[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 VI
by Domingo Soto
There it was; the emperor had no clothes. From bickering with his experts to finally scotching the task force “indefinitely”, he moved to appoint Atlas who was, although a doctor, mismatched in medical expertise, a Fox News commentator, and a member of a Libertarian think tank pushing the discredited “government is bad” theory of herd immunity. The President had left the building.
It was now mid-August. Save for the declaration of victory, there was no real plan of action. Quite the contrary, the medical experts had been essentially side-lined, muzzled, and exiled, now fighting, apparently, internal turf wars with Atlas. Whatever, battle discipline there had been was totally gone.
Or, more accurately, Trump had thrown his hands up in the air, seemingly banking on happenstance and luck. “It is,” he had said in a July interview “what it is.” He openly abandoned discipline. His worked at cross purposes to the safety protocols like social distancing and masks. He welcomed his coterie to question the dangerousness of the virus, its size, its potentiality, the numbers, the science and engaged in rabbit trails, like herd immunity (or “herd mentality” to use the President’s malaprop).
How Did We Get Here?
Nine months later, we are dead in the water and drifting. How did we get to the point that not only do we not have a plan, we lack confidence in the process or the players? Whether the President was ill-qualified for the task is clearly a valid question. Regardless, the main reason we are here is his “quirky” personality, his overblown self-image, chaos complicity, and his fatalistic positivism.
As a result of this outlook (some call it narcissism), nothing he has done is wrong or worthy of explanation. It is always the fault of others. While it’s easy to recognize the overt victims of his approach, in the long run it was the President’s credibility that suffered and, like the virus, what infected the entire process. Rather than fighting the pandemic, we are now at war with each other.
Early on, Trump sought the alibi of inactions and mistakes of others. He chastised the WHO, eventually cutting financial ties, publically calling their work and motives into question and refusing to participate in the launch of a global effort on vaccines and drugs. China? Obviously. Obama? Well, hell yeah! “The system is starting to work out very well but we had to break a system like breaking an egg because the system we had was obsolete and didn’t work and that was the system we inherited.”
Trump even pondered whether health care workers were responsible for the shortage of protective masks. By late April, he was floating the idea of withholding financial assistance to “poorly run” (Democratic) states. As the fiasco worsened and the issue of the proper course forward became more and more politicized, he would continue to double-down on this notion of “us” and “them”. Statistics became blue or red.
His main targets, however, were the health care professionals who were used, like his Miss Universe models, as not much more than hand candy or expedient foils. Not that they were all that compliant. Overall, they remained true to their disciplines even if, at times they appeared to cave to the pressure. Dr. Birx, a woman of impeccable forensic credentials, would praise the President’s grasp of scientific literature and data details, words I'm sure she will some day regret. "He’s been so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data....I think his ability to analyze and integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit during these discussions about medical issues.”
Dr Fauci, Redfield, Hahn, and the United States Surgeon General were forced to dance with the drunk in the room, right there on television, in front of God and everyone. At times their shame was palpable and at other times their pluck was a beauty to behold.
The CDC, one of the world’s most admired and professional organizations also walked the line looking like a Sunday morning stroll of shame: Granting authorizations for medicines and treatments at the President’s insistence; changing guidelines in at least the appearance of political interference. Solid evidence that would subsequently be revealed.
With Atlas’ appointment even the meager subtleties fell by the wayside. The administration played fast and loose with an agency they now perceived as in their way. Those numbers, a Trump obsession, were tweaked. Efforts were made to retroactively change morbidity and mortality reports. Command and control of the CDC was moved to the White House so that even well-meaning mistakes or changes in situation became suspect to Trump’s Machiavellianism.
Not content with that, Trump minions would continue the practice of attacking these doctors but amped it up quite a bit, accusing the "health care deep state" of engaging in “sedition” and being part of “left-wing hit squads” determined to undermine Trump and “preparing for armed insurrection after the election.” The government declared war on itself.
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