[ED NOTE: Some months ago, bewildered by the amount of oncoming data and information - and its misapplications - I started putting together a coronavirus database. That can be found here. Much of the information in this piece is taken from there.]
POSTMORTEM: Too Early?
Part VII
by Domingo Soto
And reality. In the President’s alternate universe view the virus had run its course or was, at least, on the ropes. He, if not the country, was back to business as usual. Rallies were being held. Safety protocols were no longer just ignored but now vilified. So, too, anyone that followed them. Help, he assured, was well on the way, a vaccine would soon be available, thanks to his masterful handling of the situation. He gave himself an “A” for a job well done.
But the public had by now little confidence in anything the President said. He had a history of palpably false statements, happy talk, and crazy thinking and it wasn’t limited to just his handling of the pandemic. His political capital was spent. Even if, charitably, one were to accept his claims (belatedly and as a result of Woodward’s revelation) that his positive spins were for the public’s confidence and sense of well-being, how to explain that as recently as late September, Trump was still spewing his voodoo medicine, only to be corrected by Dr. Fauci?
The President would tell a rally that “Now we know it affects elderly people. Elderly people with heart problems and other problems. If they have other problems, that’s what it really affects. That’s it. You know, in some states thousands of people— nobody young — below the age of 18, like nobody — they have a strong immune system — who knows?....Take your hat off to the young, because they have a hell of an immune system. But it affects virtually nobody. It’s an amazing thing.”
Nor is there walk-back from his obvious lies or sorties into weird science misadventures. Who to believe, the President who would brag that he had a predisposition toward science because of his ‘super genius’ uncle and who praised his own “natural ability” to grasp scientific theories, or the man who had made the suggestion about injecting bleach as a corona virus countermeasure?
It was not lost on the public that he had outrageously ridden the hydroxychloroquine horse into the ground. He had seized on yet another lifeline, beginning with a cheerleader’s tweet that said “HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine. The FDA has moved mountains - Thank You! Hopefully they will BOTH (H works better with A, International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents)....."
Characteristically he would dismiss a hydroxychloroquine study that undermined him as a “Trump enemy statement”. “I worked with doctors,” he would say. “If you look at the one survey, the only bad survey, they were giving it to people that were in very bad shape, they were very old, almost dead. It was a Trump enemy statement.”
It would prove to be a dead end, even drawing a reprimand shutting down his precious Twitter account for a short period of time. Not chastened, he would continue, moving on to a succession of snake oil remedies and hopeful panaceas, at each point rejecting the advice of one of the world’s most prestigious medical staffs. But what’s new?
Operation Warp Speed, designed to cut through the normal state of regulation of drugs, in this case the vaccine, had been a deft and incisive move. But over the months, the speed of the response and the President’s insistence that a vaccine would soon be available, now touted as a vindicating one-two punch, became a liability. The President had initially declared that COVID-19 would simply vanish. “I feel about vaccines like I feel about tests. This is going to go away without a vaccine. It’s gonna go away, and we’re not going to see it again, hopefully, after a period of time.”
He soon shifted gears, announcing that a vaccine would be available soon. At times it was by election day. Others before the end of the year. The medical experts reasoned otherwise, charitably opining that “it could happen.” But “probably not” hung in the air. Suspicious of the obviously heavy political undercurrents, the public showed resistance to taking the vaccine even before it was available.
The medical and pharmaceutical establishments bucked the President, publicly addressing the notion that the process had been tainted by political interference. No one will interfere with the efficacy of their standards, FDA’s Hahn (and others) would state.
That’s our current state: the reputations of our most celebrated institutions have been unnecessarily smeared, called into question, and - like the rest of the country - in conflict with each other; metrics, science and solutions, now tribal, seem without footing; and worse yet - even if one can condone the late start and misfires as just part of a learning curve - we are, nine months later and over 200,000 lives lost, dead in the water and without a real game plan, led by a man in whom we have no trust.
(CLICK HERE FOR THE ENTIRE SERIES)
No comments:
Post a Comment