which actually began on a Kansas farm) killed well over 50
million people globally (some estimates suggest four times that number),
including around 675 thousand Americans, wasn’t written about much, at least in
this country. I wondered why. Reflected in my April 20th 102 Years Later blog, it seems that
President Woodrow Wilson felt that reporting about that pandemic accurately
would give comfort to the enemy (Germany, Austria, Ottoman Empire, etc.) in
WWI. Censorship was established. Our allies followed suit. The lack of recorded
real time information hampered scholars for decades.
The outbreak began in the last year of the
war, 1918, but even as the conflict ended in the fall of 1918, censorship was
never lifted. The flu continued to kill through most of 1920. It took some
digging, cross-checking parallel sources to insure veracity, but it seems that
the failure to provide Americans with real time, accurate information, allowing
different parts of the nation to set their own policies (San Francisco went for
masks, LA for what we call “safe distancing” today; LA did better) and fake
news and mythology to rule without contradiction… just made bad so much worse. Alas,
with COVID-19, history repeats itself.
There is little doubt that senior US
government officials were aware of a rising Asian epidemic in the fall of 2019,
well confirmed from official sources by January of 2020. Since it was news that
could cause markets to plunge, dealing with it accurately might have created a
“panic” risk the Trump administration was unwilling to take. By February, there
was sufficient evidence that this exploding new disease was both extremely
contagious (primarily through person-to-person contact through the respiratory
system) and potentially very deadly.
It seemed inevitably headed to the
United States. Indeed, as the virus migrated from China to Europe (our East
Coast was infected mostly from this European strain), its power to kill and
infect seemed to have mutated to a higher level. Also, by February, virtually
all those experts in the various US government agencies, bureaucrats with
advanced medical and health degrees and decades of experience, knew exactly
what the deadly potential was and had clearly communicated those risks to their
administrative bosses.
The June 2020 edition of Rolling
Stone picks it up from there: “Dr.
Robert Redfield, the director of
the Centers for Disease Control, flanked Donald Trump at
the podium in the White House briefing
room. It was February 29th, the day of the first reported U.S. death from
the coronavirus, and the president fielded an urgent
question: ‘How should Americans prepare for this virus?’ a reporter asked. ‘Should
they go on with their daily lives? Change their routine? What should they do?’
In that moment, America was flying blind into
a pandemic; the virus was on the loose, and nobody quite knew where. The lives
of tens of thousands hinged on the advice about to be delivered by the
president and his top public-health advisers. Trump began: ‘Well, I hope they
don’t change their routine,’ before he trailed off, and, quite
uncharacteristically, called on an expert to finish the response. ‘Bob?’ he
said. “Do you want to answer that?”
“A tall man, with a tan, freckled head, and a
snow-white chinstrap beard, Redfield stepped to the podium. ‘The risk at this
time is low,’ Redfield told the country. ‘The American public needs to go on
with their normal lives.’ … This reassurance came at precisely, and tragically,
the wrong time. With a different answer, much of the human devastation that was
about to unfold in the United States would have been avoidable. Academic
research from Imperial College in London, modeling the U.S. response, estimates
that up to 90 percent of COVID-19 deaths
could have been prevented had the U.S. moved to shut down by March 2nd.
Instead, administration leaders dragged their feet for another two weeks, as
the virus continued a silent, exponential assault. By early May, more than
75,000 Americans were dead. [The toll is now heading rapidly to 90,000 now.]
“Even as he spoke, Redfield knew the country
should be taking a different course. The Coronavirus Task Force had resolved to
present the president with a plan for mitigation efforts, like school and
business closures, on February 24th, but reportedly reversed course after Trump
exploded about the economic fallout. Instead, the CDC director continued
touting ‘aggressive containment’ to Congress on February 27th. Experts
tell Rolling Stone that ship had sailed when the virus made
the leap from infected travelers into the general public. ‘If you’ve got a
community spreading respiratory virus, it’s not going to be containable,’ says
Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for
Health Security. ‘You have to shift to mitigation right away.’…
“The government leaders who failed to safeguard the nation are
CDC Director Redfield; FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn; Health and Human Services
Secretary Alex Azar; and of course, President Trump. Together, these men had
the power to change the direction of this pandemic, to lessen its impact on the
economy, and constrain the death toll from COVID-19. Each failed, in a series
of errors and mismanagement that grew into a singular catastrophe — or as Jared
Kushner described it on Fox & Friends, ‘a great success story.’…
“The front-line agency built to
respond to a pandemic, the CDC, was placed in unreliable hands. Dr. Robert
Redfield is a right-wing darling with a checkered scientific past. His 2018
nomination was a triumph for the Christian right, a coup in particular for
evangelical activists Shepherd and Anita Smith, who have been instrumental in
driving a global AIDS strategy centered on abstinence.
