Cartoon – Modern Reporting
Category Archives: Leadership Trust
The White House said it was following health experts’ advice. Then we learned it isn’t approving a key CDC document.
Several hours later, we got another example of the White House resisting what those health experts are advising.
The Associated Press reported around midnight that the White House had shelved planned guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The document, which was due nearly a week ago, was aimed at providing local authorities with step-by-step guidance on how to reopen:
The 17-page report by a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team, titled “Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework,” was researched and written to help faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials as they begin to reopen.It was supposed to be published last Friday, but agency scientists were told the guidance “would never see the light of day,” according to a CDC official. The official was not authorized to talk to reporters and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.
A coronavirus task force official told The Washington Post that the document has not been completely shelved but was in the process of being revised because it was “overly specific.” The official also indicated that it was felt the document was too broad, as “guidance in rural Tennessee shouldn’t be the same guidance for urban New York City.”
The denial, though, reinforces that the White House is reluctant to submit to the CDC’s more detailed prescriptions for reopening the economy. And it’s difficult to divorce the delay in this document’s publication from Trump’s anxiety to reopen the economy — and the tension that has created with past guidelines.
The administration in mid-April issued phased advice on when areas should start to reopen places such as restaurants and other nonessential businesses. But many states have moved forward with certain elements of reopening without actually satisfying those guidelines. Most notably, they have begun to reopen without meeting the Phase One guideline that they should see a decrease in confirmed coronavirus cases over a 14-day period.
As The Post’s Philip Bump reported, some states that have pushed forward with reopening have also seen an increase in cases — which would prevent them from satisfying the requirement for moving into Phase Two. That requirement is that the decline should continue for another 14 days after Phase One begins.
Issuing a detailed document would seemingly complicate further reopenings, because it would again restrict what states and local authorities are supposed to do.
The Washington Post’s Lena H. Sun and Josh Dawsey previewed what the document was set to look like last week. And they also obtained a draft of the document. The new guidelines were to go beyond the initial ones in prescribing specific actions that could be taken in each phase of the reopening. Advocates for reopening have worried that strict guidance could make it difficult for businesses, churches, child-care centers and other facilities to actually function.
Trump, who has long signaled a desire to begin reopening that economy sooner rather than later, has doubled down on that rhetoric in recent days. Despite a steady national death rate that approached previous highs on Tuesday and Wednesday, and even though cases continue to increase outside the major U.S. hotbed of New York City, Trump on Tuesday signaled that we are entering the “next stage” of reopening the economy.
“Thanks to the profound commitment of our citizens, we’ve flattened the curve, and countless American lives have been saved,” Trump said. “Our country is now in the next stage of the battle: a very safe phased and gradual reopening. So, reopening of our country — who would have ever thought we were going to be saying that? A reopening. Reopening.”
Trump has been resistant to the advice of the health officials around him, from the early days of the outbreak when he continuously downplayed the severity of the situation. On several occasions, this tension has boiled over.
We’re also hearing from those officials less and less. The CDC long ago ceased holding briefings on the coronavirus outbreak, and the White House coronavirus task force briefings, which often featured health experts Anthony S. Fauci and Deborah Birx, have now been halted in favor of less-frequent and less-coronavirus-focused briefings from McEnany. Fauci has also been prevented from testifying to the Democratic-controlled House, although he is still slated to testify in the GOP-controlled Senate and has continued doing some interviews. The cumulative effect is that these health experts aren’t on the record as much as the effort to reopen the economy begins in earnest.
In the place of those public comments, the CDC guidelines were to provide firm and detailed advice from those officials for the new stage. But for reasons that seem pretty conspicuous, we still don’t have them.
Cartoon – Pass the Buck Leadership
Trump Moves to Replace Watchdog Who Identified Critical Medical Shortages
The president announced the nomination of an inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services, who, if confirmed, would replace an acting official whose report embarrassed Mr. Trump.
President Trump moved on Friday night to replace a top official at the Department of Health and Human Services who angered him with a report last month highlighting supply shortages and testing delays at hospitals during the coronavirus pandemic.
The White House waited until after business hours to announce the nomination of a new inspector general for the department who, if confirmed, would take over for Christi A. Grimm, the principal deputy inspector general who was publicly assailed by the president at a news briefing three weeks ago.
The nomination was the latest effort by Mr. Trump against watchdog offices around his administration that have defied him. In recent weeks, he fired an inspector general involved in the inquiry that led to the president’s impeachment, nominated a White House aide to another key inspector general post overseeing virus relief spending and moved to block still another inspector general from taking over as chairman of a pandemic spending oversight panel.
Mr. Trump has sought to assert more authority over his administration and clear out officials deemed insufficiently loyal in the three months since his Senate impeachment trial on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress ended in acquittal largely along party lines. While inspectors general are appointed by the president, they are meant to be semiautonomous watchdogs ferreting out waste, fraud and corruption in executive agencies.
The purge has continued unabated even during the coronavirus pandemic that has claimed about 65,000 lives in the United States. Ms. Grimm’s case in effect merged the conflict over Mr. Trump’s response to the outbreak with his determination to sweep out those he perceives to be speaking out against him.
Her report, released last month and based on extensive interviews with hospitals around the country, identified critical shortages of supplies, revealing that hundreds of medical centers were struggling to obtain test kits, protective gear for staff members and ventilators. Mr. Trump was embarrassed by the report at a time he was already under fire for playing down the threat of the virus and not acting quickly enough to ramp up testing and provide equipment to doctors and nurses.
“It’s just wrong,” the president said when asked about the report on April 6. “Did I hear the word ‘inspector general’? Really? It’s wrong. And they’ll talk to you about it. It’s wrong.” He then sought to find out who wrote the report. “Where did he come from, the inspector general? What’s his name? No, what’s his name? What’s his name?”
When the reporter did not know, Mr. Trump insisted. “Well, find me his name,” the president said. “Let me know.” He expressed no interest in the report’s findings except to categorically reject them sight unseen.
After learning that Ms. Grimm had worked during President Barack Obama’s administration, Mr. Trump asserted that the report was politically biased. In fact, Ms. Grimm is not a political appointee but a career official who began working in the inspector general office late in President Bill Clinton’s administration and served under President George W. Bush as well as Mr. Obama. She took over the office in an acting capacity when the previous inspector general stepped down.
