Restaurants here are allowed to seat at 75 percent capacity (w/social distancing, etc.) per the governor’s order. The neighborhood brew pub, however, has not yet opened for indoor seating at all. They are playing it safe. And smart. One must say the experience loses something when eating pizza at a picnic table in the parking lot and drinking craft beer from plastic cups. The owners are waiting for Gov. Roy Cooper to lift all restrictions before opening inside after well over a year of mostly takeout. Currently, that target date is June 1.
The New York Times publishes reopening plans and mask mandates for all 50 states this morning. Washington state, however, is experiencing a fourth wave of infections. Reopening plans there are on hold.
Globally, the coronavirus pandemic is far from over.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Reuters reports, “will set out on Monday the next phase of lockdown easing in England, giving the green light to ‘cautious hugging’ and allowing pubs to serve customers pints inside after months of strict measures.”
Infections in India, unfortunately, stand at record highs with “increasing calls for the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to lock down the world’s second-most populous country.”
The Washington Post reviews the Biden administration’s plan to reestablish U.S. global leadership on pandemic planning. Biden’s announced vaccine-patent waiver is clearly insufficient:
Diplomatic experts say the worsening outbreak offers Biden his greatest immediate opportunity to help the United States regain the global stature lost under his predecessor. Both China and Russia have pursued “vaccine diplomacy” — leveraging their homegrown vaccine supplies in donations and deals — in bids to boost global public health but also to win favor with dozens of countries.
“We have to acknowledge that the Trump administration was a disaster for America’s image in the world, and for our soft power in the world,” said Bruce Stokes, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, arguing that the United States should become “the foundry of vaccines” for the globe, riffing off a similar goal laid out by Biden. “If we can do that, it seems to me we can re-win people’s confidence in America, which will redound to the benefit of America across a whole spectrum of issues,” such as climate change and competing with China, he said.
But inside the Biden administration, there is confusion over which agency is leading the effort to craft the country’s global vaccination strategy, which has led to a fragmented rather than strategic approach. While Jeff Zients, the covid-19 coordinator at the White House, has been the person in charge of setting and executing the domestic fight against the virus, five administration officials say there are too many players addressing the worldwide challenge, with not enough direction.
The effort to date appears piecemeal, say several anonymous sources.
That would not surprise Michael Lewis (“The Big Short,” “Moneyball,” “The Fifth Risk”). His new book, “The Premonition: A Pandemic Story,” weighs the U.S. response to the pandemic and finds it wanting. There are heroes and villains in his tale, says The Guardian’s Andrew Anthony, but Donald Trump is not the principle one, no matter how poorly suited he was for the task.
“There is a national institutional desire to sort of bury what just happened and say, ‘Oh it was all Donald Trump’. And I don’t think anyone who’s close to the thing believes that,” Lewis says.
Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher had developed a federal pandemic response plan under the George W. Bush administration. They stayed on under Obama only to be sidelined under Trump.
The official within the Trump administration whom he does identify as a major culprit is the former national security adviser John Bolton, who now does the media rounds as a voluble Trump critic. The day after he was appointed to the position in April 2018, Bolton sacked Tom Bossert, a veteran of the Bush administration. Bossert was the homeland security adviser who oversaw the biological threat team that was even then still influenced by the Hatchet and Mecher pandemic plan.
“From that moment on,” Lewis writes, “the Trump White House lived by the tacit rule last observed by the Reagan administration: the only serious threat to the American way of life came from other nation states.” So ingrained was this perspective within the administration that when he finally began to acknowledge the danger that Covid presented to America, Trump could only speak of it in nationalistic or xenophobic terms, continually referring to the “China virus”. Yet Lewis believes there was an opportunity for Trump to have been seen as the saviour of the day.
As for villains, there are many others, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with an international reputation as “one of the places in the government that America can be proud of.” That reputation was perhaps overblown.
In the book, they are mostly not doing very much and a lot of their energy seems to go into preventing others from doing anything either. Back in the 1970s, the then head of the CDC, David Sencer, called for nationwide vaccination after a swine flu outbreak. Two hundred million doses of vaccine were ordered and 45m administered, only for the outbreak not to materialise. Sencer was blamed for overreacting and sacked. Henceforth, the CDC tended to err on the side of cautious inaction. “I think the CDC had virtues but it was not battlefield command. It had become a place where the generals had no experience fighting a war,” says Lewis.
Both England and the U.S. looked as if they were well prepared for a pandemic. On paper. Their actual responses have not been world-inspiring. “Prevention does not pay,” Lewis says. “Disease pays.” Societies given over to market fundamentalism do not incentivize preventing illness. Corporations make more from treating illness than from preventing it.
Anthony writes, “The lesson of the book is that there are people who spend their lives readying those in power for bad outcomes. Rather than being treated as tiresome Cassandras, simply because bad outcomes more often than not don’t occur, they ought to be involved at the centre of decision-making, not just for strategic purposes but economic ones.”
That may make sense to most citizens, but not to The Market. And The Market speaks louder.