COVID Chronicles: Drink Bleach! Or, How to Not Use Your Ears
We continue our COVID Chronicles series. In this episode, I’m doing something I didn’t think I’d do – defend Donald Trump… kind of. You’ll see what I mean.
Hindsight, as they say, is 20-20, so it’s easier now, to look back on the early days of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in the US, and see with some clarity. Very likely, by next year (regardless of who’s in the White House), we’ll see even more clearly.
So, I’m just going to say this, since this is something that EVERYONE needs to understand something about diseases that affect public health.
Combating the Contagion
When any new contagion is encountered, medical science is almost always ill-equipped to quickly combat and contain the contagion.
In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the virus was identified by the Chinese at some time in 2019. This information was partially shared with other medical scientists through the WHO – who appeared to treat the initial research with kid gloves, probably out of fear of offending the Chinese.
However, since it was a novel (new) virus strain or type of coronavirus (though coronaviruses themselves aren’t new), even the Chinese were initially scrambling to figure it out, and determine how contagious it is, how it enters the body, etc. By the time the initial Wuhan outbreak became world news, the Chinese still hadn’t learned a lot about the virus, but were working on it – and with the world news picking up the story, were basically forced to release what they knew.
And so it is with every new contagion – it takes time to isolate the contagion, study it, then perform tests on it to determine all about how the contagion will affect humans and other animals, how to test for it, how to isolate the sick, and how to eradicate it. All this takes time.
An Absolute Truth
Therefore, this is an ABSOLUTE truth:
As medical knowledge grows, medical advice and public policy must likewise evolve.
Clearly then, no one knows everything there is to know about a particular novel contagion as soon as it’s discovered. We can’t snap our fingers and be instantly imbued with all knowledge about how to treat and eradicate a contagion. Likewise, public officials, healthcare professionals and politicians alike, can’t know everything about how to treat and protect their patients / citizens.
So, when certain officials or members of the general public, accuse the Trump administration of being “weak” on the coronavirus response, or not taking the pandemic “seriously”, or making contradictory statements about the virus and responses to it, they are at best being complete imbeciles, and at worst, are deliberately and maliciously gaslighting.
Points to Ponder
Here’s some facts to ponder.
During the early days of the outbreak in the US, CDC Director Robert Redfield was the first, high-profile health official who wasn’t taking the outbreak seriously. When all his counterparts in other countries, including Canada, Japan, Mexico, and practically all of Europe (to name a few) were closing their borders and not allowing international travel of any type, Redfield refused to do his job, under his direct authority given his position by the Public Health Service Act, and repeatedly refused to seal the borders of the US.
According to CDC insiders, he refused to keep President Trump informed of virus developments, which clearly gave Trump the impression that it may not be that bad in the US. And certainly, it initially appeared that Trump’s assessment would be correct, and that there’d be no need to panic, since the spread of the virus occurred comparatively slowly (compared with other pandemics of the past).
Lock Down
But then something happened: infection rates started racking up rapidly in a number of states. It was then that Trump most needed to have the backing of the CDC directorate in order to order a complete, nationwide 4-week lock-down, similar to what Italy and some other nations (who are now doing much better at this point) did. But the directorate was still avoiding Trump, and refusing to publicly support calls for a nationwide lock-down. This certainly weakened Trump’s hand in being able to enforce what would have been a de facto state of martial law.
Had Trump proceeded with the nationwide lock-down, there is no question that the very people who now call his response not forceful enough, would have been the SAME ones who would have loudly screamed that he was creating a dictatorship if the nationwide lock-down had been ordered.
Sometimes you just can’t satisfy an American.
So without an early-stage, national lock-down, with no centralized guidance from the CDC, and without firm understanding of all the transmission forms the virus was capable of, SARS-CoV-2 was free to run rampant through the country.
Guidance
After experts started learning more – including the fact that since the virus can survive live on nonporous surfaces up to 72 hours after deposition – guidance started congealing that not only should 2-meter physical distancing be applied, but that frequent hand-washing be performed, and sanitizing surfaces to be widely employed (only later did the controversial and largely unnecessary concept of constant cloth mask use become popularized, made possible by Redfield’s myopic medical viewpoints).
As knowledge grew slowly, the White House Coronavirus Task Force continued to deliberate and began providing the administration with various opinions on how to identify those with the virus, how to treat the virus, and how to protect the public from the virus. However, as is very often the case with advisory bodies made up of people from varied disciplines and skill sets, as well as the fact that knowledge was evolving as they deliberated, the recommendations to the administration sometimes appeared uniquely opposed to previous recommendations.
Changing the Tune
When President Trump briefed the press, it wasn’t always out of some ignorance of the issues or some narcissistic idiocy as nearly every liberal on the planet has accused, but in reality, President Trump was simply making public (in his own brusque, straight-off-the-cuff, yet disgustingly narcissistic style) the recommendations from the panel advising him.
So, while it sounded like Trump was changing the tune from week to week, he was, but primarily it seems because the deliberations and advice of the experts was changing from week to week. Interestingly, he could have also relied on Dr Redfield and other CDC experts, if Redfield hadn’t chosen to pull a “Joe Biden” and hide in the proverbial basement.
Even the infamous “drink bleach” comment made viral by ignorant people and the yellow journalists, was in fact a direct misrepresentation of what President Trump actually said. In the briefing where the quote supposedly originated, he was actually talking directly to Dr Birx and William Bryan (a DHS undersecretary who was on the Task Force) who were present, asking them questions related to the deliberations that had previously taken place.
Simple Minds
In the briefing, Trump never actually used the word “bleach”, nor did he actually state that people should “drink bleach”. The question to Birx and Bryan from him was about “disinfectant”, and he was asking if some sort of disinfectant could be “injected”.
Any non-medical person, Trump included, could well be forgiven for thinking in simple terms about coming up with any kind of method of killing the virus in the body, regardless of whether or not the method is medically accurate.
But it’s clear that, we can very easily and correctly call the accusation that Trump told people to “drink” or “inject” bleach as a deliberate and malicious lie. It not only shows how desperate liberals are to constantly paint anyone they oppose in the worst possible light, but also shows how gullible and stupid the “proletariat” of the Democrat party are when they have access to Trump’s actual words, yet persist in believing he said something that was never actually said.
Orwell was certainly speaking of the modern Democrat party, when he characterized “The Party” slogan as:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
That surely sums up the mindset of every Democrat I’ve ever encountered recently.