Mr. Trump was undaunted and attacked her on Twitter. “Why didn’t the I.G., who spent 8 years with the Obama Administration (Did she Report on the failed H1N1 Swine Flu debacle where 17,000 people died?), want to talk to the Admirals, Generals, V.P. & others in charge, before doing her report,” he wrote, mischaracterizing the government’s generally praised response the 2009 epidemic that actually killed about 12,000 in the United States. “Another Fake Dossier!”
To take over as inspector general, Mr. Trump on Friday night named Jason C. Weida, an assistant United States attorney in Boston. The White House said in its announcement that he had “overseen numerous complex investigations in health care and other sectors.” He must be confirmed by the Senate before assuming the position.
Among several other nominations announced on Friday was the president’s choice for a new ambassador to Ukraine, filling a position last occupied by Marie L. Yovanovitch.
Ms. Yovanovitch was ousted a year ago because she was seen as an obstacle by the president’s advisers as they tried to pressure the government in Kyiv to incriminate Mr. Trump’s Democratic rivals. That effort to solicit political benefit from Ukraine, while withholding security aid, led to Mr. Trump’s impeachment largely along party lines in December.
Mr. Trump selected Lt. Gen. Keith W. Dayton, a retired 40-year Army officer now serving as the director of the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Germany. Mr. Dayton speaks Russian and served as defense attaché in Moscow. More recently, he served as a senior United States defense adviser in Ukraine appointed by Jim Mattis, Mr. Trump’s first defense secretary.
Cartoon – Leadership Today
‘Sadness’ and Disbelief From a World Missing American Leadership
The coronavirus pandemic is shaking bedrock assumptions about U.S. exceptionalism. This is perhaps the first global crisis in more than a century where no one is even looking for Washington to lead.
As images of America’s overwhelmed hospital wards and snaking jobless lines have flickered across the world, people on the European side of the Atlantic are looking at the richest and most powerful nation in the world with disbelief.
“When people see these pictures of New York City they say, ‘How can this happen? How is this possible?’” said Henrik Enderlein, president of the Berlin-based Hertie School, a university focused on public policy. “We are all stunned. Look at the jobless lines. Twenty-two million,” he added.
“I feel a desperate sadness,” said Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European history at Oxford University and a lifelong and ardent Atlanticist.
The pandemic sweeping the globe has done more than take lives and livelihoods from New Delhi to New York. It is shaking fundamental assumptions about American exceptionalism — the special role the United States played for decades after World War II as the reach of its values and power made it a global leader and example to the world.
Today it is leading in a different way: More than 840,000 Americans have been diagnosed with Covid-19 and at least 46,784 have died from it, more than anywhere else in the world.
As the calamity unfolds, President Trump and state governors are not only arguing over what to do, but also over who has the authority to do it. Mr. Trump has fomented protests against the safety measures urged by scientific advisers, misrepresented facts about the virus and the government response nearly daily, and this week used the virus to cut off the issuing of green cards to people seeking to emigrate to the United States.
“America has not done badly, it has done exceptionally badly,” said Dominique Moïsi, a political scientist and senior adviser at the Paris-based Institut Montaigne.
The pandemic has exposed the strengths and weaknesses of just about every society, Mr. Moïsi noted. It has demonstrated the strength of, and suppression of information by, an authoritarian Chinese state as it imposed a lockdown in the city of Wuhan. It has shown the value of Germany’s deep well of public trust and collective spirit, even as it has underscored the country’s reluctance to step up forcefully and lead Europe.
And in the United States, it has exposed two great weaknesses that, in the eyes of many Europeans, have compounded one another: the erratic leadership of Mr. Trump, who has devalued expertise and often refused to follow the advice of his scientific advisers, and the absence of a robust public health care system and social safety net.
“America prepared for the wrong kind of war,” Mr. Moïsi said. “It prepared for a new 9/11, but instead a virus came.”
“It raises the question: Has America become the wrong kind of power with the wrong kind of priorities?” he asked.
Ever since Mr. Trump moved into the White House and turned America First into his administration’s guiding mantra, Europeans have had to get used to the president’s casual willingness to risk decades-old alliances and rip up international agreements. Early on, he called NATO “obsolete” and withdrew U.S. support from the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal.
But this is perhaps the first global crisis in more than a century where no one is even looking to the United States for leadership.
In Berlin, Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, has said as much.
China took “very authoritarian measures, while in the U.S., the virus was played down for a long time,” Mr. Maas recently told Der Spiegel magazine.
“These are two extremes, neither of which can be a model for Europe,” Mr. Maas said.
America once told a story of hope, and not just to Americans. West Germans like Mr. Maas, who grew up on the front line of the Cold War, knew that story by heart, and like many others in the world, believed it.
But nearly three decades later, America’s story is in trouble.
The country that helped defeat fascism in Europe 75 years ago next month, and defended democracy on the continent in the decades that followed, is doing a worse job of protecting its own citizens than many autocracies and democracies.
There is a special irony: Germany and South Korea, both products of enlightened postwar American leadership, have become potent examples of best practices in the coronavirus crisis.
But critics now see America failing not only to lead the world’s response, but letting down its own people as well.
“There is not only no global leadership, there is no national and no federal leadership in the United States,” said Ricardo Hausmann, director of the Growth Lab at Harvard’s Center for International Development. “In some sense this is the failure of leadership of the U.S. in the U.S.”
Of course, some countries in Europe have also been overwhelmed by the virus, with the number of dead from Covid-19 much higher as a percentage of the population in Italy, Spain and France than in the United States. But they were struck sooner and had less time to prepare and react.
The contrast between how the United States and Germany responded to the virus is particularly striking.
While Chancellor Angela Merkel has been criticized for not taking a forceful enough leadership role in Europe, Germany is being praised for a near-textbook response to the pandemic, at least by Western standards. That is thanks to a robust public health care system, but also a strategy of mass testing and trusted and effective political leadership.
Ms. Merkel has done what Mr. Trump has not. She has been clear and honest about the risks with voters and swift in her response. She has rallied all 16 state governors behind her. A trained physicist, she has followed scientific advice and learned from best practice elsewhere.
Not long ago, Ms. Merkel was considered a spent force, having announced that this would be her last term. Now her approval ratings are at 80 percent.
“She has the mind of a scientist and the heart of a pastor’s daughter,” Mr. Garton Ash said.
Mr. Trump, in a hurry to restart the economy in an election year, has appointed a panel of business executives to chart a course out of the lockdown.
