National Security: A New Perspective

When Americans think of national security, they think with pride of our military.  We have the biggest and best Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine military force money can buy.  Hell, we even have a Space Force.  Who else has one of those?  This military force is overseen and given guidance by the finest group of politicians a boatload of special interest money can buy.  We, as a nation, are ready to face any threat to our security, or so we thought.

Declare War on Virus

We now face a daunting enemy, one who is very adept at stealth technology and camouflage.  This new enemy can’t be stopped by a border wall.  It can’t be shot down by a drone.  You can’t “send in the Marines.”  Even our elite Army Rangers, Green Berets, and Seal Teams are no match for this elite fighting force.  This newly identified terrorist group is called, COVID-19, aka SARS-CoV-2, aka Coronavirus.

Yes, a microscopic pathogen has brought our nation and the rest of the world to its knees.  In a matter of weeks, it has shut down commerce, grounded our passenger airlines, filled our hospitals to the breaking point, strained our supply chain, and sent Wall Street into a panic.

Wall Street Panic

You can’t blame this virus on President Trump.  You should never blame our president for something until you have walked a mile in his clown-shoes.  He didn’t invent this system of security priorities where we spend more of our GDP on our military than the next seven nations combined.  He perpetuated it but it was already in place from previous administrations.  We may, however, blame him for mismanagement of the current crisis and for placing his reelection goals ahead of the nation’s health; but he is not alone in this.  President Trump, members of Congress, and others before him, minimized the threat of what we now face.  We have collectively prioritized military might over our nation’s health.

Military Spending by Country in Billions

Running a country, any country, requires vision.  You can’t be blinded by nationalism to a point where the very continued existence of that nation is threatened.  We can surely blame this president for his perpetuation of an isolationist attitude that places us at odds with those who would be our friends.  He seems to be looking at the operation of our country like another real estate venture, and that has proved disastrous.  If you make a bad decision in real estate, you can file for bankruptcy.  If you make bad decisions running a country, people die.  Having vision means having your head on a swivel and seeing things from many perspectives.  Myopic leadership is dangerous, expensive, and deadly.

We should have taken what we learned from PDM09 (H1N1) and had plans in place.  That 2009 virus, infected 60.8 million Americans, required 274,304 hospitalizations and resulted in 12,469 deaths.  Global statistics were obviously much higher.  During that pandemic, 80% of the deaths were in people younger than 65 years of age.  President Obama’s transition team warned the incoming Trump team that it could face specific challenges, such as shortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs, and other medical essentials.  They were told that having a coordinated, unified national response was “paramount.”  Such warnings now seem eerily prescient given our current pandemic.  Those warnings were dire and the result of a mock run-through of a pandemic response using the experiences of the swine flu pandemic.  Those warnings garnered a cold reception and two-thirds of the people who were present, are no longer part of “Team-Trump.”  I guess there is an “I” in team.

We see now that President Trump should never have shut down the White House National Security Council's entire global health security unit in 2018.  This unit would have developed plans for a pandemic.  He saved a few dollars.  The bill for this pandemic was able to outstrip those meager savings in a nanosecond.  We will never know how well that unit would have performed or prepared us for this eventuality, but it certainly couldn’t have done much worse.  We are now flying blind without enough test kits to know where the virus is and how best to manage its spread.  When testing kits eventually become a reality, we will have squandered valuable time that would have minimized the exponential spread of the pathogen.

The Enemy

We don’t currently have enough respirators, hospital beds, or personal protective gear necessary to manage this crisis.  We will be forced to make life and death decisions as to who will get treatment and who will be allowed to fend for themselves for lack of equipment and personnel.  Sarah Palin’s “death panels,” promoted during her fight against the Affordable Care Act may become a reality if we don’t move quickly.

Now it is time to get beyond the blame game and start looking at where we go from here.  We will plod along without a true leader and we will rely on the likes of immunologist, Anthony Fauci and Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo to get us through this mess.  We will be led out of this crisis by a hodgepodge of leaders forced into service.  We will come through this, but not without cost and consequence.  We need to plan for our future.

Anthony Fauci and Andrew Cuomo filling the vacuum

We will need to adjust our national security priorities so that they include health.  Perhaps instead of setting up a Space Force, we should have created a National Health Force (NHF).  It could even be run out of the Pentagon budget so it could be properly funded.  What politician in their right mind (this is rhetorical) would think of under-funding our “military.”

