Trump Has No Fixer To Make COVID-19 Go Away
He’s used to simply hiring people who make his problems disappear. That won’t work with a global pandemic.
The White House/Flickr
Donald Trump said something Friday that should have ended his re-election prospects the moment it left his mouth:
“I feel about vaccines like I feel about tests. This is going to go away without a vaccine, it’s gonna go away, and we’re not going to see it again, hopefully.”
Of course, viruses don’t just “go away” regardless of the amount of propaganda or wishful thinking you throw at them. His theory, however, is telling. Trump’s strategy from the beginning of this crisis has been to minimize the threat and wish it away. His refusal to initiate a comprehensive federal testing-and-contact-tracing program has as much to do with his refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of the pandemic as it does with the Republican laissez-faire approach to public policy.
Still, why would Trump say this? The usual conservative response to a public crisis is that it doesn’t really exist and the free market will magically fix it, anyway. It’s not that the problem will disappear on its own, which is a small child’s response to challenges.
The simple answer is that, ever since he was a young man, Trump has never had to confront any problem that somebody else didn’t just make disappear. Trump has always used an army of attorneys, accountants and corrupted officials to make his problems go away—whether it was with women, creditors, contractors, or law enforcement. Usually, he would have a main consligiere to take on the heaviest burdens, from the detestable Roy Cohn to Michael Cohen to Roger Stone to Rudy Giuliani and, most recently, his own personal Attorney General William Barr. Now that he is president, Trump views the entire federal government as his personal fiefdom to clean up his messes and cover for his open corruption.
But a virus is immune to the protections to which Trump has become accustomed. It does what it does, and Trump finds himself helpless and flummoxed.
There has never been a crisis so big in Trump’s life that he hasn’t been able to use people much more talented and intelligent than himself to make it go away quietly and efficiently. So in Trump’s experience, that’s what problems do: They go away. He has “good genes”; he surrounds himself with “the best people”—willing to cross any moral line for him and bad things just … disappear. All he has to do in the meantime is manage the press with a con man’s combination of razzle dazzle and intimidation. Actual work and accountability are for suckers and lesser people.
Casinos going bankrupt? Take the money and have the accountants stiff the investors. Affairs with porn stars while your wife was pregnant? Have your fixer pay them off. Real estate taxes a problem? Have some employees bribe the assessors. FBI Director threatening to expose your collusion with a hostile foreign power? Fire him by way of a patsy. Tough re-election campaign? Have your lawyer threaten a foreign country if they don’t make up a scandal about your opponent. And so on.
Remarkably, the first three years of Trump’s presidency were relatively smooth sailing outside of self-inflicted crimes and mishaps. His actual approach to life was never fully tested in the Oval Office. Now, with the first real challenge of his presidency, he is utterly adrift.
There is no amount of misdirection or intimidation he can use to make the press stories about all the deaths and economic destruction go away. There is no accountant, lawyer, or public official who can use clever paperwork to make the virus disappear. Solving this problem would require the sort of dedicated attention, tough choices, and hard work that Donald Trump has been able to spend his entire life successfully avoiding while thinking himself clever for doing so.
Trump merely asserts that coronavirus will just fix itself. If you think about it, that actually makes some sense, because every other problem in his Trump’s life has.
Tump’s
Order to Paint the Border Wall Black Could Cost $500 Million or More: Report
By Matt Stieb
Last May, President Trump reportedly told administration officials
that he wanted the metal slats that make up new sections of the border wall to
be painted “flat black” so that they would absorb heat in the summer and become
impossible to climb. Never mind that undocumented border crossings tend to decline in the summer due to the oppressive
southwestern heat, and officials warned him of the exceptional cost of such a
touch: “Once you paint it, you always have to paint it,” one administration
official told the Washington Post.
Other far-fetched and cruel ideas
that Trump reportedly proposed, like shooting migrants
in the legs and building a moat, have fallen by the wayside, but the president
still wants to paint the border wall black. According to a new report from the Washington Post, in a meeting in April — a
month in which almost 60,000 Americans died in the
coronavirus pandemic — Trump told senior adviser Jared Kushner to seek out
estimates for the paint job. The Post also obtained a copy of the
estimates that federal contractors drew up, showing costs ranging from $500
million for two coats of acrylic paint to over $3 billion for “powder coating.”
