Why Anti-Pandemic Control: from the Right

By Steven Jonas

have been writing columns on the Trump/Right and the COVID-19 pandemic since the spring of last year. As I said in my first one (March, 2020): “An Ounce of Prevention — and Trump Could Have Been on a Glide-path the Re-election,” anyone with a conventional public health background already knew by that time, about 8 weeks after the knowledge of the break-out of the then epidemic of the disease from Wuhan, China, what fairly simple and straightforward steps needed to be taken to get the disease under some reasonable form of control. (It happens that while I am not an infectious disease specialist/epidemiologist, based just on my Master of Public Health degree and my Board Certification in Preventive Medicine, with a career in academic preventive medicine, I was one of those who had a pretty good idea of what needed to be done, in terms of the health of the public.)

Actually, as it turned out, based on a series of (recorded) interviews with Bob Woodward, President Trump knew too — or should have known because he certainly understand the basic epidemiology of the disease: it is a respiratory one spread primarily by droplets through the air. As I said then:

“Many things can be said about the revelations in [Woodward’s] book, and not only about the fact that Trump knew very well what the nature of the COVID-19 threat was, early on, [but nevertheless] just happened to tell the nation, over and over again for months that it ‘would eventually just go away.’ “

But as we know well, Trump and his enablers, from the Republican Party, through Fox et al, to the Right-wing on the internet, did exactly the opposite. Right from the beginning he, and Trump and other Repubs. were indeed telling us that “it was just going to go away.” The Hannity message (which I heard live, more than once) was that the “whole thing” was a Democratic hoax, designed to try to make the President look bad. And so on and so forth.

So why did he, and his numerous Republican/FOX/and-other-enablers do what they did? As the pandemic got worse and worse over the course of the Spring of 2020 I (and many others to be sure) puzzled over this one. And recall, that in addition to downplaying the pandemic for as long as he could, and for pushing false hopes like hydroxychloroquine, with Little Scotty Boy Atlas standing behind (and with an embarrassed-looking Dr. Birx sitting off to the side) Trump was pushing something they labelled “herd immunity” — that isn’t.

The Trump/Atlas version had no basis in scientific infectious disease epidemiology and control. To get the population as a whole — the “herd” — resistant to the disease would require high numbers of people to get infected, with some major proportion getting sick, and another proportion dying, to create a situation in which so many people would have had the disease that the “herd” would as a whole become immune to the disease, in the population. In infectious disease science, herd immunity — first discovered among cows being immunized against bovine tuberculosis many years ag —] is a product of mass immunization, not mass disease, whether in cows or humans.

After some months of such puzzling about “why” Trump was doing what he was doing, I finally came to the conclusion that what Trump, who knew (or at least knew at the time of the Woodward interviews in February, 2020) what the nature of the disease was, but carried out policies like making sure that a consistent national testing and contact tracing program, through the use of the Defense Production Act, was not implemented (courtesy of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, actually), was actually after. And that was planned chaos.

Everything, and anything, that Trump did vis-à-vis the pandemic was done with both eyes firmly fixed on the election. And because he knew that he was behind, even in the Electoral vote, he figured that the most chaos there was, the more he could use the Office of the Presidency to control it (that is the chaos, not the disease) and thus he would look more “Presidential,” and that would help him in the election.

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Source: OpEdNews