Arthur Alan Wolk’s Thoughts on COVID-19
This virus began in China. It was kept secret by the Chinese Government, and those who sought to make it public were silenced. Those who tried to inform the world of its dangers were not to be heard from again.
When news of it trickled out, our Government through the Centers for Disease Control, the State Department and to some extent the FDA chose, instead of treating victims in place, to bring the virus to our shores in what can best be described as the most incompetent, unscientific and medically inappropriate manner.
The Centers for Disease Control has never gotten the flu strain for flu shots right, has proven itself utterly incompetent in the handling of other viruses and even Ebola, and is more interested in getting the numbers right than developing a vaccine or treatment regimens for this virus. The CDC changes its mind every day and has been schizophrenic in its response to this challenge. It was a State Department doctor who challenged the methodology of the CDC in bringing American victims home from China, a Department of our Government that has no legal responsibility for this designing this procedure or making this decision. The CDC went along with it, bringing sick people to our shores when in most instances, their symptoms were virtually benign, mild cold symptoms, aches and pains, mild cough and fever for several days, and thus didn’t need to be transported here before they were completely well.
The media bear great responsibility for this upside-down method of addressing this virus as well. Every day, thousands of times a day, we are told that this virus that mimics the common cold more than the dreaded Bubonic Plague of Medieval times will overwhelm our hospitals, put down our emergency services and cause thousands maybe millions of deaths.
What the media ignore is that most people who have contracted this virus have few if any symptoms and those that do mimic flu or cold-like symptoms that we experience every year in this country and all others.
Each year in our world, 51 million people get the flu, and six hundred thousand dies worldwide. This virus is no different, maybe even less virulent, and never before has the world been turned upside down because of it.
The Coronavirus is not new. It has been known for decades, but while this strain may be new, no one, not our Government, not the Chinese, not one civilized country has prepared for it or warned of it but instead now in the face of irresponsible media and worse vacuous comments by those in charge, the CDC and others, our economy is shut down, our society is shut down, our lives are changed forever, millions will needlessly suffer unemployment and worse.
Physicians who have a responsibility not to inflame the public and be accurate in their public statements become complicit in the media’s insatiable appetite for hyperbole and exaggeration.
Physicians who belong treating patients or operating on them in their fields become instant media personalities by hyping the consequences which have yet to be realized and may never all enhance their other profession, which is time on T.V.
Shame on them. They are complicit in the destruction of our society. We are far from our hospitals being overwhelmed. We are far from being without necessary medical equipment. We are far from being without the wherewithal to address this virus. That is media hype.
We are the United States of America. We can ramp up our procurement of necessary medical supplies overnight so long as the Government stays out of it with its cumbersome rules and regulations for procurement.
We can learn a lot from this crisis. We depend on the Chinese for too much. The people who gave us this virus and SARS before it and others by their hideous sanitation practices and Government controlled hiding of critical information necessary to address their homegrown diseases have trillions of dollars of our money made by stealing our jobs, destroying our industrial base and stealing our intellectual property. The Chinese should pay the world for this careless, reckless, and indefensible theft of our society as well, our economy as well, our well being too. That will require the passage of legislation to deny China the benefit of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which protects other Governments from suits by Americans.
That will never happen because our politicians on both sides of the aisle are cowards when it comes to protecting the rights of the average American, now the woman and man without a job, without an IRA or pension, if they ever had one, without medical insurance as well.
What has been the Chinese response? To blame us, the United States, for planting this virus on its soil! What else? Threatening not to send, read that sell, the drugs we need to fight the disease! The world is not a village and never was. We need to start and end the supply chain right here in America because when the times get tough, we can depend only upon ourselves.
By shutting down our society, the interaction of our people, the workplace, and schools as well, our politicians, most of whom never had a real job, are making the effects of this virus worse. It will not mutate and go away because it is not allowed to spread and become less and less virulent, like some epidemiologists predict. While some cold symptoms and a few days out of work randomly are not good, it is light years better than shutting down the whole country. Our fellow Americans will never recover from this. The resentment from the have nots is building. The country is armed because of the fear by those less affected that others will violently lash out in that resentment. Our Government, by its incompetence and the media by its greed have sown the seeds of revolution, anger, and previously unheard of poverty upon those who have worked so hard to shoulder the great burden of our society and its insatiable appetite for money from the ever-shrinking middle class.
This response to a virus that has proved to be no worse than any other version of the flu has been outrageously stupid, unscientific, ignorant of the lessons of history, and irresponsible. It has and will destroy the greatest society the world has ever known because that same society created institutions manned by a collection of empty suits who fall all over each other, dressed in their version of phony civilian uniforms like tin horn dictators, while shaking their heads, like so many bobbleheads, in approval so the cameras do not mistake their agreement with Draconian measures that will and have accomplished nothing.
These are trying times for we Americans. We must make ourselves heard before it’s too late. We must make our politicians, whether on the right or the left, accountable for their self-destructive, dishonest, and foolish responses to this challenge.
These opinions are my own and do not represent the views of everyone at The Wolk Law Firm. I am a blessed man, having come from nothing. I know what it’s like to be hungry, have no money, have no power, wear my brother’s hand me down clothes while studying to be a lawyer, working full time while going to school and all the things that make we Americans great, succeeding in the face of adversity.
We have the opportunity to win this battle and be stronger and better than ever. We are Americans, and we are blessed by our righteousness and devotion to what is right and good.
Speak up, be heard, we are still “One Nation, under God, with Liberty and Justice for All,” at least for a little while longer.
Arthur Alan Wolk
3/18/20