Ms. Merkel, like everyone, would like to find a way out, too, but this week she warned Germans to remain cautious. She is listening to the advice of a multidisciplinary panel of 26 academics from Germany’s national academy of science. The panel includes not just medical experts and economists but also behavioral psychologists, education experts, sociologists, philosophers and constitutional experts.
“You need a holistic approach to this crisis,” said Gerald Haug, the academy’s president, who chairs the German panel. “Our politicians get that.”
A climatologist, Mr. Haug used to do research at Columbia University in New York.
The United States has some of the world’s best and brightest minds in science, he said. “The difference is, they’re not being listened to.”
“It’s a tragedy,” he added.
Some cautioned that the final history of how countries fare after the pandemic is still a long way from being written.
A pandemic is a very specific kind of stress test for political systems, said Mr. Garton Ash, the history professor. The military balance of power has not shifted at all. The United States remains the world’s largest economy. And it was entirely unclear what global region would be best equipped to kick-start growth after a deep recession.
“All of our economies are going to face a terrible test,” he said. “No one knows who will come out stronger at the end.”
Benjamin Haddad, a French researcher at the Atlantic Council, wrote that while the pandemic was testing U.S. leadership, it is “too soon to tell” if it would do long-term damage.
“It is possible that the United States will resort to unexpected resources, and at the same time find a form of national unity in its foreign policy regarding the strategic rivalry with China, which it has been lacking until now,” Mr. Haddad wrote.
There is another wild card in the short term, Mr. Moïsi pointed out. The United States has an election in November. That, and the aftermath of the deepest economic crisis since the 1930s, might also affect the course of history.
The Great Depression gave rise to America’s New Deal. Maybe the coronavirus will lead the United States to embrace a stronger public safety net and develop a national consensus for more accessible health care, Mr. Moïsi suggested.
“Europe’s social democratic systems are not only more human, they leave us better prepared and fit to deal with a crisis like this than the more brutal capitalistic system in the United States,” Mr. Moïsi said.
The current crisis, some fear, could act like an accelerator of history, speeding up a decline in influence of both the United States and Europe.
“Sometime in 2021 we come out of this crisis and we will be in 2030,” said Mr. Moïsi. “There will be more Asia in the world and less West.”
Mr. Garton Ash said that the United States should take an urgent warning from a long line of empires that rose and fell.
“To a historian it’s nothing new, that’s what happens,” said Mr. Garton Ash. “It’s a very familiar story in world history that after a certain amount of time a power declines.”
“You accumulate problems, and because you’re such a strong player, you can carry these dysfunctionalities for a long time,” he said. “Until something happens and you can’t anymore.”
Melinda Gates: This is not a once-in-a-century pandemic.
‘We will absolutely have more of these.’ The billionaire philanthropist predicts a timeline for going back to normal.
- Business Insider spoke with Melinda Gates about COVID-19, the prospect and timeline of making an effective vaccine, and how the world will be permanently changed by the coronavirus.
- Gates said it would likely take about 18 months for a vaccine to become widely available, and that it should first go to healthcare workers to help them keep others safe.
- She said this pandemic was not a once-in-a-century situation, like the Spanish flu. Because the world is now a global community, we’re likely to see other pandemics in our lifetimes, Gates said.
- Even after things get back to normal, “our psyches are going to permanently changed … I hope we change to realize that we’re a global community.”
Melinda Gates is the cochair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has donated more than $45 billion to tackle some of the world’s toughest problems, including vaccination research and combating pandemics, from coronavirus to Ebola.
Gates and her husband have long been concerned about a pandemic and have warned that we need to be more prepared at a global level.
In a wide-ranging interview with Gates on Thursday afternoon, she gave her thoughts on the coronavirus pandemic, the inequality of it all, and how the world can go back to semi-normal. The highlights:
- The world needs a vaccine delivered at mass scale to go back to “normal.” A realistic timeline is about 18 months, the same time it took to create an Ebola vaccine.
- It is possible we won’t be able to find an effective vaccine for coronavirus, although Gates thinks that is highly unlikely.
- The idea of herd immunity solving coronavirus is far-fetched. Gates said that would require more than half the population to get coronavirus (which isn’t anywhere close to happening) and a lot of death along the way.
- To effectively roll out a vaccine, Gates believes you need to first give it to health workers, then to high-risk groups, then distribute it equitably to different countries and communities. The vaccine also has to cost very little with a fund to cover it for everyone. What the US is doing right now, pitting states against each other for supplies and allowing wealthy individuals to access tests first, would be disastrous for a vaccine rollout.
- To prepare for the second wave of coronavirus this fall, or even a next pandemic, we need mass testing from the get-go, voluntary data sharing from people so that we can trace who has been tested and where they have been, and vaccine stockpiles so that you can distribute those as soon as you see signs of an outbreak.
- Gates said there would “absolutely” be more pandemics in our lifetime. Coronavirus is not a once-in-a-century occurrence like the Spanish flu.
- If you want to help vulnerable, poor communities survive coronavirus, Gates recommends giving to the WHO COVID Solidarity Fund, United Way, or America’s Food Fund.
We need a vaccine to be widely distributed before the world will start to feel normal again. Gates says we won’t get that for at least 18 months.
Alyson Shontell: How is it going in the Gates household?
Melinda Gates: Like all other families, it’s been a complete change of life for all of us. But we are also incredibly privileged, and we know that, and our kids know that. But yes, life has changed drastically. The kids are studying online. Bill and I are doing all of our meetings via video teleconference. I’m a terrible cook, so I’m heating things up a lot more, and everybody’s trying to pitch in to do what needs to get done in terms of things around the house.
And the other thing I would just say is every night, we’ve had this tradition for a long time of saying grace before meals. And what that looks like is that we all go around and say something we’re thankful for. Pretty much every night what comes up from the kids and us is we’re thankful for our health and for the fact that we’re not going hungry and the fact that we can still do our work and the kids can still learn. It’s kind of amazing.
Shontell: We heard Dr. Fauci say earlier this week that things probably won’t return to normal until we have a vaccine. What do you think is a realistic timeline for a wide distribution of a vaccine? Is anything faster than 18 months really safe?
Gates: I think it’s likely 18 months. Just from everything we know from working with our partners for many, many years on vaccines, you have to test the compounds. Then, you have to go into preclinical trials, then full-scale trials. And even though I’m sure the FDA will fast-track some of these vaccine trials like they did with Ebola, still by the time you get it through the trials safety- and efficacy-wise, then you have to manufacture the vaccine and manufacture at scale. I think it really is 18 months.
