“If
we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”
Donald
J Trump, White House, June 15th
In 1918, as US forces traveled from
their Kansas training base by train and then ship to the European theater, they
carried a deadly flu virus (born in a nearby Kansas hog farm) to the Continent.
The disease exploded, ending WWI as both sides were so decimated with the virus.
As the US forces returned at the end of that year, they carried a mutated
version of that infectious agent with them. All told, somewhere between 650 and
675 thousand Americans died from that pandemic that did not generate “herd
immunity” until 1920. Three years and three waves of infection. The world
experienced an obscene 50-100 hundred million deaths from that flu.
An American perspective, one that was
shoved onto the leaders of a grateful allied Europe saved from the “Bosch,” was
the quickly adopted: President Woodrow Wilson’s demand that the existence of
that pandemic not be discussed in public. Strictly enforced censorship was the
rule, a restriction that was never officially lifted. It was imposed to keep
the enemy from learning of a disease that weakened allied troop strength, and
after the war, to keep military morale on high. Newspapers that published even
the slightest hint of that pandemic were visited by angry FBI agents, apparently
unconcerned that their censorship violated the First Amendment. Despite the
magnitude of the disease – the above is just one of many makeshift hospital
wards created to “treat” flu-ridden US soldiers – the coverup was dramatically
successful.
Even Woodrow Wilson himself
contracted the virus, which led to a mild stroke. He was so debilitated from
the aftereffects of the disease that his mind was no longer able to
concentrate; he was unsteady in his walk. He was so weakened that he died
within a year after his presidency. His precious desire to create a League of
Nations, to create a livable post-WWI economic world on the vanquished Germans
and Austrians, lost their champion. He was not able to articulate and lead the
allies in that direction. There was no League of Nations, and the allies
imposed such a horrific set of vengeful sanctions on Germany that they actually
laid the groundwork for the rise of Adolph Hitler over the following decade.
One country in Western Europe had
remained neutral during WWI: Spain. Their press wrote passionately and in
detail about this flu virus that was a killing Spaniards by the thousands.
Because only the Spanish press wrote about the disease, Americans wrongly
assume that the flu originated in Spain. And so the name “Spanish Flu” was the
new descriptor… it should have been called the “Kansas Flu.” Not having the
same WWI ongoing journalistic analysis within the English-speaking press,
historians buried the pandemic into the back pages of their textbooks. The
renewed interest in the Spanish Flu arose only with the outbreak of COVID-19.
The parallels of governmental
disinformation, a failure to release accurate facts, an inability to design and
guide a consistent, coherent and medically sound federal response to the
pandemics is astoundingly similar, although the reasons for the disinformation
are quite different. Trump’s motivations to hide and distort the bad news and
embellish the good news are centered in his obsession with being reelected.
Woodrow Wilson try to couch his censorship/failure to act decision in terms of
what he perceived to be a military necessity. Wilson probably could have saved the
lives of well over half those Americans who perished from that Spanish Flu if
he were transparent, had issued proper social distancing policies and mandated
the immediate use of masks, which later became pervasive in the second and
third waves of the disease.
Only the federal government is
equipped to deal completely with major global issues. Governors might be
able to struggle to contain infections within their jurisdictions, but there are
no borders between states, so their efforts can only go so far. Having a
president and virtually his entire party purposely misrepresenting the facts,
reopening their local economies too soon and without enforced mandatory safety
measures and even sponsoring indoor mass rallies, the perfect breeding grounds
for COVID-19 under even the lax CDC guidelines, will probably result in the
unnecessary deaths of a hundred, maybe hundreds, of thousand(s) of additional
Americans.
Head in the sand, and fire anyone who interferes
with the obfuscation! “President George W. Bush famously advocated for testing
so we could know if our children is
learning. Trump takes the opposite view: If
sunlight is the best disinfectant, Trump’s administration is festering. The
administration literally shut down the transparency website ‘open.gov’ and
another one called ‘open.whitehouse.gov.’ As The Post’s Juliet Eilperin reported, it removed some 40,000 data sets from data.gov in its
first few months.
“The head-in-sand strategy has become endemic
during the pandemic. Florida fired the
manager of its virus-data website after
she objected to the removal of records showing people had symptoms or positive
tests before the cases were announced. Georgia reorganized its data in ways that made things look better
than they were. Arizona attempted to stop the running of models showing the virus
spreading. And the Trump administration for several weeks blocked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
from issuing its guidelines for reopening.” Dana Milbank writing an OpEd for
the June 16th Washington Post.
It would be one thing if these decisions were
simply a product of incompetence… maybe even just an expression arrogant
denial. But when it is absolutely clear that these a “malice aforethought”
intentional descriptive manipulations of events, causation and hard statistical
numbers, there is an evil shadow cast over these elected officials. Nothing in
any GOP platform suggests that lying about survival-based facts, in a high-risk
environment that could kill hundreds of thousands of us (perhaps more), is a
Party mandate. It certainly prevents the proper containment of the disease. These
elected officials have not only betrayed their sworn duty and responsibility to
their constituents, they have betrayed both their own Party, distorting a
long-standing political structure for personal gain, and their country.
I’m
Peter Dekom, and when distortions of this magnitude become the new normal, it
just might be time to relabel them for what they are: high treason.
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