Handing Handles to Vandals
Pandemic Box Score: China 4, USA 1
David Wallace Wells opines in The New York Times:
This isn’t a question limited to abstract, virtual-reality-style debates on op-ed pages and social media. In at least 30 states, The Washington Post reported last week, legislatures have already passed laws limiting public health powers in the wake of the pandemic. Most of the states are in Republican control, but not all, and the restrictions legislated so far are quite intrusive: in many cases, extending outright bans against health officials or governors from issuing mask mandates, closing schools or businesses, restricting large gatherings in places like churches, or testing or vaccine protocols. But what is most striking is how little consideration they give to the particular attributes of future outbreaks — treating a future disease that spreads like measles but kills one in five kids it infects the same as one that spreads like swine flu and doesn’t kill anybody. And stopping public health authorities from doing anything about any of them.
Stop and think about that for a second: As the country emerges from three years of death, disruption and suffering, dozens of states have decided not just that future mitigation measures should be carefully targeted and calibrated, or that they should be time-limited, or that they should always integrate trade-offs and cost-benefit calculations from the beginning. They have decided that the best way to prepare for those future diseases is to tie our hands ahead of time.
When China, feeling the pressure of street protest and reeling from assaults on its economy from exiting tech giants and from US sanctions hitting their integrated chip imports, abruptly ended its Zero Tolerance covid policy, it was like the US departure from Afghanistan. One and a half million Chinese, mostly unvaccinated elderly, went to their deaths not with a two-year extended whimper, as in the US and Europe, but in a bang lasting barely four months.
There were no street protests to the carnage and no yellow press railing against incompetence at the highest levels. The street was simply silent. Bring out your dead.
Perhaps the hush can be explained by the fact that, even without access to vaccines for the latest round of Omicron variants, China fared four times better, on a per-capita-covid-death-since-2020 chart, than the US did. Consider that. The Trump/Biden bungle was four times worse than Xi Jinping’s. Pandemic Box Score: China 4, USA 1.
Even judged in economic terms, China grew its GDP 28% during the lockdown years, while the US contracted, resuming expansion only in 2022. Yes, there were fallout effects in the delayed development of many school children—a whole generation according to critics—but at least they are alive.
The same may not be said for the first to fall in the next pandemic, which we can predict as easily as climate change (the two are not unrelated), with NextGen corpses piled on top of the 100,000/year from Covid that has become the new normal.
This time we are handing the handles to the vandals. The USA is forfeiting to China or whomever else. CDC and other public health agencies around the world know full well the 2020 pandemic was preventable and have the tools they need to counter the next. But let's not ask expert virologists and epidemiologists to weigh in this next time. Let’s just leave it to the politicians and to the media wonks that craft their soundbites.
Rewriting Recent History
Ascendant in US politics on the right is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, polling well ahead of former president Boss Cobblepot, himself 25 points ahead of the presumed Democratic candidate (he was only 10 points up until he tweeted of his impending arrest). Mr. DeSantis took to a stage on March 16 to mark the third year of the present pandemic, proclaiming Florida “a refuge of sanity:”
“Three years ago, we were told there were 15 days to slow the spread, and today, with nearly 100% of the American public having contracted the coronavirus, the federal government continues to rely on fear and manipulation to peddle vaccines that don’t prevent transmission….”
Fact check:
A Gallup survey in February 2023 found that 20% of USAnians say they have had Covid. At the end of 2022, CDC serologic testing of US adults found that nearly 42% have SARS-CoV-2 antibodies indicating either vaccination or previous infection, but about 44% of those said they’d never had Covid. (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report). It is estimated that 63% of USAnians have now been vaccinated, which could explain the discrepancy.
No vaccine ever developed prevents transmission. Vaccines build the body’s own immunity to fight disease. Unless you stop breathing, eating, drinking or having sex—or wear a moon suit—you’ll never prevent infectious agents from entering your body. It is passing strange that three years into a pandemic there are still anti-vaxers who don’t understand this.
DeSantis continued, “15 Days to Slow the Spread policies led the way for lockdown policies that are still causing economic damage to the US economy and have resulted in record inflation rates not experienced since the 1980s.”
Of course, Fed interest rates, the war in Ukraine, and sanctions against China likely had more to do with inflation than bipartisan legislation to redress the domestic economic impact of Covid, but punching up on the economy is a no-brainer if you plan to run for president against the prior incumbents.