A National Health Force could plan for the next pandemic with lessons learned from this and previous ones.  Perhaps the Trump administration could find some of those discarded planning documents provided by the Obama administration.  I say that in jest knowing that Donald Trump has spent the better part of his presidency trying to dismantle everything with Obama’s name attached.

Ventilators, mobile hospitals, a reserve unit of active and retired medical professionals, all could be part of a national response plan.  We could also properly fund our Veterans Administration and expand its hospital facilities to have a certain capacity for national emergencies.  This would improve the care for our veterans and provide a civilian safety net.

Emergency Hospital at Miami-Dade County Fairgrounds

We can only hope that the passage of this crisis will not be replaced with even more chaos of some other threat to our nation.  We have paid a high price for this lesson.  We didn’t take the information gained from the last event to plan for this one but let’s hope that we have someone in office that will.  We should not take the easy political path of thinking we have better things to do.  I would hope that some future president would be able to repair the relationships with other nations that were broken with this administration.  We should be able to come to some international agreement that promotes a free exchange of information and a sharing of research.  We will survive this.  Let’s hope we learn from this.

Human Arrogance

Perhaps it was always going to take another global pandemic to wake us up from our lethargy. As the presupposed apex predator for our planet, we humans have always been somewhat arrogant. We rape and pillage the resources of our earthly host while gleefully ignoring the damage we have wrought. Now, a microscopic challenger has managed a virtual shut-down of much of the so-called civilized world. Many of the ubiquitous governmental “they” and their follower/supporters have prioritized wealth, greed, and our economy over the health of the inhabitants and the environment of the only planet we have.

Hypothetical seasonal flu epidemic spread is depicted here with the colors indicating regions currently infected with seasonal flu (red), refractory and immune to pandemics (purple), and recovered and currently susceptible to a novel pandemic (blue). White lines depict the global flight network. 

While the current U.S. president is certainly responsible for aggravating an already dire situation, he didn’t start this and he is not alone when it comes to sharing some of the blame for this pandemic’s mismanagement. We have long ignored pandemic threats in search of profits. Our nation’s capitalistic healthcare system is founded on maximizing returns on investments so we plan for normal caseloads and not for worst-case scenarios. We’ve been here before and as the adage goes, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.

Long before air travel allowed humans to move around the globe in a day, we had The Black Death of 1346-1353, the Third Cholera Pandemic of 1852-1860, the Flu Pandemic of 1889-1890, the Sixth Cholera Pandemic of 1910-1911, and the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918-1920.  After international air travel became available in the 1950s, we had the Asian Flu of 1956-1958, the Flu Pandemic of 1968, the Swine Flu of 2009-2010, and the HIV/AIDS Pandemic of 2008-2012. So, in the year 2020, why are we now surprised that we are facing another pandemic? We were warned. We knew this was coming. We didn’t have a plan and we didn’t have the administrative agencies in place to enact the plan that we didn’t have.

Quick check

In a November 14, 2017 article published on the Global Biodefense website titled April Showers..., Bring Pandemics, they stated that, “One might expect that the risk of a new pandemic is highest at the height of the flu season in winter, when viruses are most abundant and most likely to spread.  Instead, all six flu pandemics that have occurred since 1889 emerged in spring and summer months.”

"Statistical simulations suggest that Northern Hemisphere flu pandemics are most likely to emerge in late spring or early summer at the tail end of the normal flu season, according to a new study   published in PLOS Computational Biology."

We can’t have a capitalistic healthcare system and expect that it will build expensive emergency room facilities and invest in equipment where they will never see a financial return. It is the responsibility of the federal government to foresee things like pandemics and be prepared. This should not be a time for non-medical legislative bodies to try to figure out how to respond; the response plan should have already been in place. At the first sign of a possible viral outbreak, we should have merely activated the response outlined in the plan. In this country, some of this administrative capability was in place but had been recently dismantled in order to afford us the ability to further fan the flames of an already healthy economy. We issued unneeded tax cuts and corporate financial incentives and the economy soared to new heights.  Bigger, faster, and more furious are not always good things, even when discussing an economy. When the pandemic hit, as many knew it would, the global economy slowed to a near halt, the stock market plummeted, we lost all the gains of the past three years, and we are now headed toward a recession. The “fast and furious” approach quite often results in a crash and burn.  Take a bow, Mr. President.

