We humans aren’t exactly a suicidal species, but we come close.
We’ve invented weapons to destroy ourselves. We regularly wage large wars that kill many of our own species. We refuse to stop destroying our own habitat. Climate change will end our way of life, but we’re not going to stop it. And we know where future pandemics will come from, but we’re not going to prevent them.
Leading the charge over the cliff is stupid Republicans.
It seems that every time you see something inexplicably stupid and self-destructive, Republicans are lurking in the background. Take Covid-19, for example. They didn’t cause it, and I’m not suggesting they did, but they aggravated it with huge consequences. In our own country, a million dead, and losses in the trillions.
It started small.
“On December 30, 2019, per the World Health Organization, there were two confirmed cases of what would become known as Covid-19,” Vox says. “One week later, there were 46. A week after that, 134. A week after that, 2,028. A week after that, 14,565. By the beginning of March, the cumulative global caseload had hit six digits, and by the end of March it was over a million.”
Let’s pause here, but just briefly. The reason Covid-19 spread so fast is because it’s a respiratory virus transmitted from person to person through the air, and people are crammed together in close proximity in cities, workspaces, and public transport, so they’re breathing shared air. Bingo. A huge number of people are exposed in a very short period of time, in a manner uncannily resembling nuclear fission.
As the Vox article points out, “Covid-19 went from being a very small problem affecting a handful of patients to a widespread pandemic at alarming speed,” because that’s a feature — they call it a “particular danger” — of any contagious respiratory pandemic, i.e., “the more time that passes before you can mount an effective response, the faster outbreaks will get out of hand and the more painful it will be to bring it back under control.”
On the other hand, by intervening early, we could “prevent the next pathogen with the pandemic potential of SARS-CoV-2 from wreaking the same kind of havoc on the world.” That, Vox says, “is the key lesson from Covid: We need to go faster.” For example, “One estimate in May 2020 found that instituting social distancing policies just two weeks earlier in March of that year could have prevented about 83 percent of deaths in the U.S. up to early May, potentially saving tens of thousands of people.”
Think that’s going to happen next time? Two years and a million U.S. deaths later, Republicans still won’t get vaccinated or cooperate with masking and social distancing this time. And they’ve taken Covid-19 booster shot funding hostage for their immigration demands (see story here). Democracy, by its nature, is messy — but it shouldn’t be this messy. We have a character problem here.
Not all humans are stupid. Some are very smart and well-informed, especially those in the medical profession. They already know what will cause the next pandemic, and that another one is coming if we don’t head it off at the pass. And that “next time will require a faster response from governments and a longer view from policymakers, who need to see that a dollar spent on prevention today will save many more dollars and lives in the future.”
“Speed and time are of the essence,” the Vox article says. “The reality, as we see this pandemic fade in the rear view, is that the fight against the next one begins now.”
No, it won’t. Not a chance. The reality is you won’t get a cent from the Republicans in Congress today for that, even if they get their immigration demands met. You just won’t. Prevention isn’t in their DNA. These are people who won’t turn on a water tap when their own house is on fire. I blame that on stupidity, generally speaking, but it’s more particularly due to cussedness, a subtype of stupidity.
Here’s something I didn’t know before I read the Vox article: The Covid-19 vaccine was developed “in a weekend.” That’s right, a weekend. How? Because medical researchers had plenty of warning that something like Covid-19 was coming.
There were the 2002-2003 SARS and 2012 MERS outbreaks. “In response, vaccine researchers created candidates to vaccinate against SARS and MERS, and began testing them in phase 1 trials,” which showed they were safe and produced immune responses. And researchers at Texas Children’s Hospital had a SARS vaccine candidate ready for trials but “ran out of money before they could test it on people.”
While these weren’t Covid-19 vaccines per se, they could have bought crucial time by providing partial protection until a specific vaccine for Covid-19 was available. That’s water over the dam, or under the bridge, depending on where you’re standing. The relevance, and point of mentioning it, is to do better next time.
How? Vox says, “Here’s the crux: For vaccines and antivirals targeting hypothetical future pandemic pathogens, we can absolutely do phase 1 and 2 trials years in advance. Doing so means being able to dive right into phase 3 at the emergence of the next pandemic, saving humanity precious months.”
Ain’t gonna happen, any more than we’ll stop climate change, save the oceans, or stop fighting among ourselves.
Read the article here, but out of intellectual curiosity, not for hope or inspiration. I’ll be less cynical and more hopeful when we start electing better politicians, but for that to happen, we need better voters.