Republicans, it should be remembered, suffered a far worse fate during the pandemic than Democrats did. Excess deaths during the pandemic were 76% higher among Republicans than Democrats in two states, Ohio and Florida. Those deaths do not include deaths by DRANO enema or drinking Clorox, as recommended by POTUS-46. Studies suggest the political mortality gap was most likely caused by differing vaccine uptake levels between Republicans and Democrats.
A recent investigation by the New York Times found that front-line epidemic workers were sidelined from the start as the White House took control of the CDC and halted or hampered its work.
Young researchers often see public health — and particularly the E.I.S. [Epidemic Information Service] — as a sort of higher calling, far removed from politics and the marketplace….
But the arrival of the pandemic laid to rest those illusions. The first big shock came in February 2020, when the Trump administration reprimanded Dr. Nancy Messonnier, a senior C.D.C. official, for warning Americans to prepare for a pandemic.
Two days later, on Feb. 27, C.D.C. employees were told that all messaging from the agency would be routed through Vice President Mike Pence, who had assumed leadership of the coronavirus task force.
In May, 2020, CDC concluded that imposing social distancing measures one week earlier in March 2020 would have saved 36,000 lives. The report was embargoed.
The Long Covid Reality Check
Hairy Tongue? Covid Toe? These are two of the reasons you may need to be cautious around Covid so as not to get long Covid. Want more? How about the shortness of breath, fatigue, brain fog, headache, and loss of taste and smell more than three months after recovering from the initial—or latest—bout? Best science now says these are the factors that make long-term debilitation more likely:
Being Female — 150% greater risk
Being over 40 — 20% greater risk. 70-year-olds are no more at risk than those 40-69.
Being obese
Previous medical conditions — People with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, ischemic heart disease or asthma faced the next highest levels of increased risk. There was also elevated risk from anxiety, depression, chronic kidney disease or diabetes.
Being hospitalized—whether in intensive care or not, in-care Covid patients were nearly two and a half times as likely to develop long Covid.
Although Joe Biden has expressed his personal opinion that the pandemic is over, 51% of USAnians are still not convinced and continue to take steps to avoid exposure. That political trend does not poll well for either party’s announced agenda but speaks highly of a still sane majority.
The virologists and immunologists I listen to say there is a real and present danger from a new outbreak of mutant poliovirus against which current vaccines are ineffective. One million people worldwide are already infected.
If whatever the next virus is spreads faster, is more lethal, resists vaccines, mutates rapidly, and attacks old and young, healthy and infirm, all races and genders with equal ruthlessness, are we prepared? Against a relatively mild virus, Sweden’s herd immunity theory failed. China’s zero-tolerance policy failed. We tested the hammer and dance but could never quite master the right steps to keep time with the music. This finally led to the DeSantis attitude, “So why bother?”
It likely won’t matter who is in the White House. Next time we’ll just let it rip.
Meanwhile, let’s end this war. Towns, villages, and cities in Ukraine are being bombed every day. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. There are still 70 sites in Ukraine and 500 around the region. They are calling their project “The Green Road.”
The Green Road is helping these places to grow food and to erect greenhouses, and raising money to acquire farm machinery and seed. The opportunity, however, is larger than that. The majority of the migrants are children. This will be the first experience in ecovillage living for most. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those that do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.
Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.
There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad and read this new article in Mother Jones.
The COVID-19 pandemic destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed climate change, a juggernaut threat to all life, humans included. We had a trial run at emergency problem-solving on a global scale with COVID — and we failed. 6.87 million people, and counting, have died. We ignored well-laid plans to isolate and contact trace early cases; overloaded our ICUs; parked morgue trucks on the streets; incinerated bodies until the smoke obscured our cities as much as the raging wildfires. The modern world took a masterclass in how abysmally, unbelievably, shockingly bad we could fail, despite our amazing science, vast wealth, and singular talents as a species.
Having failed so dramatically, so convincingly, with such breathtaking ineptitude, do we imagine we will now do better with climate? Having demonstrated such extreme disorientation in the face of a few simple strands of RNA, do we imagine we can call upon some magic power that will change all that for planetary-ecosystem-destroying climate change?
As the world emerges into pandemic recovery (maybe), there is growing recognition that we must learn to do better. We must chart a pathway to a new carbon economy that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backward — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience. We must lead by good examples; carrots, not sticks; ecovillages, not carbon indulgences. We must attract a broad swath of people to this work by honoring it, rewarding it, and making it fun. That is our challenge now.
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