Weekly Screed #1002

 Pandemic notes 6.0: The Chernobylization of Covid-19

by David Benjamin

“This… ‘mutant swarm,’ this ‘quasi species,’ had always held within it the potential to kill, and it had killed. Now, all over the world, the virus had gone through roughly the same number of passages through humans. All over the world, the virus was adapting to humans, achieving maximum efficiency. And all over the world, the virus was turning lethal.”

— John  M. Barry, The Great Influenza

MADISON, Wis. — Perhaps the most significant development, for people trying to cope with the long-term effects of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, is the breathtaking inequality of vaccine distribution globally. Today, the rich nations of the developed West, the U.S.A. foremost among them, are awash in the vaccine doses being pumped out by the giants of Big Pharma. 

According to a New York Times article by Selam Gebrekidan and Matt Apuzzo, wealthy and middle-income Western nations jumped the line for vaccine acquisition, monopolizing 90 percent of the supply and shoving struggling nations in Asia, Africa and South America out — into the cold, where they “will have to wait years.”

Greg Gonsalves, a Yale epidemiologist, was quoted: “It was like a run on toilet paper. Everybody was like, ‘Get out of my way. I’m gonna get that last package of Charmin.’ We just ran for the doses.”

President Joe Biden articulated an “America First” attitude toward vaccine distribution: “We’re going to start off making sure Americans are taken care of first. But we’re then going to try and help the rest of the world.”

In other words, “The line starts back there, Uganda. Cool your heels, Bangladesh.”

In essence, Western leaders from Biden to Boris Johnson and Angela Merkel have created, outside their NATO inoculation bubble a sort of Covid-19 Chernobyl, a swath of poorer countries where fear and contamination will reign over the lives of ordinary folks ’til the middle of this decade. In these toxic zones, the coronavirus will thrive unfettered, free to inhabit its human hosts, reproduce willy-nilly and morph a thousand variations on itself. Some of these no-man’s-land mutations might not stay put. They could migrate to the vaccinated regions. They might even prove innovative enough to defeat the known vaccines and re-infect the smug Charmin-hoarders of the bourgeoisie. 

In sum, there remains a lingering threat that, if leaders of nations rich and sort of rich, as well as their public-health guardians, are not fiercely vigilant, we could still face a resurgence of this chameleon disease. 

When I find myself waxing optimistic about the apparently waning pandemic, I flip through a book I read when the plague was young, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Greatest Plague in History by John M. Barry. For some reason, I love disease books, and Barry’s chronicle of the flu pandemic of 1918 is one of the best ever. Perhaps most instructive for the current plateau in the SARS-CoV-2 plague is what happened in September 1918. 

At that moment, the worst of that ghastly pandemic appeared to have passed. The first wave originated early in 1918 among U.S. Army troops preparing for carnage in World War I. It spread worldwide when these doughboys were shipped to Europe to fight. The flu became so rampant, among soldiers on both sides of the war, that battles had to be postponed. Influenza actually answered the question: What if they gave a war and everybody called in sick?

However, that first wave was not really a killer. Thousands died, of course, but most survived. It wasn’t ’til the early fall of 1918 when a mutant version came ashore with infected sailors debarking in ports “from Boston to Bombay.” The new strain, swift and merciless, spread from there, catching complacent civic leaders and public health officials flatfooted and hapless.

In 1918, the official response to the pandemic was in many instances more Trumpian than Donald Trump’s callous campaign of Covid denial. President Woodrow Wilson, obsessed with the war, never acknowledged the existence of the pandemic. Moreover, he exacerbated it by sending American soldiers off to a war that was virtually over. Overloaded onto pestilent troop ships, thousands of doughboys died before laying eyes on Europe. 

Perhaps the poster boy for obliviousness in the face of a murderous plague was Wilmer Krusen, director of the Philadelphia Department of Public Health and Charities. When sailors started showing up dead in Philadelphia hospitals, Krusen — in terms that would echo down the century to the White House in 2020 — declared that the victims had not died of the pandemic influenza, but merely, “old-fashioned influenza or grip.” “Strenuous flu,” anyone?

Not only did Krusen, a cock-eyed optimist if ever there was, dismiss the September resurgence of a virus that had mutated from dangerous to deadly, he actively made it worse. His big coup was the approval of a September 28 war bond parade in Philly at the moment the virus was spreading alarm throughout the medical community. Prescient doctors hinted to Krusen that the moment might not be auspicious for a vast public gathering of unmasked people. 

Krusen shrugged off the warnings and greenlit the parade — “two miles of bands, flags, Boy Scouts, women’s auxiliaries, marines, sailors and soldiers.” It was sailors and soldiers who had vectored the influenza into every nation of the world. Many of them, as they marched to Wilmer Krusen’s orders, were already sick. Everybody in Philly came to the big parade. Thousands fell ill within days afterward, hundreds of them dying with shocking swiftness. 

While the disease swept more and more Philadelphians into the overcrowded graveyard, Krusen whistled on. By October 5, the death count hit 254, which prompted Krusen’s public-health spokespeople to say, “The peak of the influenza epidemic had been reached,” until the next day, when the total spiked to 289. Next day, the newspapers said, “Believing that the peak of the epidemic has passed, health officials are confident.”

Next day? The death toll cracked 300. A few days later, after 428 flu fatalities, Krusen seized the moment and said, “Don’t get frightened or panic-stricken over exaggerated reports.” Shortly thereafter, the influenza exaggerated its daily toll to more than 800. Philly stayed panic-stricken for months.

In a new century, with a new pandemic, our contemporary Wilmer Krusens were well-meaning ditherers named Dr. Robert Redfield, the now disgraced director of the Center for Disease Control under Trump, and Dr. Deborah Birx, Trump’s coronavirus response chief, who sat cringing and dumbfounded in the White House press briefing room as her boss rambled on about injecting bleach into human arteries as a remedy for Covid-19. Birx told ABC News interviewer Terry Moran, “Frankly, I didn’t know how to handle that episode.” 

Frankly, neither Birx nor Redfield knew how to handle Covid-19 from the moment almost 400 days — and 530,000 deaths — ago, when Trump stood beside them and declared that the disease had affected a few people from China and it would “disappear, like a miracle.”

The news that nobody in the so-called Third World will have access to vaccine this year, or next year either — because rich countries are hogging the serum —  guarantees that SARS-CoV-2 will not, probably never, disappear like a miracle. And if America, Canada, Europe, China, Russia, etc., continue to screw up vaccine distribution, we could be looking at Willy Krusen’s Philly all over again, all over the world.