Apparently I live on a different planet than a lot of people

A Washington Post article said yesterday that "Some of the emerging [Trump administration] policies have been driven by backlash to the covid-19 response, after Trump made clear his disdain for the nation’s public health infrastructure. He and allies have said the U.S. approach to the virus, including mask and vaccine mandates and school shutdowns, was heavy-handed, a position that some Democrats now share too."

Although that sentiment is nothing new, I continue be dumbfounded by the notion that the country's response to Covid, a once-in-a-century (we hope) pandemic, was "heavy-handed." There were almost 900,000 daily reported cases in January of 2022. There were 1.35 million cases reported on January 10 of that year. Daily hospitalizations peaked at around 163,000 that same month. Daily deaths were around 2,600. In January 2021, daily deaths were well over 3,000. A 9/11's worth of deaths. Every. Single. Day. The highest daily death count that month was 4,197.

In the U.S., more than 1.1 million people have died of Covid. During its rampage it became the third leading cause of death, behind heart disease and cancer. Life expectancy in the U.S. declined by 2.7 years between 2019 and 2021.

So I remain flabbergasted by claims of over-reaction. By my lights, protecting the public from such catastrophic events is a vital role of the public health infrastructure, and of government. Many who disparage that role are apparently too stupid to realize they are likely alive today as a consequence of the government's "heavy-handedness."

But set that aside. The article also said "the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was told Friday to lay off an estimated 10 percent of its staff, including nearly an entire class of “disease detectives” — the infectious-disease experts charged with helping spot the next epidemic." [Update: More recent reporting by the New York Times says the "disease detectives" are apparently being spared, but vast numbers of other public heath researchers and scientists are being summarily fired.]

Current serious public health concerns include the rising incidence of avian influenza, which some fear could become the world's next deadly pandemic. The disease has ravished egg laying flocks (it's why egg prices are so high), has been working its way through dairy cattle herds, and is increasingly infecting humans (one has died) that come into contact with those herds. Should the virus acquire the mutations needed to spread easily from person to person, it's off to the pandemic races.

There's more. "Global health leaders have warned about a new outbreak of Ebola virus in Uganda and other emerging outbreaks overseas," said the Post article.

And Trump's move to pull the U.S. out of the World Health Organization will hamper our ability to coordinate with other countries as diseases spread.

As an aside, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now confirmed as HHS secretary, has said the U.S. should pause infectious disease research for 10 years. Kennedy wants to concentrate instead of chronic diseases. Because of course we can't do both.

Also worth noting is that USAID, the world's largest foreign aid organization, has a large and crucial role in strengthening disease surveillance systems globally, particularly in developing countries. USAID, which Trump is in the process of shutting down, is vitally involved in detecting the emergence of the next pandemic.

Trump has also gratuitously announced he'll withhold federal aid from schools that have Covid mandates, which the Post notes is largely moot, since most such mandates were removed almost two years ago.

This is what passes for leadership now. But what right do I have to complain? We knew this was what we were getting, and chose it anyway.

Copyright (C) 2024 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

 

And don't drink bleach, either

In a press conference the day after the the DC plane crash that killed 67, Donald Trump riffed about its cause. His conclusion: DEI. "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" was the probable culprit.

Trump offered that opinion on no evidence at all. He just made it up, inflaming ongoing DEI discourse, falsely blaming his predecessors, lying about his own record, and generally doing all the despicable things we expect him to do. One reporter challenged him: "Mr. President, you have today blamed the diversity elements, but then told us that you weren’t sure that the controllers made any mistake…. I’m trying to figure out how you can come to the conclusion right now that diversity had something to do with this crash."

"Because I have common sense,” Trump said, "and, unfortunately, a lot of people don’t."

The very first thing that occurred to me, as Trump uttered those words, was: Is that the same "common sense" that caused him to wonder, before a live national television audience in 2020, whether ingesting strong sanitizers (like bleach, or perhaps Lysol), or somehow getting ultraviolet light inside the body, might be useful in combating Covid? Was Trump now displaying the same keen insight and shrewd intuition that he did back then, while treating us all to the amazing workings of his perspicacious mind?

And what a mind. Just ask him. Back then he acknowledged that although he's "not a doctor," he's "like a person who has a good you-know-what." He said this while twirling his finger in the vicinity of his head. His White House coronavirus adviser, Deborah Birx, who is a doctor, sat there stone faced on the stage, in seeming disbelief, as Trump suggested she look into his brilliant ideas.

Watching at home, I groaned in dismay.