Our response?  A perfect 10.   Donald Trump, March 16, 2020

As a fellow apex predator, I have realized that certain situations can change that cocky status in an instant. I can remember from my youth skin diving and spearfishing in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. I had speared a large red snapper in his reef hideaway and while I pondered how to get my spear and its prize back to the dock, I spotted a much larger-than-me shark that seemed to be looking for his own dinner. I was no longer at the top of the food chain; I was the next link.

The Three Little Pigs

I feel our legislators need to go back to nursery school and relearn the lesson of The Three Little Pigs. When our economy was strong, it was then time to invest in our infrastructure.  That investment would have included a physical ability to shore up our medical response capability at such time as the need would surely arise.  That investment would have had long term benefits in terms of new jobs and much needed physical improvements that had been long overlooked.  We needed a strong brick-like system and not one made of sticks and straw.

The wolf came down the chimney...

 
The short-term tax breaks and corporate incentives may prove more costly than we could have imagined.  Well, now the big bad wolf is at our door and he may just blow our fragile economy off its foundation, not to mention the human misery and loss of life. Had we been the smart pig of storybook fame, we would now be feasting on wolf stew.

Leadership in the Age of Trump

Leadership takes all forms

Leadership skills are not taught but learned through observation and developed through character. We have seen Donald J. Trump at the helm of our country for these past three years. He was elected president of our United States and we expected him to lead the country. In this endeavor, he has failed. No better example of his failed leadership skills could be shown, than in his handling of the recent coronavirus crisis.

"One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency." Arnold Glasow

It is at times such as these that leaders show their true mettle. When experts in the field of pandemics and medicine gave Trump advice that could possibly head off a more serious spread of the virus, provide first responders with the tools necessary to treat the sick, and generally act in a humane manner, he ignored their advice. He started spouting rhetoric that would make him look better and improve his chances in the upcoming election.

COVID-19 Test Kit

At a March 6th press conference, Trump stated that the coronavirus test kits were as “perfect” as his infamous phone call with the Ukrainian president.  I’ll buy some of that since one of the three modules in the kit was a failure and corrected kits were needed.  He went on to say that, he didn’t want the passengers on an infected cruise ship now off the California coast to come ashore because it would hurt his numbers. His quote, “I like the numbers being where they are.  I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship.” This is not a leader worrying about the fate of others in a time of crisis, but a leader more concerned with his reelection.  Think about that attitude for just a moment.  No expression of empathy or sympathy for the crew and passengers stuck aboard a ship full of sick people; he’s worried about his “numbers” and how those numbers might affect him.  That is not a leader.

Cruise ship Princess enters San Francisco Bay

In this most recent crisis, our president should be a leader and a source of trustworthy information. Instead, he promotes outright lies and various falsehoods intended to make him look better. His claim that he would have one million coronavirus test kits available by last Friday (March 6, 2020) was missed by a mere 925,000 kits. He claimed that anyone who wanted to be tested could be tested. We now know that even people who have been exposed and were showing symptoms had been denied testing due to “procedures” and most probably a lack of available test kits. Trump has also claimed, against all the advice of medical professionals, that he will have a vaccine available in weeks or a couple of months at the outside. An optimistic best-case scenario puts the availability of a new vaccine for the coronavirus at least a year away.

This misinformation, spread by our president, follows a very dangerous pattern of deceit involving this potential pandemic.  In 1918, then-president Woodrow Wilson did much the same thing when he launched a dangerous campaign to shore up his support and suppress criticism.  (Sound familiar?)  He established a Committee on Public Information.  Wilson also signed the Sedition Act, criminalizing “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government” or anything else that might impede the war effort.  This stifling of the information under the guise of supporting the war effort ended up allowing the disease to spread from a military camp in Kansas to citizens all across the nation.  A Navy ship carried the virus to Philadelphia, and sailors started dying, but the city’s public health director, a political appointee named Wilmer Krusen, dismissed it as “old-fashioned influenza or grip.” As the toll grew, Krusen assured the public that the city was on track to “nip the epidemic in the bud.”  (Sound familiar?)  This so-called Spanish Flu went on to kill more people than all who died in World War I and World War II, combined.

