The new book Nightmare Scenario limns a gruesome picture of the ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision inside a Trump administration confronted with a pandemic microbe several orders of magnitude better organized and more intelligent:
“One of the biggest flaws in the Trump administration’s response is that no one was in charge of the response,” Abutaleb and Paletta write. “Was it Birx, the task force coordinator? Was it Pence, head of the task force? Was it Trump, the boss? Was it Kushner, running the shadow task force until he wasn’t? Was it Marc Short or Mark Meadows, often at odds, rarely in sync?”
“Ultimately, there was no accountability, and the response was rudderless,” they conclude.
So...wait. We needed a whole book to tell us this?
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| The choice was to throw in a picture of Trump, or a picture of one of the Scoobies, and, duh, Velma is both way smarter and way-smokin'-hotter, so... |
For fuck's sake. This bloated nincompoop pranced around on live television suggesting that the solution to an epidemic pathogen was bleach, shoving lights up your ass, and malaria drugs while ignoring every single piece of public health knowledge about epidemic pathogens developed since the fucking Plague of Athens.
Everyone outside the bubbling MAGAt kool-ade vat knows that the simple stooge couldn't have figured out what he was supposed to do, and if he was told to sit down, shut up, and follow his epidemiologists' instructions how to do it would have just dipped some crap out of his diaper and thrown it at them like the shit-flinging toddler he is.
This is the least-difficult mystery that Scoobies ever solved. Trump did it, regardless of where the bug came from or how or why. He was told that a deadly pathogen was coming - by the damn Chinese premier, forgawdssake, so it wasn't like the guy didn't know what he was talking about - and he was too shit-scared that his rating would tank to actually do what the South Koreans did.
The problem here doesn't seem to be that there's no way to tell how these things happened or who was responsible. Instead it's more magical thinking; I don't WANT it to be that way, so I won't believe it.
Speaking of the whole "where it came from",question related to this magical thinking is the whole "Wuhan lab leak COVID genesis" thing.
Frankly, it isn't something I'm particularly spun up about. We know that biolabs have killed people before...but so have - a lot more often - zoonotic pathogens. The chance that this is an intentional PRC bioweapon are vanishingly slim. For one thing, you develop the vaccine FIRST, so you don't end up killing shitloads of your own troops (Unit 731 is holding on Line 2...) with your own pathogen. For another, a bioweapon that kills old, sick people and is usually ineffective against healthy young ones? Not much of a weapon.
No. The probability is that this is just another in the long line of zoonotic South Asian pathogens in the great SARS/MERS/seasonal flu tradition.
But. Even if it's not, even if this is something that was cooked up by the tricksy Chinamen, that doesn't tell the story the MAGAts want it to.
Because a lab leak doesn't mean we get to sling a nuke at the PRC. Or even fight one of those good and easy-to-win trade wars against them.
For because the world is bound with strands of aircraft aluminum and kerosene aviation fuel it means that it's in our interests to ensure that we 1) know as much as possible about what's going on in Chinese biolabs, and 2) ensure that those labs are as well-designed, well-equipped, well-trained, and well- managed as possible. It means more, closer engagement with the loathsome government of the PRC, not less.
Well...dammit.
When it comes down to cases, I think we're seeing here the functional end of what happens when humans are confronted with difficult, complex, frightening things, especially when the hardscape around those things point towards conclusions those humans dread and fear.
If working through that country forces you to agree to and believe things that you hate with all your heart...it will make you happier not to believe them. If you can settle on a simple, clear answer - even a simple, clear wrong answer - that backs up your hopes and beliefs?
You'll go with that.
Problem?
Climates and pathogens and armed men don't care what you want to believe. If you get them wrong they'll kill you and all yours deader'n shit.
Governing yourself by whatever stupid thing you want to believe?
That's a real good way to make that happen.
3 comments:
Well put, Chief.
Not only the enemy has a vote, but the whole universe has vote.
And, most often its the deciding vote.
Our leadership needs to be humble in its decisions,
knowing the difference between the possible and impossible.
It is an old problem.