Either cost would be an egregious
waste of taxpayer dollars, not to mention the wall budget. The White House has
allocated $15 billion for the border wall, two-thirds of which comes from the
Defense Department budget for construction; if the administration considers
something closer to the high-end estimate, that could eat up as much as a fifth
of the total funds obtained for the barrier, even though the project is less
than half finished. Though the president hopes to build 500 miles of the wall
by early next year, only 175 new miles have been built throughout his entire
administration.
One official with knowledge of the
plans told the Post that the administration doesn’t have
a policy for the obvious challenge of painting the slats already in place on
the Mexican side of the wall. And a materials engineer, Rick Duncan, who spoke
with the paper said that Trump’s black wall would only increase the steel
barrier’s ability to retain heat by less than 10 percent. “There’s no technical
reason to paint it to make it hotter,” Duncan said, adding that the intense sun
on the border would cause the paint to lose its ability to absorb heat. He
estimated that sections in the Sonoran desert would need to be repainted every
ten years, adding to the substantial cost of a project that has no use aside
from appeasing the president, who may have thought of the idea because one of
his friends touched a hot surface once:
TRUMP KNEW ABOUT THE PANDEMIC BUT SAW
IT ONLY AS ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY TO HAND WALL STREET AND THE RICH TRILLIONS IN
WELFARE SOCIALISM.
“So, in a sense,
everything was set to go. As you know, just a week before the inauguration in 2017,
the Obama people who had been doing this planning got together with the
incoming Trump people, their counterparts, and conducted this major simulation that
demonstrated the weaknesses that still existed. And then, of course, president
Trump proceeded to disband, dismantle, or defund most of the networks that had
been set up in the previous two administrations and to ignore all of the
reports and warnings that were produced in his administration, as well.”
Why Humanity Will Probably Botch the Next Pandemic, Too
We won’t learn much
from this, Mike Davis fears. Photo: John Moore/Getty Images
Mike Davis tried to
warn us. Fifteen years ago, America’s favorite Marxist truck driver turned MacArthur Fellow published The Monster At Our Door:
The Global Threat of Avian Flu. In it, Davis argued
that a global pandemic was not merely imminent but late: When you pack tens of
millions of human beings into unprecedentedly dense, often unsanitary cities —
then surround those cities with factory farms teeming with historically vast
concentrations of pigs and chickens — you get a more fertile breeding ground
for emergent disease than any our species has ever seen. Add in southern
China’s diverse wildlife population, wet markets, and lung-impairing air
pollution — and a global economic system that tosses millions of humans across
continents on a daily basis — and the mystery wasn’t whether a novel virus
would emerge in China and then take the world by storm but why one hadn’t already done so.
Davis implored humanity to capitalize on its good fortune while it still could.
A lethal strain of avian flu had already become endemic in East Asian birdlife.
But there was still time to build up the emaciated health-care systems of
the developing world, subordinate competitive nationalisms to global
cooperation on public health, scale back hazardous agribusiness practices, and
wrest control of antiviral and vaccine production from Big Pharma’s grubby
hands.
None of that
happened, of course. And in 2020, Davis’s prophesied “monster” (or, at least,
one its relatives) finally ran through our door, ransacked our house, and killed many of our loved ones.
Intelligencer spoke with Davis this week about what must be done to combat the
COVID-19 pandemic and all the other monsters still to come. Maybe this time,
we’ll listen (or, failing that, maybe a few of us will check out his new book, Set the Night on Fire:
L.A. in the Sixties, which has nothing to do with
coronaviruses but is surely worth reading anyway).
As one of the small
minority of humans who’d been anticipating a global pandemic for decades, has
anything surprised you about the one we actually got or America’s response to
it thus far?
The virus has some
very unusual qualities. But apart from that, it fits perfectly into the
template that’s been created over the last generation. In 2005, the Bush
administration issued a national strategy for pandemic influenza. The World
Health Organization (WHO), that same year, updated its rules for how all
member-governments are to respond to a pandemic. We’ve been preparing for this
for longer than my teenage children have been alive. And the Obama
administration, particularly after it was confronted with Ebola, put a lot more
investment into pandemic prevention and expanded international surveillance.