Woodrow Wilson and Trump have much in common.

Good leadership involves an earned trust.  Great leadership adds to that the ability to lead by example.  Bad leadership is merely obedience demanded with repercussions for non-compliance.  Donald J. Trump falls into the latter category.
We can perhaps overlook Trump’s multiple attempted cutbacks of CDC funding, after all, his attempts failed. We might also overlook the fact that he left positions vacant that were designated to handle pandemics. To quote Monty Python, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” 

Spanish Inquisition sketch from Monty Python

We can chalk up his elimination of a position in 2018, on the National Security Council that would have been responsible for coordinating efforts to combat infectious disease to just another in a long string of bad policy decisions. Trump’s closing of the USAID program known as PREDICT that was tasked with the detection and discovery of zoonotic viruses with pandemic potential, like COVID-19, could also be put in the category of whoops-shouldna-done-that.

Joe BTFSPLK of Li'l Abner fame

We can overlook and forgive quite a bit in hindsight. The problem, of course, is that Donald J. Trump seems to be the zoonotic embodiment of Joe Btfsplk of Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip. For those of you not up on your 1970’s cartoons, Joe Btfsplk was a well-meaning jinx who brought disaster to all around him. He walked around with a small bad luck raincloud showering him from up above.  He was a walking disaster.  This character fits Trump with all but the “well-meaning” part of the description.  I was always partial to Daisy Mae myself but, at my age, I have trouble remembering why.  Wait, I’m beginning to remember.

Li'l Abner character Daisy Mae

We know that Trump is aware of the seriousness of the coronavirus; after all, this crisis has recently tanked the stock market and wiped out much of his administration’s major accomplishment.  This virus thing might hinder his chances of getting reelected.  He’s not worried about a bunch of old people dying as long as he isn’t one of them.

The trouble with the future is that it usually arrives before we’re ready for it.  

Arnold Glasow

Trump’s next major move shows he slept through any management classes that dealt with responsible leadership; he put Alex Azar in charge of our nation’s medical needs. Now, don’t get me wrong, delegation is a good thing if you pick the right person with qualifications and give them the authority to get the job done.  But here we find that Mr. Azar’s background in medicine is that he was trained as a lawyer. This is not to diminish his credentials since he was General Counsel to Health and Human Services and was a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly & Co. Given Trump’s slim, almost bare cabinet pickings, Azar was actually a find.  But, then Trump out-Trumped himself with a marginalization of the recently minted Azar as chief of the task force.  He unceremoniously shoved Mr. Azar behind the new coronavirus scapegoat, Mike Pence. Yes, that Mike Pence.

Who's on first?

You see, Mike Pence is a firm believer in science as long as it doesn’t conflict with his interpretation of the Bible, his broken moral compass, or any visions his boss receives from on-high.  In this case, “on-high” is anything from Fox News’ Sean Hannity.  As governor of Indiana in 2015, he rejected a clean needle exchange for drug addicts during the HIV outbreak.  The suffering of the homosexual community was, after all, God’s will.  Pence later “prayed on it,” and eventually lifted the ban. How many people died as a result of this delay is just a matter of conjecture.

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right thing.   Peter Drucker

Pence also said that “despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill.” In a strict interpretation of his quote, you might say he is right because it is cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and other related illnesses that actually do the killing. Mike Pence also doesn’t think condoms are effective in preventing STDs. His quote, “truly safe sex is no sex.”  Add to all this his denial of climate change because we (America) have the cleanest air and water in the world (actually, we rank #10), and there you have a fair handle on his scientific credentials. Oh, I almost forgot, he still thinks being gay can be “corrected” with conversion therapy. Will anyone be surprised if he ever comes out of the closet?

If I don't like you, I'll fire you!  If you don't like me, I will fire you!  -- Lou Grant

Well, Trump has his “task force” in place. He now has someone to blame for this mess if it gets out of hand. To Trump, “getting out of hand,” means that a nasty pandemic is getting in the way of his reelection. Any failures here would mean that Pence goes on the well-worn chopping block and Trump picks a new running mate (rumored to be Nikki Haley).  Trump learned from Lou Grant of The Mary Tyler Moore Show who, when asked to what he attributed his managerial success said, “I learned how to delegate blame.”  That’s how I remembered it.  When I looked it up I found that his actual statement was just slightly different...