The good news that I’m seeing on that front, though, is so many scientists are coming forward, and I’m seeing CEOs come forward and say, “I have this platform we can use.” Pharmaceutical companies are coming together already to say, “How do we build up the manufacturing capacity so it’s there when we get a vaccine and we can basically just run it through the manufacturing process?” I’m seeing lots of good things come forward, but it’s a process that needs to run its full course, because you don’t want to put something in someone’s body that is harmful.
Shontell: Right. It seems like, in addition to creating something we’ve never had before, you do really have to do these human tests in a way that’s safe so that you’re not creating a vaccine that maybe cures coronavirus but gives you something else.
Gates: I’d add also that we need to know who it’s safe to give the vaccine to and in what dosages. We know COVID-19 is affecting people who are particularly vulnerable health-wise if they have diabetes, or a heart condition, or they have asthma. You have to make sure that, safety-wise, you’re not giving somebody a vaccine that’s going to affect their heart. So yeah, there are lots of issues there that have to be tested.
It’s possible we won’t be able to create a coronavirus vaccine, although Gates thinks that’s highly unlikely. Also, herd immunity is not the solution.
Shontell: If at the end of this 18-month period, or however long it is, we do feel like we’ve got a vaccine, what do you think that vaccine will actually look like? Is it possible that we actually won’t be able to create a vaccine at all? Could that be one scenario?
Gates: Well, it’s possible. We have to look at how far science has come even in the last five years. And the number of compounds we have, there’s something like 14,000 compounds that we, with our partners alone, have. And there are many, many, many others testing compounds that we’re looking at to see, “Is this promising?” Could that one be promising? And we have high throughput screening now of compounds. I really think we’re going to find a vaccine.
We found a vaccine for Ebola, right? And we did that in about an 18-month time frame, and that was hard. When I see the scientific community all coming together the way they are around the globe and sharing data and sharing information, we’re going to get a vaccine.
Shontell: OK, so you’d say that it’s a high likelihood.
Gates: High likelihood.
Shontell: That’s very, very good to know.
Gates: The other thing to think about is, in the meantime, there’s another whole strand of work going on, which is the therapeutics accelerator. Through the accelerator, we’re trying to find medicines so that if you get COVID-19, hopefully we can boost your immune system or tamp down the effect of the disease on you. So again, hopefully, we’ll come up with some medicines that will also help so people don’t get as sick as they’re getting and landing in the ICU, which is what’s truly tragic.
Shontell: Is there anything to this idea of herd immunity? Could we be closer than we think on that, or is that far-fetched thinking?
Gates: That’s still very far-fetched today. You don’t get herd immunity until you have a huge percent of your population that has had the disease. We know that from all the diseases in the past that humans have had. So no, we’re still a long way from herd immunity. And you can’t count on that because a lot of people are going to die in the meantime if you let the experiment run and you just let the disease run its course in communities. Sure, we could get herd immunity and we will get so much death. That’s why it’s so important to remind people the only tools we have today are physical distancing, handwashing, and wearing masks in public. We have to go with what we know works.
How to distribute a coronavirus vaccine to the masses: 1. Make it cheap and buy it for everyone. 2. Give it to healthcare workers. 3. Give it to the highest-risk people. 4. Come up with an equitable way for everyone else to get it (the US is screwing that up right now).
Shontell: Once we have a vaccine, what do you think is the best way to distribute it to the masses? Who should get it first? How would we do it on such a big scale?
Gates: We have to make sure that the vaccine is very low priced and that there’s a fund for buying it for everyone, whether you’re in a low-, middle-, or a high-income country. And that’s doable. We’ve done that with the Vaccine Alliance that exists today. That’s been in existence since 1990, so we know how to do that piece.
But we also have to distribute very carefully. The very first people that need to get this vaccine are healthcare workers, because if you can keep them safe, they can help keep others safe. Then you need to distribute it to the people who are the very most vulnerable. That is, they have underlying health conditions, some of the ones that we’ve talked about before. And from there, you then make it distributed completely equitably across society.
And even the United States is going to have to really work at that. COVID-19 is exposing all the inequities we have in our healthcare system. And so we need to look at, OK, does Mississippi get this vaccine at the same time California gets it and New York gets it? We can’t do this game that we’re playing right now where you have 50 different states competing for resources for masks and PPE, that makes zero sense. You need a national strategy that will equitably distribute this vaccine and we first look at the vulnerable populations.
Shontell: To touch on that point, as you mentioned, there are so many inequalities coming to light with this pandemic, from who has been able to get initial testing on to how it’s affecting different genders in different ways, to more African Americans in the US dying of this than other races. When you think about it, social distancing, stocking up on food, and handwashing are all privileges that some of the poorest communities don’t have.
You’ve done a lot of work on equality efforts, and you’ve said it’s the best way to fix everything in society is to level the playing field. How do we start leveling the playing field so the next time it’s better for everybody? How do we help the people who are in the poorest, most vulnerable communities right now?
Gates: We have to start by remembering that COVID-19 anywhere is COVID-19 everywhere. And if we keep that front and center in our minds, then we will start to think really deeply about these most vulnerable populations.
The thing that keeps me up at night — because I’ve traveled to Africa so many times and been in so many townships and slums — is if you are a person living in those conditions, you can’t begin to handwashing or social distance. In those situations, we need to start with food. People need to be able to feed themselves. And then if they feel like they have COVID symptoms, then they don’t have to go out of the house looking for food.
When I think forward about how we would do this, right now, we have to focus on the pandemic today right in front of us. We have to take the tools we have and try and distribute them as equitably as we possibly can. That means a national response that is thought out and strategic. So you start there.
When you plan for the future, you start to plan it out the way we did for other diseases that came into the world. You would create a vaccine stockpile. We’ve actually been quite involved with that for cholera, which we don’t get much in the United States anymore, but you get in a lot of places in the developing world or in refugee camps. And when there’s a stockpile of vaccine, then when you see an outbreak or a vulnerable population get it, it’s already basically paid for and you ship the vaccines out.
We have to have not a national stockpile of vaccines but an international stockpile of vaccines for something like COVID. We can predict some of these types of disease outbreaks; we just haven’t been planning it. We plan for things like an earthquake or a fire. We need to plan for disease. We are a global community. People travel. We’ve just learned that New York mostly got infected from people coming back from Europe. We have to plan for these things as a global community in the future.