So, in a sense,
everything was set to go. As you know, just a week before the inauguration in
2017, the Obama people who had been doing this planning got together with the
incoming Trump people, their counterparts, and conducted this major simulation that demonstrated the weaknesses that still existed. And
then, of course, president Trump proceeded to disband, dismantle, or defund
most of the networks that had been set up in the previous two administrations
and to ignore all of the reports and warnings that were produced in his
administration, as well.
Given the resilient
weaknesses that Obama’s team identified and the manifold deficiencies in
America’s systems of public health and medical provision, how confident are you
that a Democratic administration could have averted a catastrophe like this
one?
Most epidemiologists
believe that we live in an age of pandemics. Of course, avian flu, including
its new variety, the H7 variety, is just as dangerous as coronavirus. And
according to the WHO, an outbreak is imminent. But the difference in the Obama
administration would have been, first of all, we would have had a better
early-warning system. Just last year, Trump defunded a CDC-related program that
monitors viruses present in wild and domestic animals that could possibly cross
over to humans. That program was allied with the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
which is the world’s leading expert in animal-to-human coronaviruses.
So that would have
been in place. And if Obama had received the warnings about critical shortages
in personal protective gear and ventilators that Trump had, and if he had
stocked the strategic stockpile, then I think our experience of this may have
been closer to Germany’s. And we may have avoided a catastrophic economic
shutdown or at least gotten by with a much shorter one.
Having said all that,
in this country, the pandemic has taken root in a medical environment
characterized by continuous disinvestment, particularly at the county and state
levels. There are 60,000 fewer employees in public-health departments than
there were before 2008. So many [Great Recession–era] cutbacks haven’t been
undone. Meanwhile, since the election of Ronald Reagan, we’ve been converting
hospitals into financial systems running on just-in-time inventory and keeping
as few beds as possible.
Nursing homes are a
similar story. They’ve become a big industry dominated by private-equity firms,
which extract the highest profits they can out of the lowest costs. And from
the very beginning of the outbreak at the Life Care Center in Kirkland,
Washington, it was clear that nursing homes were going to turn into mortuaries. James Straub, who’s the union representative for that nursing
home, was telling me in March, “Look, the public-health people are not on top
of this.” You know, everybody thinks Washington is the most progressive state
in the world. But not on these issues. The homes are very poorly regulated. And
when the public-health officials went to collect the first bodies, they didn’t
bother to interview the nursing-home workers. These workers had no protective
gear at all. They had minimal to no training in infection control. The
officials didn’t bother to interview them. These nursing-assistant jobs pay $10
an hour. The only way people can make ends meet is to moonlight. So a large
minority of people who work in nursing homes also work at least part time in
another nursing home. So you have this transmission belt that links all
the nursing homes together in a given region. James told me in March, watch
what happens in nursing homes — thousands of people are going to die. Well,
12,000 have died in them by the latest count (and that’s absolutely an
undercount).
The criminal
abdication of federal responsibility is implicated in this. From the very
beginning, they should have known that thousands of people were going to die in
these nursing homes. There should have been federal rescue efforts.
The coronavirus
crisis has triggered a lot of critical discussion about the hazards posed by
East Asian “wet markets” and the consumption of “bushmeat” in West Africa. Your book
suggests that while these are indeed risky practices, they are also the
products of broader pathologies in global capitalism. What are those
pathologies, and how must we redress them if we wish to start feeding ourselves
in a manner that isn’t so conducive to pandemic disease?
I don’t think there’s
much disagreement that the transmission of wild-animal diseases to humans has
greatly accelerated. And it’s being accelerated by three things. One is the
clearance of tropical forests for livestock grazing. The second is the
multinational logging companies, and the third has been the problem of high
food prices that has driven people away from traditional sources of protein and
towards consuming — in ever-increasing numbers — the flesh of wild species.
When I wrote the book
in 2005, the study that really kind of knocked
my socks off was an article that showed the interrelationship between factory
fleets and overfishing in the Gulf of Guinea. Traditionally, coastal West
Africans have relied on fish protein. Every little village strung out on the
coast was a fishing village, and they were the ones feeding the broader
population. But some time in the 1970s or 1980s, factory fishing fleets came into
the Gulf of Guinea and basically vacuumed out half the fish biomass. And a lot
of it went for animal feed, not human consumption.