“If you’ve noticed, I’m one of the few producers without a peptic ulcer. One of the reasons for that is, I’m able to delegate blame.”  

Lou Grant, Season 1, The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Nobody wishes that this new coronavirus gets out of hand. No matter how much you may despise Trump for his other failures; we can all hope this isn’t one of them. We can, however, add his blatant failure of leadership in this crisis right where it belongs.  Trump will own it. Even if it just fades away next month, his lack of leadership in this event shows that he is unfit to lead our country. We can only hope this nation survives his ineptitude long enough to replace him with our usual cadre of well-meaning run-of-the-mill greedy politicians.  As leaders go, I am more interested in the likes of Dwight D. Eisenhower than William Travis.  Travis was a fine patriot, but everyone in his command died at the Alamo.

Enough to Make You Batty

In the last several days I have managed to watch the first two episodes of an interesting, if not scary, documentary titled Un-Natural Selection on Netflix. I followed that with an article I read in The Week magazine about the origins of the Covid-19 virus and I got a bit concerned.

Unnatural Selection Title Slide Episode 3

The Netflix documentary series highlighted several related topics dealing with genetic engineering. It told me that, contrary to my previous notions about CRISPR (clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) and genetic engineering, there are kitchen and garage entrepreneurs performing these feats with materials and equipment they legally bought on the Internet. They are creating glow-in-the-dark frogs, dogs that can be more muscular, certain muscle enhancements for humans, and home-brew HIV medications, among other experiments.  I had previously assumed that such activity was so expensive and complicated that it would only be done in advanced labs; I was wrong.

Does your new apple taste a bit fishy?

The article on Covid-19 (Coronavirus) dealt with its origins in China, which traced the animal to human connection to a bat virus that somehow mutated with genetic material from a soldierfish and then infected humans. This all happened naturally without human intervention save for the humans being infected and then spreading it around. Then the article went on to mention that in 2014, a laptop was captured from ISIS that contained instructions on how to weaponize plague bacteria.

Bats are reservoirs for more than 60 viruses that can infect humans.

Therefore, genetic engineering is well within the grasp of mere mortals with at least a rudimentary knowledge of science, and we now know that someone in ISIS is considering that possibility.  We can imagine that ISIS’s intentions are not to make a better tomato but probably something more nefarious. That sounds like a nightmare scenario that our intelligence services would be wise to address. I feel a bit uncomfortable with my newfound knowledge when I realize that our intelligence services have been ridiculed and marginalized by our current administration for reasons that are not readily apparent.

Perhaps VP Pence could investigate

While genetic engineering advancements have a huge upside with cures and treatments for debilitating and deadly diseases, the power to play Darwin-on-steroids appears to be well beyond the bioethicists’ current debate schedule. This technology is now outside government-monitored labs and in the hands of anyone with motivation to do good or evil.  We have dealt with H1N1, H5N1, MERS, SARS, and Ebola, which were accidents of nature that killed millions of people over the years; 50 million died in the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic alone.  What if people decided to manufacture their own novel virus?

This is a sign that was posted during 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic

Covid-19 is a novel virus in that, while influenza viruses move around the globe every year, they are not novel until they carry different hemagglutinin or neuraminidase protein than the strains already in circulation.  No, I didn’t recently get a medical degree but that explanation made clear(?) why this new Coronavirus qualifies for the “pandemic” label. While a repeat of the tragedy of 1918 is highly unlikely now that we have better drugs and treatments, it is having a broader impact on our new global economy. Our just-in-time manufacturing ability and modern transportation methods have increased our vulnerability beyond the impact of the illness.

Many of these viruses are zoonotic in that they can jump species and many are linked to bats. My fear is that, with newly available technologies and home genetic engineering, what happens when some random human goes “bat-shit crazy” and decides to nudge evolution and brew up a new virus cocktail of their own?

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?  The Shadow knows.

Perhaps it's time to break out the torches and get the village people to storm the castle?  I'll play the Indian.

It's Alive!