A Tale of Two Epidemics
Article by Anonymous. Edited by Howard Metzenberg
Foreward by the Editor:
This piece is by an anonymous author, one who may have a professional background in health care, public health, or health administration. He or she launched it anonymously on the Internet, asking friends to spread it far and wide. In an era when civil servants and scientists are expected to put loyalty to the Trump Administration first, this author may have feared for their career in a time when truth tellers and whistle blowers face retribution and retaliation.
The piece has been circulating for over a week, in several versions, and its provenance is now uncertain. Because it was factual and skillfully organized, but wanting for some design, polish, and editing, I decided to take on the task myself and publish it as an editor. I updated it slightly, because today we will record 1 million cases world wide and 250,000 in the United States, and I gave it a title. The disease continues to grow exponentially, with cases and deaths doubling in as little as three days where there are new outbreaks.
The author’s work begins:
Forgive the length, but I decided to write up a little history lesson for everyone on both sides of our political divide. I think it’s important that we understand the truth, especially come November when it’s time to vote. We have time on our hands to read, right?
In December 2013, an 18-month-old boy in a village in remote Guinea was bitten by a bat. He fell ill with a mysterious illness characterized by hemorrhagic fever, blackened stools, and vomiting, and two days later he died. Soon there were five more fatal cases.
As Ebola spread across the borders of Guinea into neighboring Liberia and Sierra Leone in July 2014, President Obama activated the Emergency Operations Center at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. The CDC immediately deployed personnel to West Africa to coordinate a response that included vector tracing, testing, education, logistics, and communication.
Altogether, the CDC under President Obama trained 24,655 medical workers in West Africa, educating them on how to prevent and control the disease even before a single case left Africa or reached the United States.
Working with the United Nations and the World Health Organization, Obama ordered the re-routing of travelers heading to the United States through specific airports that were equipped to handle mass testing.
Back home in America, more than 6,500 professionals trained to confront a potential pandemic through mock outbreaks and practice scenarios. That training took place before a single case hit America.
Three months after President Obama activated this unprecedented response, on September 30, 2014, the first case arrived in the United States. Thomas Eric Duncan had traveled from West Africa to Dallas to visit family, and had somehow slipped through the testing protocol. He was immediately detected and isolated in a hospital equipped to care for him. After he died a week later, two nurses who had treated him contracted Ebola and later recovered.
Several weeks later, an American physician who had just returned from Guinea after working with Doctors Without Borders to contain the virus was diagnosed and treated at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. He survived.
Several other international health workers, who had risked their lives to help contain the outbreak, were medically evacuated to the United States and treated successfully in secure facilities, without incident. Donald Trump, not yet a candidate for president, but already using Twitter, was harshly critical of these humane actions. “Ebola patient will be brought to the U.S. in a few days — now I know for sure that our leaders are incompetent. KEEP THEM OUT OF HERE!” he tweeted at the time (reported in Newsweek, 2/25/2020).
All of the protocols established by CDC worked, and the Ebola outbreak was contained.
The Ebola epidemic of 2014 could easily have become a pandemic and a global catastrophe. Thanks to prompt action by the United States government under Obama, it never did. Those cases were the only cases to reach North American shores. Obama did what needed to be done, beginning months before the first case arrived.
Ebola is even more contagious than Covid-19. Had President Obama not prepared for an epidemic, millions of Americans might have perished from Ebola’s painful hemorrhagic fever, ending in a horror movie death accompanied by bloody diarrhea and bleeding from the eyes, ears, nose, and chest. Survivors would have faced debilitation and months of recovery.
The irony is, because Obama did these things, we don’t even remember that he did them. Ebola was contained, and the epidemic never reached us.
What do we know so far about Covid-19, and the Trump Administration’s response?
Several years before the disease was first reported in China, Trump disbanded the pandemic response team that Obama had put in place. He cut funding to the CDC, and he reduced the United States contribution to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Trump and John Bolton removed Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, the member in charge of America’s response to infectious diseases, from the National Security Council, terminating a position created by the Obama administration. An expert in global health, Ziemer had served in both the Bush and Obama administrations. A position for an American CDC specialist embedded in China’s health administration, a position designed to foster cooperation in public health, was also left unfilled.