This was disastrous
for coastal fishermen. And it raised fish prices in the cities. At the same
time, other multinationals were conducting immense logging operations in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, and Cameroon. And their work crews
required, of course, high-protein, high-calorie diets to perform hard labor. So
they started living off of so-called bushmeat. It’s been shown that no less
than 70 mammal, reptile, and bird species entered the diet. Well, since this
coincided with rising prices of fish protein, the city markets started
attracting bushmeat. And what had started off as just little, ancillary
operations for logging companies soon became a kind of big business in itself.
So people were consuming all kinds of meat that was basically unfamiliar and
only entered the diet because it was so cheap. So that’s the political
ecology that sponsored the emergence of HIV and Ebola.
There are obviously
other factors. The prominence of exotic wild animals, including bats, in the
diets of South China and in Chinese traditional medicine. The so-called “wet
markets” where they’re sold. That’s obviously a huge problem. But it’s a much
easier one to deal with than the political ecology that I’ve sketched out for
West Africa. Similarly, the Amazon is always a possible source of emergence.
Which makes opposing rainforest destruction something other than just
tree-hugging. The rainforest isolates us from wild animals that originate
epidemic disease.
And then there’s
obviously the industrialization of poultry and livestock production. Enormous
poultry plants were directly implicated in the spread of avian flu in China and
Southeast Asia. And that’s a problem everywhere. There’s also the overuse of
antibiotics in these huge livestock concentrations. I remember once being in
Western Utah. And the horizon was just flattened sagebrush, but this awful
smell hung over it. And I got closer, and it was this infamous plant in
Western Utah that processes a hundred thousand pigs a year. And of course,
larger poultry plants process as many as a million.
A final factor is
poverty itself. Malnutrition, the absence of clean water, fecal contamination
of household environments, coexisting infections (24 million people in
sub-Saharan Africa have HIV) — all this combines to create a separate
immunological humanity. In the United States and Western Europe, maybe 20 or 25
percent of the population has immune systems that are compromised, simply by
age or some preexisting respiratory condition, diabetes, whatever. But if you
go to parts of Africa or the slums of the world, that’s kind of turned upside
down. You might find 70 percent of the population whose immune systems are
greatly compromised.
You’ve written about
the horrific consequences that the 1918 “Spanish flu” had for the people of
India and how their suffering has been obscured in the West’s historical memory
of that pandemic. What does India’s experience in 1918 tell us about the perils
facing the developing world in 2020 and what must be done to mitigate those
perils?
Most histories of the
Spanish flu, including John Barry’s [The
Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History], concentrate
almost entirely on the United States, Western Europe, and then a few
sensational examples in the Pacific. But somewhere between 60 percent and
two-thirds of the people who died, died in Western India. This was a situation
where the British requisitioned grain from India on a huge scale to support
their war effort. And this requisition coincided with a drought. Food prices
started to go sky-high, and a famine ensued. So when the Spanish flu hit
Western India, it encountered a population that was gravely malnourished, some
on the verge of starvation. And people died like flies.
That’s a warning to
us today. Right now, if you’re in Kenya, the cartons of medical supplies that
used to come stamped with “To the people of Kenya, from the people of the United
States,” now say, “To the people of Kenya, from the people of China.” Trump has
made “America first” mean Africa last or the global poor last. There’s an
enormous need to scale up what is now a flagging effort, mainly from the
European countries, to address the pandemic in Africa. In some countries, what
is even more important than medical aid is debt relief. I think there are
about 30 African countries that spend a larger part of their budgets on paying
off loans they contracted in the 1980s and 1990s than they do on their public
health systems. In so many countries, we simply have no idea what’s
happening because there’s so few test kits.