How to be ready for the 2nd wave to hit this fall: Are you ready to give up your personal data and get tracked?
Shontell: Clearly, we were caught flat-footed and unprepared here in the US especially. There’s talk of a second wave of coronavirus potentially hitting in the fall. What are the things we need to do to plan for it? What has to be done by the end of the summer to put us all in a much better shape for it? And then I’m curious what we need to have in place to prevent something like this moving forward, if that’s even possible.
Gates: In terms of what we need to do to prepare ourselves this fall, first of all, all the way through this, we need to listen to the medical experts and the science experts. They know what’s real. We need to do the disease modeling to see where the outbreaks are going. We need to plan resources appropriately and share them in the United States with all the states in an equitable way.
And then we need to do massive testing. We have to have testing at wide scale so that you can get a test and you can know if you’re positive. And if you’re positive, then you self-isolate. Unless you get further disease, you then get telemedicine. You figure out if you need to go to the health system. And you have different tiers of the health system, places people can go for oxygen versus people who go to the ICU.
We can do that, kind of. You can do that triage of people if you have a test. To be frank, we also need to be able to share all that testing data so that eventually the US would be a place like South Korea, where I can literally prove on my phone “I took a test this morning — I’m COVID-free” or “Guess what? I had COVID before and I tested for antibodies in my system. I can be out in society working maybe now.” You could literally have a code on your phone that says, “Tested this morning” or “See? I have a COVID antibody.”
And so we can start to see who can be in society versus who needs to self-isolate. But without testing and contact tracing and some way of being able to prove to one another we’re safe, you can’t plan for a full eventual reopening of society. We need to do get that up and running at scale at a national level.
Preparing for the next epidemic is a whole different conversation. You’d have tests available from the get-go. You would have fought through the civil-liberties issues of people sharing their health information willingly or not willingly. Am I willing to share my health data so that you know if I got it?
Early on, people with COVID had symptoms we didn’t know to track. If we had known that from the get-go because they were able to share their information into a national database voluntarily, we would have known to tell people, “Look for these symptoms. Self-isolate just in case you have it.” We have to be able to start thinking through those types of systems as a country so that we’re prepared for whatever comes next.
Whose job is it to solve a pandemic, the elite’s or the government’s?
Shontell: Yes to all of that. Edelman put out on their annual Trust Barometer in January. They found that trust in media is really low right now. Trust in the government is really low too. But trust in business leaders is the highest group, and people seem to put the most faith in business leaders to solve some of society’s biggest problems.
You and Bill have done a tremendous amount with the foundation. You’re seeing Mark Zuckerberg giving a ton of money toward this. Sheryl Sandberg is doing the same. Jack Dorsey just pledged a big chunk of net worth to help fight COVID. Lots of people are stepping up. Bezos as well.
Is it the responsibility of business leaders to do this versus the government? Is this something we should come to expect? How do you kind of view the responsibility of the people who are in positions of the most privilege as we tackle something as wide-scale is this?
Gates: What I’m seeing is people stepping up. I sometimes wish people could see the number of emails we’re receiving daily at the foundation, not just Bill and me, but our scientists and our head of global health. We’re seeing CEOs come forward. We’re seeing philanthropists come forward. We’re seeing people who have knowledge and data saying, “Should we look at this? What should we do?” I am seeing the best of humanity come out right now in some of these leaders who are stepping forward and doing the right thing.
“Is this the responsibility of business?” was your question. It’s the responsibility of all of us. Business won’t be able to solve this. There’s no way business or philanthropy can solve this alone. It takes the government. It’s government who puts out huge amounts of money into our healthcare system to take care of everybody, to take care of the most vulnerable. It’s philanthropy and business and nonprofits coming together with government to have a national response. That is the only way we’re going to be able to care for all Americans.
But what I see is amazing scientists like Dr. Fauci stepping up and giving all the right messages. Those are the people we should be listening to, and I am seeing so many people come together behind the scenes to try and do the right thing. While the vulnerable is what keeps me up at night, one of the things that keeps me encouraged when I wake up in the morning is seeing so many people doing the right thing.
This is not just a once-in-a-century pandemic. ‘We are absolutely going to have more of these.’
Shontell: Is this a once-in-a-century pandemic like the Spanish flu, or do we need to expect to face more pandemics like this moving forward?
Gates: This is not a once-in-a-century pandemic. We are absolutely going to have more of these. This thing is highly infectious, COVID-19. But it is not nearly as infectious as measles. And we dealt with measles in the world. We know how to deal with measles. We’re going to see more, so we need to plan for them. And we haven’t planned for them as a global community.
Shontell: Why do you think we’ll see more pandemics?
Gates: We’ll see more because of all kinds of reasons, but mainly because we’re a global community and we travel and we spread disease.
Alyson: To end on a positive note, we are going to get through this, right? It will be hard, but we will get through this. I’m curious from your estimation: What timeline are we looking at for life to feel normal again? Or are we in a new normal, and are there things that we should expect to be permanently changed?
No one really knows when things will feel normal again. But be prepared for some permanent changes, including to your psyche.
Gates: I definitely think there are going to be things that are permanently changed. Our psyches are going to be permanently changed. We are learning some things about how to do more meetings online. We’re learning how to take care of each other online. People are reaching out to the elderly in their homes and doing video calls and sending emails or dropping a meal off. What’s going to change is our psyche, and I hope we change to realize that we’re a global community.
To the question of when does society reopen in what we think of as our normal form, nobody really knows the answer to that. It really is when we get a vaccine at scale.
Will we get, over time, probably some partial reopenings of society where you can do certain smaller group things or be out walking with one friend or two friends? I think we will start to see some partial reopenings.
We have to follow the data, though, of how is that working in Wuhan right now? How did it work in South Korea? How does it work in Germany? The places that are kind of ahead of us on both their response and when they got the disease? And then, we’ll start to be able to see, OK, where can we open up pockets of society over time? For right now, we need to be physically distant from one another.
Shontell: If the average person wants to give to help a vulnerable person or community, what’s the best way to do that other than social distancing? Is there some cause to give to or something that’s most helpful?
Gates: Yes. You could go globally. You could go to the WHO COVID Solidarity Fund. Locally, you could go to United Way. America’s Food Fund is another place you can go. I would give also to local domestic-violence organizations. We see domestic violence on the rise for many, many people, particularly women. Any of those would be amazing places to go and to give, even if you only give $10 — $10 or $100, it all makes a difference.
