Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant gave Wired a sober (and sobering) analysis of where we are in this pandemic and where we are headed. Brilliant helped the World Health Organization (WHO) eradicate smallpox, and served as senior technical advisor for Contagion. He warned TED of the next, inevitable pandemic in 2006.
He tells Wired:
People say Contagion is prescient. We just saw the science. The whole epidemiological community has been warning everybody for the past 10 or 15 years that it wasn’t a question of whether we were going to have a pandemic like this. It was simply when. It’s really hard to get people to listen. I mean, Trump pushed out the admiral on the National Security Council, who was the only person at that level who’s responsible for pandemic defense. With him went his entire downline of employees and staff and relationships. And then Trump removed the [early warning] funding for countries around the world.
As we await the daily smoke-blowing exercise from the White House, Brilliant agrees states are doing some things are right: social distancing, school closings, cancellation of events. Flatten the curve to bridge the months needed to develop a vaccine. Between survivors acquiring immunity and a vaccine, we can beat the epidemic, he believes. Perhaps some antiviral drugs will help in the interim.
But the lack of testing is hampering our ability to target resources. “We should be doing a stochastic process random probability sample of the country to find out where the hell the virus really is,” Brilliant says.
What else should be done? What would he do if he were president?
I would begin the press conference by saying “Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Ron Klain—he was the Ebola czar [under President Barack Obama], and now I’ve called him back and made him Covid czar. Everything will be centralized under one person who has the respect of both the public health community and the political community.” We’re a divided country right now. Right now, Tony Fauci [head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] is the closest that we come to that.
Klain worked for Barack Obama. Not going to happen under Donald Trump. He’s spent his presidency unmaking the last one.
Even so, the former hippie hopes the pandemic will help Americans find a better version of themselves, inspired perhaps “young kids, millennials, who are volunteering to go take groceries to people who are homebound, elderly” and by “heroic nurses, who are coming and working many more hours than they worked before, doctors who fearlessly go into the hospital to work. I’ve never seen the kind of volunteerism I’m seeing.”
Meanwhile, federal resources await orders from the top. Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie tells Politico the designated backup health system for natural disasters sits making preparations:
The VA is “preparing for a national call on this matter,” Wilkie said in a telephone interview, likening the personnel to military reservists who can be called up by the president at any time. “They know that they can be deployed anywhere in the country. Just like the reserves, their physicals are up to date, their shots are up to date. That prepares them to launch when called upon.”
Only the White House has not made the call.
In Iast week’s in the Wall Street Journal, Walter Russell Mead condemned Trump’s mishandling of the crisis, calling it “improvisational and chaotic.” A pandemic is not something he can “bluff, threaten or placate.”
“He approaches politics as entertainment and has repeatedly foiled opponents by turning potentially disastrous developments—impeachment, for example—into thrilling new episodes of ‘The Trump Show,'” Mead wrote.
Indeed, the daily COVID-19 briefings substitute for the showboating Trump usually reserves for his rallies now cancelled on account of plague. Each day he teases some new, headline-grabbing development. Followup reporting finds it is vaporware. The next day’s news cycle is the same. Tease-headline-debunk. A news media starved of daily briefings for the last year eagerly regurgitates Trump’s statements and corrects the record later.
Mead writes, Trump is “stalling for time as he processes the nature of the threat and tests rhetorical and policy responses to it.” But like the honey badger, the coronavirus doesn’t give a shit.
Trump might have unleashed the full potential of the federal response at his fingertips weeks ago. He might have kick-started the manufacture of needed medical supplies. But the slow-roll keeps him in the spotlight and gives him the daily attention he requires as much as oxygen.
Republicans for the Rule of Law hope to make him pay a price for that starting this morning.
[h/t/ SR]
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