Finally, the World
Health Organization, whose role is to be the coordinator of combined
international efforts, has been completely sidelined. From the very beginning,
nobody did what they had promised to do. The most extraordinary case is
actually in Europe. The European Union has a long-standing convention and
emergency bureau to coordinate joint action during disasters, including
cross-border disease. The Italians begged for the implementation of this, which
would have mandated the sharing of national stockpiles of medical equipment and
the sending of doctors. It was all supposed to operate through this disaster emergency
body that was created. And every member of the E.U. — without exception —
refused. And that shadows the future of the E.U. It would not be at all
surprising if Italy decides in the next year to leave like Britain did.
Your book indicts the
Chinese government’s handling of various influenza outbreaks in the early years
of this century. Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have accused the Chinese
government of suppressing information about the novel coronavirus. Do you think
the Xi Jinping government deserves as much blame for this crisis as American
political leaders have ascribed to it?
Initially, I joined
the chorus of people condemning China. And it’s certainly the case that within
Wuhan and Hubai, there was great repression, even violence against the whistleblowers
and an effort to cover up the extent of the outbreak, including possibly
covering it up from Beijing. So that’s all true. But as far as the allegation
that Beijing did not inform the international community in a timely manner,
this seems to be an entirely different story. China detected the first unusual
pneumonia outbreaks at the beginning of December. They announced that an
unknown virus was responsible in a little more than a week. They sequenced the
whole genome of the virus. The WHO was informed about this almost immediately.
Trump doesn’t seem to understand the number of Americans who work for the WHO
and who were in almost instant contact.
The “smoking gun”
that’s usually brought in evidence against the Chinese was a false social-media
message that denied the existence of human-to-human spread. But the Chinese
government immediately followed that with an official statement that said yes,
there is human-to-human spread. So I’m very confused about that. I don’t see
the evidence that the Chinese scientific community or the WHO covered that up.
The problem, in January through early February was that nobody seemed to
believe that this could be as bad as it was. Fauci, in the beginning, was saying this posed a very low risk
to the United States.
But by playing the
“yellow fear,” Trump is destroying the alliance — the medical and scientific
alliance — that is absolutely most important, and that’s the cooperation
between the scientific communities of the United States and China. That’s where
most of the cutting-edge research is going to be done. And the research
community has probably broken all records for cooperation since the pandemic
began. People are publishing and providing information that ordinarily would be
proprietary. That’s been a silver lining in all of this.
Speaking of
proprietary research, why do you believe that the way we fund pharmaceutical
development — principally, through the granting of patent monopolies to
private-sector firms — is inadequate to the needs of pandemic prevention and
mitigation?
The reasons for this
are pointed out very eloquently in a report from Trump’s own Council of
Economic Advisers. The report pointed out that a drug company has no incentive
to manufacture something that will only be used once, when it could invest in
other areas that offer constant profits over many years, such as medication for
heart disease or sexual dysfunction in elderly males like myself.
If you look at the
big picture of how vaccines are developed, most of the key research that gets
capitalized for private profit is actually produced on the public’s dime.
Either in public universities, or private universities where the research is
federally funded; maybe some of the faculty will spin off a little biotech
company with an intense emphasis on research and development. Meanwhile, Big
Pharma are basically a bunch of rent collectors who spend much more money on
advertising than they do on R&D. On the whole, they’re interested in
patents. And this became a huge battle during the second avian-flu outbreak in
2003, 2004, because there’s an antiviral that’s been very successful in
preventing avian-flu cases from becoming critical called Tamiflu. And India
wanted to manufacture it generically. So the Indian government asked the World
Health Organization to support them. This was when it looked like the avian-flu
outbreak might become pandemic in a matter of weeks.
And the WHO — which
is forced to seek 80 percent of its budget from philanthropic organizations
like the Gates Foundation, from the most powerful states but also from
pharmaceutical companies — decided not to endorse this position. And in
exchange for keeping its mouth shut about generic production, Big Pharma
provided the WHO with a stockpile of Tamilfu large enough to last about two or
three weeks.
Four of the big
pharmaceutical companies are doing vaccines at the moment. But the real
research isn’t being done by them. It’s being done by small and
medium-size firms whose work the big companies will then buy. So Big Pharma is
basically a rent-collection agency based on holding patents and the exercise of
immense political lobbying. It is unnecessary in this whole chain of innovation
and production. I much admire Elizabeth Warren for having submitted a bill for the public production of prescription drugs. I think that’s what progressive in the U.S. should demand. I
don’t mean nationalization, because the smaller and medium-sized companies that
do provide and develop new drugs should be kept in the loop. But there’s no
reason for Big Pharma anymore. It’s become a fetter on the translation of a
genuine revolution in biotechnology into public health in this country and
around the world.
