Make America Immune Again
Many
sources of the nation’s strength have eroded.
Opinion
Columnist
·
May 5, 2020, 6:28 p.m. ET
·
If
Joe Biden is looking for a bumper sticker for his campaign against Donald
Trump, I’d suggest this one: “Make America Immune Again.”
This
pandemic has both exposed and exacerbated the fact that over the last 20 years
we as a country have weakened so many sources of our strength. We’ve
simultaneously eroded our cognitive, ecological, economic, social, governance,
public health and personal health immune systems — all the sources of
resilience we need to get through this pandemic with the least damage to lives
and livelihoods.
All
these immune deficiencies are the logical outcome of how we’ve let ourselves go
as a country, how we’ve let ourselves be dumb-as-we-wanna-be for so many years
— devaluing science and reading, bashing public servants for political sport,
turning politics into entertainment, not to mention adopting horrible eating
habits that have left 40 percent of Americans obese.
Dumb-as-we-wanna-be
is epitomized by the guy in Austin, Texas, who last week shoved a “park ranger
into the water while the ranger was explaining to a crowd the need for social
distancing,” as CNN reported.
Warren
Buffett was right: When the tide goes out you see who’s swimming naked. And now
it’s us. We are still exceptional, but now it’s in the fact that we lead the
world in total coronavirus cases and deaths from Covid-19.
“We
were the leading country in everything when I was young,” Gloria Jackson, a
75-year-old retiree from my home state, Minnesota, told The Washington Post.
“And what are we now? We’re mean. We’re selfish. We’re stubborn and sometimes
even incompetent. … It seems like some of these other countries almost feel
sorry for us. … We can’t get out of our own way. … There’s no leadership and no
solidarity, so everybody’s doing whatever they want … which means everyone
who’s vulnerable is losing big.”
This
erosion of our collective societal immunity has been fed by many sources over
the years, but none more than a Republican Party that has simply jumped the
tracks. Donald Trump’s election was a byproduct of our lost immunity, but his
leadership has now become a giant accelerant of it.
At
a time when we desperately need to be guided by the best science, Trump’s daily
fire hose of lies, and his denunciations of anything he doesn’t like as “fake
news,” has contributed mightily to the loss of our “cognitive immunity” —
our ability to sort out truth from lies and science from science fiction.
At
a time when we need a globally coordinated response to a pandemic, Trump has
wrecked every alliance we have.
At
a time when we need high social trust in order to have a coordinated response
at home, Trump’s political strategy of dividing us and playing everything both
ways — even telling people both to rise up against their governors and to lock
down according to his guidelines — is the opposite of the “all in this
together” approach we need to win this battle.
At
a time when access to affordable health care is extra-important — when
frontline workers need to know that if they go to work and fall ill, they will
have some safety net to protect them — Trump has been trying to destroy the
Affordable Care Act enacted by President Barack Obama without even thinking
through an alternative.
At
a time when we’ve never more needed our early warning systems to be operating
at peak potential, the four top jobs at the Department of Homeland Security and
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence “have all been filled with
temporary acting officials for literally every day that Covid-19 has been on
the world stage,” Garrett Graff recently noted in Politico.
And
Trump’s vindictiveness toward any career public servant who challenges his
narrative has surely contributed to the weak response from the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention. Experts are afraid to raise their hands to
contradict the president.
What
would it take to make ourselves collectively more immune to Covid-19? It starts
with the understanding that the only thing these weeks of lockdown have done is
slow the spread of the virus. We still need a sustainable plan for saving lives
and livelihoods until we get herd immunity, naturally or from a vaccine. There
are three basic approaches.
One
is the Swedish approach of partial lockdown, protecting
the most vulnerable and gradually allowing the healthiest to acquire the
infection, recover and build herd immunity naturally.
The
other is the Chinese strategy: strict lockdown followed by back-to-work flows,
accompanied by masks, social distancing and the full use of China’s state
surveillance systems to test, trace and quarantine any carriers of the virus to
keep it contained until a vaccine can provide herd immunity.
We
seem to be opting for a more democratic version of the China model — but in a
totally haphazard, every-state-for-itself manner.
What
are our prospects of success?, I asked Dr. Vivek Murthy, Obama’s surgeon
general, who has just published a thoughtful and timely book, “Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a
Sometimes Lonely World.”
“Even
if we can’t be as aggressive as China in terms of surveillance and testing, the
truth is, we are at best only 10 percent of the way there. Simply put, we are
behind,” said Murthy.
Yes,
a strategy of gradually lifting lockdowns based on different risk categories
can make sense, he added, but only if every state has in place widely available
testing that generates rapid results — results that are efficiently turned over
to teams empowered to immediately trace and then quarantine the infected or the
most vulnerable, in big towns and small, to block any further spread of
Covid-19.
“Speed is everything,” said Murthy.
“Time lost equals lives lost.”
The number of tests we are
doing — which Trump is always boasting about — is irrelevant unless you can
reliably and quickly get a test when and where you need it, and the results can
be converted into efficient tracing of others who might be infected.
“By
that measure we are falling far short,” said Murthy. “It is your ability to
find an infected person through testing — and then all their contacts — that
matters most.”
That’s
because the biggest challenge we face in America today is “community spread,”
explained Murthy. “Consider a diabetic parent living in a small home with three
children who need to go back to school and the other parent needs to go back to
work. How do we open up safely and prevent them from bringing the disease home?
Practically speaking, how do we actually protect the vulnerable?”
Murthy
suggests the federal government do a version of what China did: rent empty
hotels to provide quarantine options to the most vulnerable or those infected
and hire some of the massive numbers of unemployed workers to become part of
tracing teams in every state under the lead of public health experts.
In
sum, if we are going to save the most lives while getting the most people back
to work to prevent an epidemic of unemployment, depression and despair, it is
going to require a federally coordinated, democratic version of the China
strategy.
But
Trump resists that kind of science-based, nationally coordinated approach,
because it serves him politically to urge his supporters to resist his own
administration’s health guidelines.
Trump
seems to think he can bluster, bluff and talk out of both sides of his mouth
with Mother Nature — the way he did in real estate and has done on so many
issues as president, when his party could always cover for him.
But
it doesn’t work that way with Mother Nature. She is not a contestant on “The
Apprentice.” She is just chemistry, biology and physics. We’re the contestants
on her show. We don’t get to fire her. She gets to fire us.
She
throws viruses, hurricanes, floods, droughts, heat waves and pandemics at us to
sort out who’s the fittest. And the ones who survive have one thing, and one
thing only, in common: They are the most adaptive at generating the chemistry,
biology and physics needed to meet the challenge.
That’s all that matters. All those who
can’t, get fired or, rather, are returned to the manufacturer.