Canute, sitting on his throne, barking at the tide to go out knew that he was just a king of men and not king of the tides.
His courtiers, however, always flattering him, constantly tried to fudge the difference.
They didn't do either Canute, or their kingdom any favours by doing so.
Having someone less smart than Canute could lead (and often did lead) to problems.
Not sure that us fancy moderns have found any better way to run ourselves.
Even the popularity contest called democracy clearly has not fixed it.
There's very strong evidence for the conjecture that Covid was not designed as a bioweapon. Not by China or anybody else.
This piece was published fairly early on, March 17, 2020, in Nature Medicine: The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. The money quote is a bit thick, as you'd expect, but the implications are fairly clear.
“While the analyses above suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may bind human ACE2 with high affinity, computational analyses predict that the interaction is not ideal and that the RBD sequence is different from those shown in SARS-CoV to be optimal for receptor binding. Thus, the high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation.”
OTOH, support for the conjecture that it's a product of natural selection, in an area where coronavirus diversity is already unusually high, is quite strong.
Here's the abstract from another paper published July 28 2020 in Nature Microbiology: Evolutionary origins of the SARS-CoV-2 sarbecovirus lineage responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. The paydirt is succinctly summarized in the very last sentence, so I'll trim the quote.
“Abstract
There are outstanding evolutionary questions on the recent emergence of human coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 including the role of reservoir species, the role of recombination and its time of divergence from animal viruses. We find that the sarbecoviruses—the viral subgenus containing SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2—undergo frequent recombination and exhibit spatially structured genetic diversity on a regional scale in China.”
“Divergence dates between SARS-CoV-2 and the bat sarbecovirus reservoir were estimated as 1948 (95% highest posterior density (HPD): 1879–1999), 1969 (95% HPD: 1930–2000) and 1982 (95% HPD: 1948–2009), indicating that the lineage giving rise to SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating unnoticed in bats for decades.”
There's a third piece that was published February 5 in Science of The Total Environment, Shifts in global bat diversity suggest a possible role of climate change in the emergence of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2. Again, the paydirt is right in the Abstract:
“Abstract
Bats are the likely zoonotic origin of several coronaviruses (CoVs) that infect humans, including SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2, both of which have caused large-scale epidemics. The number of CoVs present in an area is strongly correlated with local bat species richness, which in turn is affected by climatic conditions that drive the geographical distributions of species. Here we show that the southern Chinese Yunnan province and neighbouring regions in Myanmar and Laos form a global hotspot of climate change-driven increase in bat richness. This region coincides with the likely spatial origin of bat-borne ancestors of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2. Accounting for an estimated increase in the order of 100 bat-borne CoVs across the region, climate change may have played a key role in the evolution or transmission of the two SARS CoVs.”
In shorter language, southern China has been converted into a hothouse environment for both bats and the coronaviruses that circulate in them, thanks to climate change. So a spillover event in that area isn't abnormal. On the contrary, it's something we should have expected.
Ael: I hate to agree with you on this, but it is increasing obvious that we hairless apes have designed a club too dangerous for us to wield. We certainly began changing things back in the Neolithic, but out modern industrial civilization is a whole different thing; it's like comparing a stone axe to high explosive.
Stormcrow: That's pretty much my commonsense reading. Southeastern China has been a reservoir of infectious disease since the earliest contacts between Asia and the rest of the world. IT's not just bats and pangolins; the vast majority of avian and swine flus emerge from SE China. It's perfect; warm, moist climate, lots and lots of small farmers raising lots and lots of chickens, ducks, and pigs.
And what makes it irritating is the WE DID EXPECT IT! The feds had a whole pandemic response playbook that the MAGAts shitcanned in their first hundred days, along with everything else the Darkie did.
Now, reading about the heroic measures the docs took to save Tubby, and his arrogant, idiot acts as soon as he waddled out of Walter Reed? Makes me want to hunt the fucker down and gut-shoot him just to watch him die. Like I said here way back in the spring of 2020; the fucking nitwit could have been a hero. Easy! But, no. He had to be who he is, meaning that hundreds of thousands had to die.
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