As you argued in
2005, a global pandemic of some kind was all but inevitable. The novel
coronavirus is a terrible scourge. But it is much less lethal than some of the
avian-influenza strains that have come within a few mutations of achieving
human-to-human transmissibility. Given this, one might see a silver lining in
the fact that the first major pandemic of the 21st century poses relatively little
risk to children. We will still
pay a horrific toll for our governments’ myopia and negligence. But at least we
will emerge from this having finally learned our lesson. And when the next,
potentially more lethal bug hops the species barrier, we will be prepared. Do
you find solace in such reasoning?
Let me start with an
analogy. Let’s take the case of wildfires and earthquakes, which I write about a lot, at least insofar as they
affect California. In both those cases, the learning curve is either flat or
negative. There may be some slight reform that comes out of it. But at the end
of the day, we repeat the same bad policies. We keep doing the same things that
made people vulnerable to the previous fire or to the previous earthquake. And
that’s because of the huge inertia built into the system. Right now, in San Diego
County where I live, we’ve had two of the largest wildfires of the 21st
century. And there’s 100,000 homes in development in high- or
critical-fire-risk areas.
The last great
earthquake of the 1990s led to only minor improvements in structural safety. So
there are these inertial interests that oppose lesson learning and reform on a
serious scale. Now, the record with epidemic disease is mixed. But go back to
SARS. SARS initially created a greater scare than the avian flu had. One guy
got it at an airport hotel. Everyone he came in contact with got infected, and
within 24 hours this thing had appeared in five different countries. So there
was research done. There were two candidate vaccines developed for SARS. But
there was no money to take them any further. And so these vaccines sat in
refrigerators. There was no profit to be had from them. Those vaccines might
confer cross-immunity to the current coronavirus. But we’ll never know.
And that’s what tends
to happen: When world trade or the lives of people in rich countries is
threatened, you see this huge flurry of activity. But once the threat declines,
the money or funding disappears.
We’ve disinvested in
public health. The private sector has been unable to develop the lifeline
medicines that we need. In terms of international coordination, I don’t think
the WHO is going to exist in the present form a year from now, not after the withdrawal of American support.
During the Cold War,
both the United States and the Soviet Union put a lot of effort into world
public health as part of their respective efforts to influence nonaligned
countries (ex-colonial countries). So the U.S. launched its famous malaria
campaign, and the Soviet Union, in 1958, launched the campaign that eventually
rendered smallpox extinct. After the Cold War ended, there was no geopolitical
or foreign-policy reason to pay that much attention to public health in the poorer
part of the world. Now who’s going to rebuild an international infrastructure
to raise the capacities of poorer countries to detect and respond to diseases?
To ensure that the stockpiles are adequate to meet the challenge anywhere on
the globe? I don’t see anybody doing that.
The United States has
abdicated. China is very equivocal about this. Although they are now the first
responder in 18 or 20 countries, they’ve been very equivocal about investment.
They never put that much into the World Health Organization. They never stepped
into America’s shoes. Will they now? That’s totally unclear. Because
nationalism is everywhere. And it’s defeated international public-health
cooperation in this outbreak. So we’re going to be left with a research
community that is more spirited and international and willing to cooperate with
each other than at any time in history, but with governments that have turned
their backs on all the post-World War II institutions [of global cooperation].
Except for the World Bank and IMF, of course. And it’s the World Bank whose
structural-adjustment programs destroyed health systems throughout the debtor
world in the 1980s and 1990s.
So out of this mist,
can you find a silver lining? Is there any indication that the destruction of
tropical rainforests will stop? That we will stop eating the beef that destroys
the forests that protect us from emergent viruses? That we will end factory
farming on its present scale? That we will invest a trillion dollars to provide
potable water and sanitation to everybody on Earth?
No, of course not.
None of this will happen.