Trump is so full of himself that he has neither the self-awareness nor the discipline to not say stupid things out loud before the American people and the world. (Stupid things are best kept to oneself, and perhaps examined in private with trusted, expert confidants, until one achieves a basic measure of mental clarity. For a variety of excellent reasons and the good of everybody, a president, when speaking publicly, should avoid utterances that would subject him to mockery.)

Anyway, some things never change. At a press conference with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump proposed that the approximately two million Palestinian inhabits of Gaza not be allowed to rebuild in their own sovereign territory but, rather, should be re-settled in various other countries (Egypt and Jordan, for example). As for Gaza, which Israel has bombed to rubble over the past 15 months, the United States would take possession and indeed ownership of it, and develop it into what Reuters called "an international beach resort" that Trump said could be "the Riviera of the Middle East." (All the particulars—the what and why and how and for whom and indeed WTF remained unspecified.)

There is much to be said about this hare-brained idea. Such as that Trump is, quite incredibly, advocating ethnic cleansing. Removing Palestinians from their land and dispersing them around the region would destroy them as a unified people and be a criminal monstrosity, recorded for all time as such by history.

Also extraordinary was that, like ingesting bleach, this outlandish proposal was clearly vetted only in the screwball mind of Trump himself, before being barfed out onto the world. This is not how serious countries and serious presidents conduct their affairs, especially when such grave humanitarian and geopolitical considerations are involved. A state press conference is not a whiteboard on which previously unconsidered brainstorming takes place.

Obviously, for right-wing Israelis depopulating Gaza would be a dream come true. For everybody else, the idea was crackpot lunacy. Jordan and Egypt want nothing to do with a flood of Palestinian refugees who would have to be permanently assimilated. King Abdullah II of Jordan rejected any attempt to displace Palestinians and annex their land. Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said he would back Gaza's reconstruction but not mass displacement. Saudi Arabia expressed its “unequivocal rejection” of attempts to displace Palestinians and reiterated that it would not establish diplomatic ties with Israel in the absence of an independent Palestinian state.

France reiterated its opposition to any forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, calling it a violation of international law, as did Germany. The UK emphasized that Palestinian civilians must be able to return to their homes and rebuild their lives. Spain and Ireland echoed calls for a two-state solution. And so forth.

Experts noted the obvious: Such a plan would be a severe violation of international law. "Forced deportation or transfer of a civilian population is a violation of international humanitarian law, a war crime and a crime against humanity," wrote The New York Times. "The prohibition against forced deportations of civilians has been a part of the law of war since the Lieber Code, a set of rules on the conduct of hostilities, was promulgated by Union forces during the U.S. Civil War. It is prohibited by multiple provisions of the Geneva Conventions, and the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II defined it as a war crime."

"The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court lists forcible population transfers as both a war crime and a crime against humanity," the Times continued. "And if the displacement is focused on a particular group based on their ethnic, religious or national identity, then it is also persecution — an additional crime."

Unsurprisingly, the administration is now walking it all back. [Update 2025-02-10: Or maybe not. Trump is now returning to the idea, and suggesting he could cut aid to Jordan and Egypt if they don't take displaced Gazans. Trump told Fox's Bret Baier that Gazans would never be allowed to return, and that the U.S. would develop Gaza. "It would be a beautiful piece of land," Trump said.] It was just a lot of talk, said some Republican politicians. (But why must we endure such ignorant "talk" from our president?) Secretary of State Marco Rubio twice suggested that Trump was only proposing to clear out and rebuild Gaza, not claim indefinite possession of the territory. (False. I listened to Trump's press conference. He stressed that the U.S. would own and develop Gaza.)

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said "the president has not committed to putting boots on the ground in Gaza," but she did not say how the United States could take control of the territory without using military force, not least because Hamas has not been destroyed, and indeed has substantially reconstituted itself with fresh recruits.

Of course, the problem of what to do about a decimated Gaza is starkly real. "Trump’s proposal for Gaza is met with disbelief, opposition and sarcasm, but as he often does, in his brutal and clumsy way, he raises a real question: What to do when two million civilians find themselves in a field of ruins, full of explosives and corpses?" said former French ambassador to Washington, Gérard Araud.

But it isn't as if the "question" wasn't already obvious, needing but for Trump to raise it even if in a "brutal and clumsy" way. A serious and urgent international discussion of what's next is clearly required. But what nobody needs is a U.S. president throwing half-baked cockamamie at the wall in public.

And just to be clear, don't drink bleach.

Copyright (C) 2024 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.