Shontell: I’m leaving this conversation very hopeful. Thank you for all efforts you and Bill and the foundation are doing in helping fight this. You were early to realizing the problems of pandemics, and we are grateful that you’re on it.
Gates: Thanks, Alyson. Be safe. Be well.
The Inside Story Of How The Bay Area Got Ahead Of The COVID-19 Crisis
https://khn.org/news/the-inside-story-of-how-the-bay-area-got-ahead-of-the-covid-19-crisis/
Sunday was supposed to be a rare day off for Dr. Tomás Aragón after weeks of working around-the-clock.
Instead, the San Francisco public health officer was jolted awake by an urgent 7:39 a.m. text message from his boss.
“Can you set up a call with San Mateo and Santa Clara health officers this a.m., so we can discuss us all getting on the same page this week with aggressive actions, thanks,” said the message from Dr. Grant Colfax, director of San Francisco’s Department of Public Health.
“Will do, getting up now,” Aragón responded.
It was March 15, two days before St. Patrick’s Day, a heavy partying holiday and nightmare scenario for public health officials.
The novel coronavirus was spreading stealthily across the San Francisco Bay Area and public health officials were alarmed by the explosion of deaths in Italy and elsewhere around the globe. Silicon Valley would be next, case counts indicated.
Until then, they had primarily focused on banning mass gatherings. But they knew more had to be done — and wanted to present a united front.
Within a few hours of the text, Bay Area public health leaders jumped on a series of calls to debate options, including the most dramatic — a lockdown order that would shutter businesses, isolate families and force millions of residents to stay home.
They decided they had no choice. And they were able to move swiftly because they had a secret weapon: a decades-long alliance seeded in the early days of the AIDS epidemic that shields them from political blowback when they need to make difficult decisions.
Together, they would issue the nation’s first stay-at-home order, likely saving thousands of lives and charting the course for much of the country. Three days later, Gov. Gavin Newsom followed with his own order for California. New York came next, as have dozens of states since.
“This was one exhausting and difficult day for all of us,” Aragón later wrote in his journal. “We all wish we did not have to do this.”
Now, officials nationwide are weighing how to lift isolation orders as the rate of COVID-19 transmission slows — and protests against the orders mount. The Bay Area is again poised to lead, but with a warning: All of this could be for naught if it isn’t done right.
The coalition of county public health officers didn’t set out to lock down the Bay Area that fateful Sunday morning in mid-March. But as they discussed the exponential increase in Santa Clara County cases, where the hospitals were becoming overwhelmed by infected patients falling ever sicker, what they needed to do “started to crystalize,” said Dr. Sara Cody, the county’s public health officer.
“It felt huge to me,” she recalled, “because I knew how disruptive it would be.”
Elsewhere in the region, diagnosed cases were sparse. But decades of experience had shown the health officers that while they represent different jurisdictions, they are one region when it comes to infectious diseases. “We knew that it would be a matter of time before that was our experience,” said Dr. Matt Willis, Marin County’s public health officer, who contracted COVID-19 days later.
Cody told her colleagues that Italy was under siege, and her county was just two weeks away from a similar fate. If she could have locked down sooner, she told them, she would have.
“That was compelling,” said Dr. Lisa Hernandez, the public health officer for the city of Berkeley, which had not yet recorded any cases of community transmission. “We knew there was going to be St. Patrick’s Day parades and celebrations, so the timing was critical.”
Dr. Scott Morrow, California’s longest-serving public health officer, who heads operations in San Mateo County, said he also felt the urgency. “We thought, ‘Yes, the clock is ticking,’” he recalled.
County health officers in California have immense power to act independently in the interest of public health, including the authority to issue legally binding directives. They don’t need permission from the governor or mayors or county supervisors to act.
Even for this group, though, with all its collective strength, telling millions of Californians to shelter in place seemed risky at first. But the health officers involved had grown to trust one another, even if they don’t always see eye to eye.
For instance, they currently disagree on whether to require residents to wear face coverings. Some counties, including San Francisco and Marin, are requiring them in public, while others, like Santa Clara, are not.
On the first Sunday morning call, Aragón floated the idea of developing a coordinated recommendation that Bay Area residents stay at home. By the next confab, Cody, Santa Clara County’s health official, made the case that for social distancing to work, it had to be an order.
“Sara Cody was the courageous leader!” Aragón later wrote in his journal.
So forceful a move can be unpopular, but evidence shows it can also be the most effective, in the absence of treatment or a vaccine. “Here’s the rub on these methods — they only work if you do it really early,” said Dr. Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan and an expert on the 1918 flu pandemic.
“When you do a quarantine, you stop the commerce, you stop the flow of money,” he said. “But on the other side of that are those whose lives are saved.”
This isn’t the group’s first pandemic. The alliance, formally called the Association of Bay Area Health Officials, was born in 1985 in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
Dr. David Werdegar, who became health officer for San Francisco that year, was analyzing AIDS data for surrounding counties and asked their health officers to join him for dinner at Jack’s, an old bordello-turned-political hangout in the city that has since shuttered.
Most of the infectious disease research was happening in San Francisco at the time, but HIV was spreading, and one city couldn’t fight it alone.
“It was important that we share all the information we had,” said Werdegar, now in his 80s and retired.
Dr. Robert Melton, a former Monterey County health officer, said that working for nearly two decades with Bay Area public health giants taught him tremendous lessons. “Camaraderie is important in maintaining the energy to be able to focus on the common good, through good and bad,” he said.
That close-knit relationship among the 13 health officers — representing counties stretching across a large swath of Northern California from Napa to Monterey — continues to this day. Collectively, their public health actions touch about 8.5 million people.
They meet monthly and communicate regularly on Slack, a messaging app. Their diverse backgrounds and expertise, especially in an era of funding cuts, provide a deep well of public health knowledge from which to draw. Together, the group has joined forces to combat youth vaping, air pollution and measles outbreaks.
And they have also tackled various influenza scares, which is why they had an emergency response blueprint at the ready when cases of what would later be called COVID-19 first cropped up in Wuhan, China.
“We spent a couple years as a region thinking about pandemic planning, and that really helped us come a long way thinking about these policies for COVID-19,” said Dr. Erica Pan, the interim health officer for Alameda County.
So when they jumped on the call that Sunday, they were already in mid-conversation about how to respond. They brought their lawyers and, working into the predawn hours, translated their lockdown plan into legalese, one that would be enforceable with fines and misdemeanor charges.