The voices demanding
for it to happen will grow louder. But I haven’t seen a lot of international
solidarity in this country, even amongst the left. You know, I’m a Sanders
supporter, 110%. But I can’t recall him ever talking about issues of
international inequality, health, debt, or any of it. The left, in a way, is
following its own version of “America first.” And the philanthropic and
religious organizations that have played a vital role can’t deal with the scale
of the challenges ahead. They represent an old form of philanthropic
internationalism that’s everywhere on the wane and everywhere being defunded.
So I guess we’ll have to rely on Bill Gates being Superman and going into a phone
booth, putting on his cape, and saving the health of 8 billion people.
The silver linings
are all in terms of the possibilities that exist to accelerate this biotech
revolution. And the prospects for that are incredible. But I can’t see any way
they get translated into public health for everybody. I mean, the battles that
will occur over the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine are going to be —
suffice to say, if there is a vaccine, the White House is not going to be
pushing for it to be distributed equally to all countries in need
Top aide told Trump in January coronavirus
would be his 'largest national security crisis': Report
| April 29, 2020 01:54 PM
National security
adviser Robert O'Brien sounded an early alarm when he told President Trump in
January that the coronavirus would be “the
largest national security crisis" of his presidency.
O'Brien advised Trump
at the time to take quick action by restricting travel from China and sought to
convince his European counterpart to do likewise, according to a new Wall
Street Journal report.
White House officials
were told to view O'Brien's top aide, Matthew Pottinger, a former Marine
and Wall Street Journal reporter who covered the SARS outbreak
in China and who expressed concern about the virus early on, as the voice of
the National Security Council on issues relating to COVID-19.
Fearing he could spread
the virus, Pottinger even wore a mask in front of Trump
before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance to do so.
O'Brien, who joined the
White House coronavirus task force in late January, also pressed for the
addition of Dr. Deborah Birx to the response effort.
Birx joined as a
coordinator on Feb. 26 as Vice President Mike Pence was appointed to lead the
group.
Like Birx, O'Brien
joined the White House from the State Department, where he was the
administration’s special envoy for hostage affairs.
At the Security
Council, he advised that the White House should maintain focus on competition
with China, a view shared by Trump's Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy
Peter Navarro, who has accused China of
"profiteering" during the pandemic.
Trump May Already Be Discrediting a
COVID-19 Vaccination
He’s systematically destroying Americans’ last reserves
of trust in government.
May 2, 2020
Hopes are rapidly rising for a COVID-19 vaccine. The World
Health Organization recently announced that as many as 102 potential candidates are
currently under development—eight of them already in clinical trials. President
Donald Trump has called for his own ambitious vaccine research program, dubbed “Operation Warp Speed,” with the goal of finding a
cure by year-end. If all goes well, a vaccine could be available en masse by
January, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top epidemiologist and a
key member of the White House coronavirus task force.
These developments are good
news. As United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said this week, only a vaccine can return the world to
“normalcy,” while all other measures, such as universal testing, will only
mitigate the spread of the infectious disease.
But if and when a vaccine is
available, will Americans actually give it their trust?
Under any circumstances, there
would be some skepticism. Even reasonable citizens might show some caution in
embracing new and relatively unproven therapies. This skepticism, however,
could take on epic proportions under Trump’s leadership. The president’s near-constant
stream of lies, misinformation, obfuscations, and half-truths has
systematically destroyed Americans’ last reserves of trust in government. A
logical consequence of this behavior is that many Americans will end up wary of
a cure produced by the administration, even with rock-solid proof of its
efficacy.
This could be catastrophic.
Public reluctance to accept a vaccine will mean continued suffering, despite a
treatment in hand, and an even slower road back toregular life. As much as
Trump would like to believe that a vaccine would be gratefully embraced by all
Americans—no doubt a catalyst for his urgency in pursuing one—Trump himself has
made that outcome less likely.
Even in the best of situations, persuading Americans to
get their shots isn’t easy. Fewer than half of Americans get their flu shots every year, according to the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During the H1N1 pandemic of 2009-2010,
only 27 percent of Americans were ever vaccinated, despite
relatively high-profile public health campaigns and the availability of free
vaccinations to anyone who wanted one. As a result, H1N1 continues to sicken and kill Americans every year—albeit at
rates far, far below that of COVID-19.