When the Covid-19 outbreak started in China, Trump assumed it was China’s problem and sent no research, supplies, or assistance of any kind. We were in a trade war, so why should he help them?
On January 3, 2020, the Trump Administration received its first briefing from American overseas intelligence organizations that the outbreak was much worse than China was admitting, and that it would definitely hit our country if something wasn’t done to prevent it. White House officials were unable to get his attention for weeks, and then Trump ignored the report, not trusting his own government’s intelligence.
As the disease began spreading to Europe, the World Health Organization offered tests to the United States. Trump turned them down, claiming that private companies in America would make the tests “better” if they were actually needed. But he never ordered U.S. companies to make the tests, and they had no profit motive to do so on their own.
According to scientists at Yale and several other medical schools, when they asked for permission to work on their own testing protocols and potential treatments or vaccines, they were denied permission by Trump’s FDA.
When Trump first spoke of Covid-19, before scientists had even agreed upon a name for the disease, he told CNBC, “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.” Less than two weeks later, he told Sean Hannity, “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”
Trump continued to project such optimism as cases mounted. At a White House press conference on February 26th, reported in the New York Times, he claimed, “We’re going down, not up. We’re going very substantially down, not up. As they get better, we take them off the list, so that we’re going to be pretty soon at only five people. And we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time.”
When doctors and scientists objected that this was a mistake, Trump claimed that their message was conjured, after the failure of impeachment, to make him look bad. At a South Carolina rally on the eve of the Democratic primary, he described the Coronavirus scare as a hoax by liberals. The disease continued to spread, but he took no action to get more testing.
What Trump did do was stop flights from China from coming here. According to scientists and doctors, this move was too late and accomplished nothing. By the time of his travel restrictions, the disease was worldwide and was already spreading exponentially in the U.S, transmitted by Americans, and not by Chinese people as Trump would like you to believe.
Today as I am posting this, on Wednesday April 2, 2020, we are crossing the threshold of 1 million confirmed cases worldwide and 250,000 in the United States. The actual number in the United States is undoubtedly much higher, but we don’t know because we still don’t have enough tests.
Why don’t we have enough tests? Remember that Trump turned down the established and accurate tests from WHO and prevented American universities from developing their own? Remember that Trump had cut the funding to the CDC, and was even proposing further cuts in February 2020?
When President Trump goes before the camera and blames the previous administration, he poisons the truth. How dare Trump blame the Covid-19 pandemic on Obama. He has no one to blame but himself.
Trump and his allies also try to place the blame on China, where the disease began. China handled it poorly and dishonestly, and even covered it up at the outset. So it’s fair to blame the government of China for its initial mishandling of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and perhaps for withholding later information.
But that misses the point. Obama didn’t blame Ebola on Guinea. He helped West African nations stop it. Trump let the disease invade the United States. And he is still not doing all he could to save lives.
Trump talks about invoking the Defense Production Act, but hasn’t actually done so except in one case. He is making the same mistake twice — waiting until it’s too late to take action. Invoking that act would require factories with the right equipment and know-how to start producing life saving ventilators for our hospitals, protective masks and gear for front line health workers. And the plus is it would actually employ people to do so.
As cases of Covid-19 grow exponentially in the United States, hospitals are desperate to obtain ventilators for critically ill patients, health care works face critical shortages of protective gear, and decision makes are working blind because test supplies are inadequate. Physicians and hospitals are preparing for the time, perhaps only days away, when they will be forced to ration care, to decide who lives and who dies, denying access to lifesaving equipment and resources to one patient in order to save another.
Editor’s afterward:
Because its anonymous author urged that it be distributed far and wide, I declare that to the best of my knowledge this article is in the public domain, that it was intended to be widely read. Furthermore, my own editing and refinements to the text are in the public domain. I have included images that are in the public domain, or that represent fair use in linking to other public sources. I invite the original author to come forward and claim credit.
Howard Metzenberg, editor. Seattle, Washington. April 2, 2020