They would make prime-time announcements across the region the next day, alongside elected officials. “This is not the moment for half-measures,” said San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo. “History won’t forgive us for waiting an hour more.”
At first, the stay-at-home order applied just to the “Big Seven” counties surrounding the San Francisco Bay, whose officers peeled off from the larger group to issue it first. They shared their model ordinance with the others, who quickly followed.
Dr. Gail Newel, an OB-GYN and Santa Cruz County’s health officer, is not an infectious disease expert. She has relied heavily on the group’s expertise throughout her career, and especially now.
“It’s this incredible bank of knowledge and wisdom and experience that’s freely shared among the members,” she said. “And the whole Bay Area benefits by that shared knowledge bank.”
Roughly one month after they made the unprecedented decision to close the local economy, the risk seems to have paid off. It will be years before researchers have fully analyzed its impact, but officials across the Bay Area are cautiously optimistic. Others haven’t been so lucky.
Though there are important differences between the two regions, New York City, which issued a stay-at-home order four days after the Bay Area, saw its hospitals completely overwhelmed and had recorded more than 14,600 deaths as of Monday.
By comparison, the counties represented by the alliance have documented more than 215 deaths and hospitals haven’t been overtaken by a surge. In fact, hospitals brought online specifically to accommodate an overflow of patients are sitting largely empty.
Even within California, communities that waited to issue lockdown orders have emerged as COVID-19 hot spots, including Los Angeles, where Mayor Eric Garcetti followed suit three days after the Bay Area.
Internally, some of the Bay Area health officials have wondered if they made the right call. But “anytime I have any doubt, I just read another news report from New York or Detroit or New Orleans,” said Dr. Chris Farnitano, Contra Costa County’s health officer.
And the close-knit band is already undertaking its next task: reopening the economy without causing another spike in cases.
Before the orders are lifted, the officials say there must be rapid, widespread testing across the population. They want to hire disease investigators by the hundreds, if not the thousands, to trace the virus and quarantine those who have been infected. And until there is a vaccine, they may ask people to wear masks in public and continue social distancing, even in bars, restaurants and schools when they reopen.
“I was concerned that we might get a lot of resistance and it might get interpreted as alarmist and overreach,” said Marin County’s Willis. “Time has shown that it was really a vital step to take when we took it.”
Trump, Head of Government, Leans Into Antigovernment Message
With his poll numbers fading after a rally-around-the-leader bump, the president is stoking protests against stay-at-home orders.
First he was the self-described “wartime president.” Then he trumpeted the “total” authority of the federal government. But in the past few days, President Trump has nurtured protests against state-issued stay-at-home orders aimed at curtailing the spread of the coronavirus.
Hurtling from one position to another is consistent with Mr. Trump’s approach to the presidency over the past three years. Even when external pressures and stresses appear to change the dynamics that the country is facing, Mr. Trump remains unbowed, altering his approach for a day or two, only to return to nursing grievances.
Not even the president’s re-election campaign can harness him: His team is often reactive to his moods and whims, trying but not always succeeding in steering him in a particular direction. Now, with Mr. Trump’s poll numbers falling after a rally-around-the-leader bump, he is road-testing a new turn on a familiar theme — veering into messages aimed at appealing to Americans whose lives have been disrupted by the legally enforceable stay-at-home orders.
Whether his latest theme will be effective for him is an open question: In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released on Sunday, just 36 percent of voters said they generally trusted what Mr. Trump says about the coronavirus.
But the president, who ran as an insurgent in 2016, is most comfortable raging against the machine of government, even when he is the one running the country. And while the coronavirus is in every state in the union, it is heavily affecting minority and low-income communities.
So when Mr. Trump on Friday tweeted “LIBERATE,” his all-capitalized exhortations against strict orders in specific states — including Michigan — were in keeping with how he ran in 2016: saying things that seem contradictory, like pledging to work with governors and then urging people to “liberate” their states, and leaving it to his audiences to hear what they want to hear in his words.
For instance, Mr. Trump did not take the opportunity to more forcefully encourage the protesters when he spoke with reporters on Friday.
“These are people expressing their views,” Mr. Trump said. “They seem to be very responsible people to me.” But he said he thought the protesters had been treated “rough.”
In a webcast with Students for Trump on Friday, a conservative activist and Trump ally, Charlie Kirk, echoed the message, encouraging a “peaceful rebellion against governors” in states like Michigan, according to ABC News.
On Fox News, where many of the opinion hosts are aligned with Mr. Trump and which he watches closely, there have also been discussions of such protests. And Mr. Trump has heard from conservative allies who have said they think he is straying from his base of supporters in recent weeks.
So far, the protests have been relatively small and scattershot, organized by conservative-leaning groups with some organic attendance. It remains to be seen if they will be durable.
But Mr. Trump’s show of affinity for such actions is in keeping with his fomenting of voter anger at the establishment in 2016, a key to his success then — and his fallback position during uncertain moments ever since.
In the case of the state-issued orders, Mr. Trump’s advisers say his criticism of certain places is appropriate.
Stephen Moore, a former adviser to Mr. Trump and an economist with FreedomWorks, an organization that promotes limited government, said he thought protesters ought to be wearing masks and protecting themselves. But, he added, “the people who are doing the protest, for the most part, these are the ‘deplorables,’ they’re largely Trump supporters, but not only Trump supporters.”
On Sunday, Mr. Trump again praised the protesters. “I have never seen so many American flags,” he said.
But Mr. Trump’s advisers are divided about the wisdom of encouraging the protests. At some of them, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat, has been compared to Adolf Hitler. At least one protester had a sign featuring a swastika.
One adviser said privately that if someone were to be injured at the protests — or if anyone contracted the coronavirus at large events where people were not wearing masks — there would be potential political risk for the president.
But two other people close to the president, who asked for anonymity in order to speak candidly, said they thought the protests could be politically helpful to Mr. Trump, while acknowledging there might be public health risks.
One of those people said that in much of the country, where the numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths are not as high as in places like New York, New Jersey, California and Washington State, anger is growing over the economic losses that have come with the stringent social-distancing restrictions.
And some states are already preparing to restart their economies. Ohio, where Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, took early actions against the spread of the virus, is planning a staged reopening beginning on May 1.
Still, as Mr. Trump did throughout 2016, as when he said “torture works” and then walked back that statement a short time later, or when he advocated bombing the Middle East while denouncing lengthy foreign engagements, he has long taken various sides of the same issue.