Scholarly analyses of the
public’s response to the H1N1 vaccine find a correlation—even if it’s a relatively small one—between general
levels of public trust in government and vaccination rates. Much more
significant in influencing vaccination ratesis the quality and consistency of
official communications from government officials. More than anything, that’s
what enables citizens to accept official advice and trust in a treatment’s
safety. “Individuals and institutions are trusted when the public perceives
that they are knowledgeable and expert, they are open and honest, and concerned
and caring,” as one study found. All of these are standards that the president and his administration
have repeatedly failed to clear.
Trump himself has been a font
of misinformation and conflicting advice. He boosted the anti-malaria drug chloroquine
(now shown to be both ineffective and deadly) and made utterly
unsupported claims that the virus will “go away” with the summer heat. Then, he suggested that injecting
oneself with disinfectants could be a treatment for COVID-19, a proposal met
with horror from public health experts—and a stern warning from the makers of Lysol.
The president has also failed
to be “open and honest.” He has undermined the credibility of public health
officials and governors in whom Americans put more faith. More than once, his
false statements have forced his top public health officials to issue “clarifications” that contradict his own baseless claims. At the same
time, Trump has encouraged resistance against the restrictions imposed by his
own administration, such as through his pointed refusal to wear a face mask in defiance of CDC guidance.
Trump has also failed to convey
any sense of empathy for the people hardest-hitby the ravages of the virus’s
outbreak. According to an analysis by the Washington Post, Trump has
spent just four and a half minutes expressing condolences for the pandemic’s
victims while spending 45 minutes praising himself over more than 13 hours of
airtime during a three-week period.
Even “Operation Warp Speed,” Trump’s
push for a vaccine, smacks of political expediency more than a genuine concern
to save lives. According to the New York Times, Trump has
repeatedly urged a faster timetable, despite consistent warnings
from public health experts of the risks of rushing through the process.
These fears are certainly
justified, given the administration’s record of missteps in its pandemic
response. For instance, flawed coronavirus test kits ordered by the CDC set back the nation’s testing capacity
by weeks in the early onset of the crisis. The FDA’s rush to approve antibody
test kits has now led to a flood of inaccurate or outright fraudulent
tests on the market.
It’s no surprise, then, that Americans feel awash in
misinformation and conflicting guidance. A new survey from the Pew Research Center finds that about half
of respondents say they find it difficult to sort fact from fiction in their
daily news consumption. Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they’ve seen some
news “that seemed completely made up.”
This confusion makes the public
a ripe target for anti-vaccine misinformation campaigns, which the Associated
Press recently reported are already in high gear. “I don’t want the
government forcing it on my community or my family,” activist Rita Palma told
the AP. In addition to sowing doubts about the effectiveness of a potential
vaccine, these groups are organizing resistance against the possibility of
mandating its usage, a headache that governments will be forced to confront.
The consequence of all of these
failures is a public that is rightfully suspicious of the Trump
administration’s motives and competence as it joins the race for a cure. Recent
polls find that only 23 percent say they trust Trump’s information “a great deal.” Fewer than half would follow his recommendations. Even most Republicans now say
they don’t put much stock in Trump’s pronouncements. All told, these
circumstances are hardly a recipe for a successful vaccination campaign, even
if government scientists were to beat the odds and meet the administration’s
ambitious year-end deadline.
In the meantime, the damage
Trump has done to public trust has weakened efforts to mitigate the virus.
Public officials still need Americans to maintain the discipline of social distancing, reject deadly
misinformation, and comply with guidance on wearing masks, especially as “quarantine
fatigue” sets in and hardens. They will need people to get themselves tested
regularly and adhere to quarantines if contact tracing shows they’ve been
exposed to someone infected. But as images of crowded
beaches and mask-less
protesters show, rebellion is
already brewing and may only get worse.
Granted, public trust in
government has long been in decline. But Trump’s appalling pandemic response
could be the ultimate deathblow. As much as Trump wants to reap the political
rewards of unleashing a cure this election year, he is sabotaging his prospects
by destroying the public trust needed to bring the pandemic under control. What
he’ll leave behind instead is one more disaster for his eventual successor to
repair.
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