Trump's failure and the next pandemic

“The political folks believed that because [Covid] was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.” —Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban quoting Jared Kushner’s team in March, 2020.

Arguably the most important aspect of political leadership is the ability to deal with a crisis.

The massive incompetence and malice of the Trump administration in 2020 led, for example, to the unnecessary deaths of an estimated half-million Americans. And now we may well be facing a repeat that could be even worse.

The flu pandemic of 1918-1920 was the result of a bird flu (H1N1) that mixed, presumably in a pig, with a human-adapted flu virus and then killed over 50 million people worldwide and almost 700,000 in America (when our population was only 100 million people; it’s 334 million today).

So far, every person in America who’s become infected with this generation’s bird flu (H5N1) has gotten it from an animal, mostly birds (particularly chickens). It’s so widespread in the US chicken population, in fact, that it’s largely responsible for the high price of eggs leading up to the election and today. (So much for the GOP/media inflation talking point.)

In Canada, though, the science journal Nature published a rather alarming story last week, writing:

“In a children’s hospital in Vancouver, Canada, a teenager is in critical condition after being infected with an avian influenza virus that has researchers on high alert.
“Viral genome sequences released last week suggest that the teenager is infected with an H5N1 avian influenza virus bearing mutations that might improve its ability to infect the human airway. If true, it could mean that the virus can rapidly evolve to make the jump from birds to humans.”

The teenager doesn’t work or even live near farms and has had no known contact with birds. And it appears that the virus that has her at death’s door is a recent mutation:

“But researchers have homed in on three key differences between those [normal bird flu] viruses and the teenager’s: two possible mutations that could enhance the virus’s ability to infect human cells, and another that could allow it to replicate more easily in human cells, not just in the cells of its usual avian host.”

There’s a broad scientific consensus that the H1N1 flu of 1918 acquired its ability to easily infect humans and transmit from person to person because a pig with a case of a random human flu virus (pigs are easily infected by people) was simultaneously infected with bird flu. The two viruses are believed to have swapped genes inside the pig, producing the deadly variation that killed millions worldwide (although the hypothesis is still being debated).

And just last month, here in Oregon, a pig farm discovered five of their pigs were sick with bird flu. Public health authorities immediately sealed off the farm and euthanized the pigs to prevent them from picking up a human flu virus, but this is a pretty stark warning.

Another concern is that with Covid we had a virus that was transmitted by air, but died almost immediately when it landed on surfaces we could touch. Nobody got it from buckling a seatbelt used by an infected person on a plane, eating from a plate handled by an infected restaurant worker, or touching a package handed to them by an infected Amazon delivery driver.

The flu, on the other hand, is easily transmitted by touch; it’s why people are advised to frequently wash their hands during flu season.

Nobody wants to create a panic, least of all me, but this is alarming. Even more alarming is that if this mutation (or others like it) spreads, the guys running our nation’s response to a second pandemic this decade will be vaccine-skeptic Bob Kennedy and herd immunity advocate Marty Makary.

Herd immunity is the theory that when enough people are infected with a disease, the survivors have leftover “natural” immunity; some advocates (like Makary) even suggest it’s superior to vaccine-induced immunity.

The problem with the argument for “natural” herd immunity in the case of Covid or a deadly flu is that the disease often kills people so only the survivors have immunity, whereas the vaccine confers immunity without killing people.

Herd immunity is a real thing; we saw it play out during the Black Death in Europe in the 1340s. After a third of all the people on the continent were dead, the remaining two-thirds appeared to have a minor immunity, the traces of which are still found in their descendants’ genome today.

Relying on herd immunity to deal with Covid would require roughly 80 percent of all Americans to get infected, leading to at least an additional 1-2 million deaths here as well as more multiple millions of Americans suffering permanent disability from long Covid.

Nonetheless, Makary went so far as to publish an article in The Wall Street Journalin February of 2021 arguing, as the headline read, “We’ll Have Herd Immunity By April”:

“Some medical experts privately agreed with my prediction,” he wrote, “that there may be very little Covid-19 by April [2021] but suggested that I not to talk publicly about herd immunity because people might become complacent and fail to take precautions or might decline the vaccine. But scientists shouldn’t try to manipulate the public by hiding the truth.”

Last week, Trump appointed Makary to head up the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which oversees the production and distribution of vaccines. Not reassuring.

And his boss, of course, could be even more problematic.

That’s the Bob Kennedy who Trump wants to head up the Department of Health and Human Services who argued that:
— Efforts to deal with Covid were part of a “biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race”;
— The mRNA Covid vaccine was “the deadliest vaccine ever made”;
— The Covid virus was “ethnically targeted” to spare “Jews and Chinese people”;
— And efforts to mitigate the spread of Covid were “instruments of compliance for authoritarian regimes.”

Leadership matters, particularly during times of crisis, as do expertise, experience, and competence. Kennedy is a lawyer, not a physician; he has no medical training whatsoever.

We’re facing Russia’s threat to turn their attack on Ukraine into World War III, China’s increasing belligerence toward Taiwan with their spies well-lodged inside every major US phone company, and now the possibility of a new pandemic.

Given how, during the last pandemic, Jared Kushner advised Trump that it would be an “effective political strategy” to ignore the spreading virus and blame it on Blue state (WA, NJ, CT, NY) governors — and Trump took that advice for the first several months while the pandemic blossomed out of control — now might be a good time for us all to assess how prepared we are to go through this again.

Stock up on masks and essentials. Hand sanitizer and things like Vitamin D and Zinc that support the immune system. Consider what’s necessary to work from home.

And those Democratic governors who take science seriously should begin pandemic preparations for their states.

None of this necessitates panic; this time the government will be able to produce a flu vaccine much faster (once the virus finally mutates and stabilizes) than the yearlong wait we experienced in 2020 (assuming Kennedy and Makary don’t screw things up). We’d never before produced a vaccine against a coronavirus; flu vaccines have been produced worldwide since 1945.

As the old saying goes, forewarned is forearmed.

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