“Redfield’s tight-knit relationship with the
Smiths goes back at least three decades, beginning when Shepherd Smith
recruited him to join the board of his religious nonprofit, Americans for a
Sound AIDS/HIV Policy (ASAP). The Smiths made their views plain in the 1990
book Christians in the Age of AIDS, which argued HIV
infection resulted from ‘people’s sinfulness,’ and described AIDS as a
consequence for those who ‘violate God’s laws.’ Redfield, a devout Catholic who
was then a prominent HIV researcher in the Army, wrote the introduction,
calling for the rejection of ‘false prophets who preach the quick-fix
strategies of condoms and free needles.’…
“Yet the failure
to activate the private sector was the key difference between the U.S. response
to the coronavirus and that of South Korea, which first detected the virus in
its country at the same time the U.S. did. ‘Instead of going through regulatory
hijinks,’ says Milton, the University of Maryland virologist, South Korea ‘turned
their biomedical industry loose, and they started producing lots of tests right
away.’ With this massive rollout — including drive-through testing clinics for
patients with mild symptoms — South Korea got in front of its outbreak. At the
beginning of May, South Korea had recorded fewer than 11,000 cases and 250
COVID-19 deaths. The United States, Milton insists, missed the window to
activate its biomedical might to achieve the same result. ‘We have that
capability,’ he says. ‘We could have done that.’…
“Rick Bright
directed HHS’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority until his
ouster in April. In a whistleblower complaint, he reveals he warned Azar on
January 23rd that the virus could already be spreading in the U.S. but ‘we just
don’t have the tests to know one way or the other.’ Bright accuses HHS
leadership of ‘a lax and dismissive attitude’ toward the coronavirus, and
singles out Azar for ‘downplaying this catastrophic threat.’…
“The
mismanagement cost lives. With adequate testing from the beginning, says Dr.
Howard Forman, a Yale professor of public-health policy, ‘we would have been
able to stop the spread of this virus in its tracks the way that many other nations
have.’ Instead, says Sen. [Patty] Murray [Dem-WA], the administration’s
response was ‘wait until it’s too late, and then try and contain one of the
most aggressive viruses that we’ve ever seen.’”
Still the
pressure to reopen everywhere was mounting, even in South Korea, and the signs
of the mid-May resurgence of the virus in that “success story” nation should
serve as a warning to us all: “The city [Seoul] had begun breathing easy, life once more pulsating in
its streets. Museums and art galleries reopened, gyms welcomed back regulars,
baseball and soccer leagues kicked off. Traffic choked thoroughfares, and
schools readied to greet students for the first time in months.
“For 18 days in a row, this
metropolis of nearly 10 million reported zero cases of community transmissions
of the novel coronavirus. It seemed, even in these uncertain times, that danger
had receded in a nation praised for its handling of the pandemic… Then, a
29-year-old man who’d gone clubbing over a holiday weekend came down with COVID-19,
shattering the tenuous sense of normality and setting off a frenzied search for
thousands who’d been in the clubs and bars he visited.
“As of Tuesday [5/12], more than 100
people had tested positive for the virus linked to a cluster stemming from the
popular nightlife district of Itaewon. Co-workers and family members of
clubgoers have tested positive, including an 84-year-old woman who’d dined with
a grandson. The city recoiled: More than 2,000 establishments were ordered to
shut down, office buildings where the infected worked were closed, and start
dates for schools were, once again, pushed back.
“The latest outbreak unleashed a
torrent of anger against the young revelers and ignited debates over personal
responsibility and blame. Recriminations have led to life-and-death questions
that will beset societies across the world as governments weigh the risks of
when and how to ease social distancing requirements. What do we owe our
neighbors at a time when individual pleasures risk unraveling the hard-earned
collective reprieve from the virus’ terror? And when the virus slips through
the cracks of relaxed vigilance, whom do we hold to account, and how?” Los
Angeles Times, May 13th.
As protestors mount their reopening
campaigns on various capitol building steps around the United States, asserting
non-existent constitutional rights, they have the cameras and the stage all to
themselves. Those who believe in containing the virus through prudent
distancing policies, by definition, are powerless to mount the counter-protests
that reflect what polls tell us are the sentiments of the majority of
Americans.
You also get inane exchanges, driven
by ignorance and denial, like this from a Senate hearing on May 12th,
where NIH pandemic maven, Dr. Anthony Fauci, gave dire warnings against
reopening too much too soon: “Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who tested
positive for coronavirus in March, challenged Fauci and other public health
experts Tuesday [5/12], arguing that the virus has been on a ‘relatively benign
course’ outside of high infection rates in New England. He warned that there
would be an even greater damage to the country if schools did not re-open in
the fall.
“‘As much as I respect you, Dr.
Fauci, I don't think you're the end-all,’ Paul said. ‘I don't think you're the
one person that gets to make a decision. We can listen to your advice, but
there are people on the other side saying there's not going to be a surge and
that we can safely open the economy. And the facts will bear this out.’”
CNN.com, May 12th. Kentucky is one of those smaller states now
experiencing a CV-19 surge. Maybe Rand Paul should visit some of those
make-shift morgues, like the one in New York City pictured above. We have run
out of places to put the bodies!
Oh, and it doesn’t help that the
President continues to urge Americans to get back to work, move out into public
spaces, and ignore government regulations and guidelines to the contrary.
Experts keep saying if we do not apply prudence to our efforts to restart the
economy, there will be a devastating second wave. But what they are saying
privately is that the second wave has already begun. Too many state and federal
agencies are trying to figure out how to contain, not the virus, but the
statistics showing rising CV-19-releated infection and death rates from
premature efforts to reopen the economy. Sound familiar?
I’m
Peter Dekom, and in my search through history, particularly the Spanish Flu, it
seems that second waves are almost always much worse than the initial spate of
infections and deaths.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment