COVID-19 | The Virus that changed America and the World

Kenneth Foard McCallion

• Publisher: Bryant Park Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780692781517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Read the newest book from Kenneth F. McCallion, "a go-to source" featured in major media outlets including MSNBC, CNN, Netflix, The New York Times, USA Today, and more. "Kenneth McCallion may be one of the most influential people almost no one has heard of." RealClearInvestigations. In March 2020 the United States of America came to a screeching halt. After months of confusion and downplaying by officials, the COVID-19 death rate climbed high enough that it could no longer be ignored. Even after lockdowns were initiated, government officials continually issued confusing statements about face masks, testing, and vaccinations timelines, leaving the country increasingly panicked and vulnerable. In COVID-19: The Virus That Changed America and The World, renowned author, attorney, and healthcare infrastructure expert Kenneth Foard McCallion offers a fascinating and sweeping view of the COVID-19 pandemic, starting with an exploration of ancient plagues and tackling important and timely subjects such as racial disparities in the virus's impact, what COVID has revealed about the U.S. healthcare system, and how the pandemic has increased the wealth divide. Ultimately, COVID-19 sheds light on a virus response driven by wishful thinking, denial, and politics - one which will have a lasting impact on the U.S. and the world for generations to come.

1

The past is Prologue

During a White House press briefing on March 18, 2020, President Trump responded to criticism that his administration was unprepared for the coronavirus crisis, saying that the virus “snuck up on us.”1 The following day, Trump expressed the view that the virus was “something that just surprised the whole world,”2 later adding that the crisis was “uncharted territory” and “there’s never been anything like this in history.”3

Trump’s comments were wrong on several levels. First of all, plagues, epidemics, and pandemics have always been a part of human history, from ancient Greece and Rome to the Middle Ages, and well into the modern era. The Plague - or “Black Death” as it was called - killed at least 50 million people in the 14th century. That represented 60 percent of Europe’s entire population, making it the worst natural catastrophe in human history – so far. The Spanish Flu swept the world in 1918, killing between 20 and 50 million people, with one-fifth of the world’s population becoming infected by the deadly virus.

It is unlikely that the number of sick patients and fatalities arising from the COVID-19 pandemic will reach the deadly heights of the 1918 pandemic. However, the coronavirus has already infected and killed a large number of people in the U.S. and around the globe,4 driven one-third of humanity into virtual lockdown,5 and brought the economies of the United States and most of the rest of the world to their knees. This pandemic is destined to continue claiming more victims until there is an effective vaccine in place.6

Trump’s claim that the deadly pandemic battering the U.S. was a big “surprise” is also false. Experts both in and out of the federal government have warned of the possibility of a significant pandemic for at least the past two decades. These warnings stressed the devastating consequences that would follow if the country was not adequately prepared. The National Intelligence Council (NIC) warned in its 2004 version of “Global Trends” that it was only a matter of time before the U.S. would experience a pandemic as deadly as the 1918 influenza.7 It was projected that the virus would bring global travel and trade to a halt for an extended time, and would likely overwhelm health resources.

About ten years later, the Ebola crisis of 2014 led the Obama White House to form a global pandemic unit within the National Security Council. Its mission was to make sure that the federal government’s extensive resources were ready to be fully mobilized when the next pandemic reached the U.S. The Trump White House later disbanded this unit after John Bolton took over as Trump’s National Security Advisor in May 2018.

During President Trump’s tenure in the White House, a 2017 Pentagon plan was circulated among senior officials in the Trump administration. The plan identified “a novel respiratory disease,” such as influenza or coronavirus, as being “the most likely and significant threat” to the U.S.8 If prior studies were not enough to trigger an emergency preparedness plan, the U.S. National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI)’s warning should have set off the alarms. NCMI issued a confidential report in November 2019, one month before the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China. The report warned the White House, Pentagon, and the National Security Council that the spreading coronavirus disease in China would be a “cataclysmic event.”9 NCMI stressed the outbreak in China was only the initial stage of a global pandemic.10

When the COVID-19 epidemic inevitably reached the U.S. in January 2020, the U.S. acted as if it was paralyzed and unprepared to mobilize the resources necessary to respond rapidly to this threat. The Trump White House squandered the first two critical months – from January through at least March 2020 – with a virtually incoherent stream of confusing public statements. These statements ranged from outright denials that the U.S. had any coronavirus problem to expressions of wishful thinking that the virus would quickly “wash” through the country and then disappear.11 Most of these ill-conceived or intentionally false statements came directly from Trump. He and his closest advisors claimed media reports of the spread of the deadly virus were a “Democratic hoax” or “fake news.” Trump claimed a liberal and hostile mainstream media perpetrated the hoax with the malign intent of damaging his presidency. Trump tried to both downplay the issue and to support his claim that the media was “over-reacting” by falsely commenting that the contagion was no more dangerous than the common flu.

The White House’s dissemination of false information and blatant political opportunism amid the growing crisis was at odds with reliable details the White House had been receiving for several years. The country had conducted at least three “dry runs” on how to handle a pandemic over the past five decades. Based upon these studies and “tabletop” exercises, agencies within the federal government had in-depth institutional knowledge and a plan as to what needed to be done when the next virus-driven pandemic hit. The U.S.’s successful responses to previous epidemics and pandemics – including the reactions to the Asian Flu pandemic of 1957, the SARS epidemic of 2002-2004, the H1N1 Swine Flu pandemic of 2009, and the Ebola epidemic of 2014 - all left the federal government with a wealth of knowledge on how to respond to the next deadly virus.

Unfortunately, professional experts with institutional experience within federal agencies could not by themselves put an effective containment and response plan into place. Red flashing lights and sirens blaring their warnings could not be turned into a full-scale mobilization against this microbial attack until the White House gave the “go-ahead.” Tragically, that signal never came until it was too late, and even then, the federal response was sluggish and poorly coordinated.

In short, a review of the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus crisis amounted to a near “perfect storm” of errors, miscalculation, inattention, lack of political leadership, wishful thinking and sheer incompetence on the part of the White House and the relevant federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Health and Human Services Administration (HHS), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The CDC, for example, made the fateful, disastrous, and arrogant decision to develop its own coronavirus testing capability. In January and February 2020, the CDC shunned offers of assistance from the World Health Organization (W.H.O.), implying that the already-proven W.H.O. test was not good enough for America. The CDC also should have known that it did not have the in-house capability to mass produce the number of testing kits that would be necessary. The CDC then compounded this error by wasting critical weeks developing a test which, to everyone’s horror, was flawed and required several weeks to correct.

The CDC also rebuffed offers of assistance from hundreds of public, private, and university laboratories. These formidable resources could have been enlisted early on in this extremely time-sensitive battle. The decision was particularly puzzling, considering the federal government had previously partnered with private labs, academic labs, and companies in developing effective responses to prior pandemics. For example, during the 1957 Asian Flu crisis, the U.S. recruited private testing companies and labs to develop an effective vaccine for the virus even before it reached U.S. shores.12 This effort was spectacularly successful, in no small measure due to the public-private partnerships that were forged early on in the crisis. After a few months of research and development, the country had a vaccine ready to inoculate America’s schoolchildren before they returned to school in the fall of 1957.

In contrast, the CDC held the private commercial lab companies and university labs at arm’s length in responding to the coronavirus crisis. During the critical months of January and February 2020, the CDC and the FDA prevented these labs from developing their coronavirus tests by enforcing unnecessary regulatory roadblocks. Private and academic labs were required to go through a complex and agonizingly slow process of applying for their own “emergency use authorizations” (EUAs) from the FDA. Since the standard regulatory procedure to obtain a EUA can take weeks unless waived in the context of a national emergency, many of the best laboratories in the country were sidelined during this critical period.13 Meanwhile, the academic laboratories that already developed tests were unable to conduct their testing. Nor could these labs help the local, city, and state public health officials with their urgent testing needs, since federal regulations did not allow them to do so.

Despite all the warnings that a major national emergency was unfolding, the federal agencies inexplicably failed to see any pressing need to waive the usual regulations. As late as January 28, CDC Director Robert Redfield was telling state public health directors that “the virus is not spreading in the U.S. at this time,” because the CDC believed that the immediate health risk from COVID-19 to the general American public was relatively low.

As a result of the lack of any testing capability in the critical early weeks and months of the coronavirus crisis, the federal government, and most local, county, city, and state governments across the U.S., were left with insufficient and often misleading data as to the extent of the virus’s spread at the local, regional and national level. Many virus carriers were “asymptomatic” and could have been spreading the virus to dozens or perhaps hundreds of people without even knowing that they were infected. There were few if any effective mitigation measures that were available other then blanket “stay-at-home” orders applicable to everyone. In other words, the U.S. was flying without a compass through the dense fog of the crisis without any reliable information or data that could only come from widespread and effective testing.

The U.S.’s utter failure to develop and deploy sufficient testing capability was in sharp contrast to South Korea’s response, as well as that of several other countries. The South Korean government enlisted the support of private industry at an early stage in January 2020. They were able to engage in widespread and effective testing within weeks, making a significant difference in that country’s ability to contain and respond to the crisis. Indeed, the U.S. government had to finally swallow its pride in mid-April and request 750,000 testing kits from South Korea, some of which started to be received almost immediately.14 Still, by mid-April 2020, the critical early testing window was rapidly closing. The spread of the virus and the number of infections had already reached its peak in epicenters such as New York, New Jersey, Detroit (Michigan), and New Orleans (Louisiana).

The Trump administration also failed to take a leadership role in the implementation of any mitigation or “social distancing” rules. The administration left coronavirus response and mitigation to the cities, states, and counties, who were forced to make these critical decisions on their own. These age-old mitigation measures, such as “lockdowns” and quarantines, had...