5 minute read
Informed Dissent
The failures that brought us this pandemic can never be forgiven or forgotten.
The new hoax
“The reason you’re seeing so much attention to [ C O V ID-1 9 ] today is that [ the media] think this is going to be the thing that brings down the president. That’s what this is all about it. ǥ The ƪu kills people. This is not Ebola. It’s not SAR S, it’s not MER S. It’s not a death sentence; it’s not the same as the Ebola crisis.” — Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, Conservative Political Action C onference, Washington, D.C ., F ebruary 2 7
F rom 2 0 1 4 –1 6 , Ebola killed more than 1 1 ,3 0 0 people. In 2 0 0 3 , SAR S infected 8 .0 9 6 people and killed 7 7 4 . In 2 0 1 2 , MER S spread throughout the Arabian Peninsula, leading to about ͞,͜͜͡ confirmed cases and ͤͤ͡ deaths by the end of 2 0 1 9 .
As of Monday morning, C O V ID-1 9 has infected nearly 1 .3 million people and killed ͣ͜,͟͢͡ in just over three months.
Mulvaney wasn’t speaking out of turn. This was the party line. A day earlier, on F ebruary 2 6 , Trump tweeted that the coronavirus was “very much under control.” At a press briefing on February ͞͠, when there were ͤ͡ known coronavirus cases in the U.S., Trump said it wasn’t as big a deal as the ƪu: “The ƪu, in our country, kills from ͞͡,͜͜͜ people to ͢9,͜͜͜ people a year.
By Jeffrey C. Billman
That was shocking to me. … And again, when you have 1͡ people, and the 1͡ within a couple of days is going to be down to close to z ero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” A few hours after Mulvaney handwaived the coronavirus threat, the president traveled to a MAGA rally in South Carolina, where he blamed not just the media but Democrats for overhyping the crisis: “This is their new hoax.” Two days later, the first American died of COVID-19. Since then, 9,͢͡͞ Americans have followed — again, as of Monday morning — and roughly ͤ͟͟,͜͜͜ Americans have been diagnosed with the novel coronavirus.
If Trump gets his way, this history will be memory-holed. In his retelling, he knew it would be a pandemic before anyone called it a pandemic, and he took it seriously from the start, even though he called it “an unforeseen problem.” And if the death count is less than 2 .2 million — a years-long, worstcase-scenario projection that assumed no mitigation — it will be a testament to his leadership.
Last week, the White H ouse’s coronavirus task force unveiled its own projection: Between 1͜͜,͜͜͜ and ͜͞͠,͜͜͜ would die, it said, though the White House wouldn’t divulge the projection’s
SHUTTERSTOCK
timeline or assumptions. As of Monday, the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s model, which the White H ouse used to develop its projections, forecast ͤ1,ͣ͢͢ U.S. deaths through August.
Some public health officials believe the IH ME is optimistic, and other models are much grimmer. But if it is correct and this wave of COVID-19 files by July, Trump will head into the election touting it as an achievement. And all of a sudden, 80,000 deaths in four months — more than in V ietnam, more than ͞͡ 9/11s — will somehow be recast as a victory instead of a colossal failure, likely with the same pusillanimous media now swooning over Trump’s “change of tone” complicit in the sales job. Trump is, if nothing else, a champion bullshitter.
But make no mistake: This is a colossal failure with catastrophic repercussions. It will cost thousands of lives. And the worst of it could have been avoided. We shouldn’t forget that. And we damn sure shouldn’t forgive it.
Two startling reports from this weekend lay bare how badly Trump botched the most important job of his presidency.
The first, from the Associated Press, reveals that the administration waited until mid-March to place bulk orders for N9͡ respirator masks, ventilators, and other eq uipment needed by frontline health care workers. By that time, the national emergency stockpile was depleted. In late March, Trump finally ordered General Motors and Ford to manufacture ventilators, but the order came too late for them to produce mass q uantities before the peak of the crisis hits.
More damning is a devastating Washington Post investigation detailing how a disinterested president and his incompetent team missed chance after chance to contain the virus before it spun out of control, all while telling the public that this was nothing to worry about.
Throughout January, as officials tried to focus Trump’s attention on the pandemic, he brushed them aside. F inally, on January ͟1, Trump shut down travel to C hina, but only after C hina locked down Wuhan. By then, the U.S. already had eight coronavirus cases. Department of H ealth and H uman Services Secretary Alex Aar’s efforts to secure additional funding for eq uipment and a testing-and-tracking network were shot down as “alarmist.” When coronavirus cases started to mount, the White House eventually agreed to ask Congress for ͊͞.͡ billion, which C ongress upped to $ 8 billion. By then, the Post reports, “The United States missed a narrow window to stockpile ventilators, masks, and other protective gear.” The C enters for Disease C ontrol and Prevention failed to put together a reliable coronavirus test while the government blocked private and academic labs from deploying their own until F ebruary 2 9 . Again, too late. Without widespread testing, the U.S. lost weeks in which it could have pinpointed and contained outbreaks before they spread.
This tragedy of errors, of course, traces to the top: to a president who disdained expertise, nurtured his sense of grievance, and prioritied the stock market and his own re-election above all else.
The result, as the Post succinctly puts it, is that “the United States will likely go down as the country that was supposedly best prepared to fight a pandemic but ended up catastrophically overmatched by the novel coronavirus, sustaining heavier casualties than any other nation.”
N o matter how many die, that will always be Trump’s unpardonable sin.
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