Mobilizing anger and mistrust toward the government was a crucial factor for Mr. Trump in the last presidential election. And for many months he has been looking for ways to contrast himself with former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and a Washington lifer.
The problem? Mr. Trump is now president, and disowning responsibility for his administration’s slow and problem-plagued response to the coronavirus could prove difficult. And protests can be an unpredictable factor, particularly at a moment of economic unrest.
Vice President Mike Pence, asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” about the president’s tweets urging people to “liberate” states, demurred.
“The American people know that no one in America wants to reopen this country more than President Donald Trump,” Mr. Pence said, “and on Thursday the president directed us to lay out guidelines for when and how states could responsibly do that.”
“And in the president’s tweets and public statements, I can assure you, he’s going to continue to encourage governors to find ways to safely and responsibly let America go back to work,” he said.
With the political campaign halted, Mr. Trump’s advisers have seen an advantage in the frozen-in-time state of the race. Mr. Biden has struggled to fund-raise or even to get daily attention in the news cycle.
But Mr. Trump himself has seemed at sea, according to people close to him, uncertain of how to proceed. His approval numbers in his campaign polling have settled back to a level consistent with before the coronavirus, according to multiple people familiar with the data.
His campaign polling has shown that focusing on criticizing China, in contrast with Mr. Biden, moves voters toward Mr. Trump, according to a Republican who has seen it.
“Trump finally fired the first shot” with his more aggressive stance toward the Chinese government and its leader, Xi Jinping, said Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist. “Xi is put on notice that the death, economic carnage and agony is his and his alone,” Mr. Bannon said. “Only question now: What is America’s president prepared to do about it?”
Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, has advocated messages that contrast Mr. Trump with Mr. Biden on a number of fronts, including China.
But inside and outside the White House, other advisers to Mr. Trump see an advantage in focusing attention on the presidency.
Kellyanne Conway, the White House counselor, has argued in West Wing discussions that there is a time to focus on China, but that for now, the president should embrace commander-in-chief moments amid the crisis.
Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and a friend of Mr. Trump’s, said on ABC’s “This Week” that he did not think ads criticizing Mr. Biden on China were the right approach for now.
Ultimately, Mr. Trump’s advisers said, most of his team is aware that it can try to drive down Mr. Biden’s poll numbers, but that no matter what tactics it deploys now, the president’s future will most likely depend on whether the economy is improving in the fall and whether the virus’s spread has been mitigated. Those things will remain unknown for months.
“This is going to be a referendum,” Mr. Christie said, “on whether people think, when we get to October, whether or not he handled this crisis in a way that helped the American people, protected lives and moved us forward.”
Truth dies in silence. Sadly, so do people.
https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2020/04/truth-dies-in-silence-sadly-so-do-people.html
I have been writing columns for physicians for twenty years. And year after year, I have had physicians say this: “I’m glad you said what you did. If I said it, I’d be fired.” There are variations on the theme, but they’re much the same. Twenty years, and far more than 20 years, during which the alleged health care leaders in America have been routinely muzzled because they aren’t supposed to speak the truth. Open discussions shut down because they might embarrass someone or upset an administrator. Because it might, heaven forbid, shine a light on a genuine problem.
Some years ago, as the mental health crisis was gathering steam across the emergency departments of the land, I was contacted by a news show in France. The producers wanted to come to South Carolina and follow me on some shifts in my ED. They wanted to see how mental health was working out here. “We have socialized care, but mental health is also a huge problem in our country,” the producer said.
I dutifully, and appropriately, went to administration. “No, we can’t do that,” I was informed. I was given this explanation when everyone knew the mental health system was at the breaking point: “What if they uncover a problem?” Here was a chance for publicity, for potential grant money or to demonstrate that a political solution was in order. How dare we let in fresh air? How dare we suggest that things were not perfect?
The same thing is happening in the midst of the pandemic. Physicians, nurses, and other assorted health care professionals are being threatened for wearing masks. Administrators say, “They make the patients nervous.” Also likely, administrators have realized they don’t have adequate equipment. Facilities and systems with enormous budgets caught unprepared in a pandemic.
I see the stories of these professionals as I follow online forums. Physicians, nurses, and others, threatened with firing because they dared to speak out on the issue of PPE (personal protective equipment).
Like police officers without ballistic vests, these physicians don’t want to go into the rooms of COVID-19 patients without the masks and respirators, gloves, gowns, and face shields that will keep them safe. The equipment that will allow them to return home to their loved ones and prevent them from infecting their families. This isn’t a good look. A hospital that refuses to acknowledge the concerns and safety of its professionals is a hospital that ultimately doesn’t deserve them.
The same veil of silence pervades dialogue on the treatment of coronavirus. When I follow discussions, I see a lot of shaming. “There just isn’t enough evidence to try hydroxychloroquine, Zithromax, convalescent plasma, an untried vaccine, HIV drugs, etc.” Those who suggest we might try are considered reckless or ignorant. As the battle rages and lives are lost, innovation and risk are viewed with disdain. And our medical establishment is locked into the paradigm of double-blinded, placebo-controlled studies involving tens of thousands of people and lasting years. Here’s a view of the same from the U.K. Unfortunately, to suggest that we may need to react faster is only met with ridicule, and often tied to political views instead of expediency. Worse, it ignores the deep, fundamental need to offer hope, any hope, to hundreds of millions of professionals and citizens who are living in fear.
There is a tragic irony here; a painful coincidence. Physicians silenced. Let’s see. Where did we see that sort of thing resulting in a worldwide pandemic? Does China come to mind? The Chinese Communist Party threatened (and who knows what else) physicians who dared to speak out about coronavirus, even when they knew its danger. Even when they knew how easily and widely it spread.
They continued to soft-peddle numbers about total cases and case fatality. The party continued to allow travel to and from China long after the problem was known. They even suggested that Italians have a “hug a Chinese person” campaign to combat alleged racism; a charge delightfully accepted and repeated by gullible Western journalists in pursuit of a narrative.
Truth dies in silence. Sadly, so do people. And certainly when we tell dedicated health care professionals to keep their mouths shut when they have identified problems, offered solutions and simply asked for help. Whether it’s a private business, a totalitarian government, or anything in between, we should insist that the truth be spoken; freely and without fear of punishment.
Because, for the foreseeable future, lives will depend on it.
HENRY KOTULA 