We have been living with the threat of SARS CoV-2 for over a year and a half. Republican leaders have always espoused a strong affinity for business interests over all else. With that in mind, this pandemic is bad for the economy, and they have a strong desire to rush back to business as usual. With most things rushed, things didn’t go as planned. Ignoring preliminary threat levels back in early 2020, Republican leaders made some poor choices. Their president thought that, if he pretended really, really hard, it would just go away and not threaten his chances for reelection. He was wrong.
From here in the cheap seats, it is easy to see the mounting damage in this demolition derby we are calling the Covid-19 pandemic. The virus not only didn’t “go away with the heat of summer” in 2020, but it also came back with a vengeance and brought with it some of its mutant friends.
President Trump managed to get one thing right as they say about the blind squirrel eventually finding an acorn. He streamlined the vaccine approval process and promised developers of a successful vaccine a cash bonanza in the end. Where he seriously dropped the ball was in vaccine distribution. Managing complex problems was not his strong suit. With him, you just hit everything with a sledgehammer and ignore the collateral damage.
 |
| Blind squirrel finds an acorn |
The scientific community, who had been working on a new approach to vaccine development for many years, had an mRNA vaccine ready for trials within a matter of weeks. Fast-track testing and a pandemic full of test subjects enabled two successful vaccines to be approved on an emergency basis in early 2021. Luckily, Trump didn’t stay in office and Joe Biden was able to fix the vaccine distribution mess.
By March and April of 2021, the vaccine distribution wrinkles were worked out and people were waiting in lines to get vaccinated. All went well and everybody who wanted a vaccine got immunized. Then a combination of Republican politics, misinformation, fear of government, fear of needles, and a plethora of unfounded rumors brought the vaccine program to a halt. We were far short of our goal of herd immunity.
We had Republican leaders fighting the medical community, which provided fodder for the fringe antivaccine anti-masking crowd. This included that strange group of folks who seem to show up in Walmart at 3 a.m. and at Burning Man festivals, who now had a new cause to make them feel special. With a rush to return things to normal so businesses could get back up and running, Republican governors challenged the ever-changing advice of the scientific community and championed the cause of false freedoms within the Don’t Tread on Me crowd.
 |
| Examples of the American Fringe The New Republican Party Support Group |
With a world not yet vaccinated, and an under-vaccinated America, a vaccine mutant would come in and become the new enemy. This Delta variant would be born in India and would find its way to our too-soon-opened and rushed back-to-normal homeland. Infections would rise, more would die, and younger people would now feel the effects. Republican governors like Ron DeSantis would do a victory lap because fewer people were dying. This would have nothing to do with his actions and everything to do with science learning how to better treat the disease.
Fewer people were dying but more were getting sick, including many younger people ending up in hospitals. They say that hindsight is 20/20 but it’s probably more like 20/30 because, while we can look back at what happened, we don’t know what would have happened if we had acted differently.
Our current hurdle is the 22% of Americans who actively identify with the anti-vaxxers. A recent paper found that 8% were true hardcore within this group and 14% were less committed. Within the anti-vaxxer group, almost half were Republican men, 34% Republican women, 14% Democratic women, and 6% Democratic men. Of this entire group, 38% were white evangelicals. Much of this pre-pandemic anti-vax movement was based on a 1998 paper published in the British medical journal, The Lancet linking autism with the measles vaccine. Since that time, 10 of the 12 original authors retracted their support for the thesis, and the main author, Andrew Wakefield, lost his medical license for ethics violations. It seems he had an undisclosed financial interest in the debunked claim and stood to earn up to $43 million per year selling specialized test kits. The damage was done. The anti-vax ball was already rolling and claiming victims.
So, where are we now? We have a Republican party claiming to support personal freedoms, even when they violate the freedoms of others. This same party claims to support business and all things that will help that economic engine run smoothly. My mother’s expression that covers their response so far is, “penny-wise and pound-foolish.” In my childhood, I didn’t understand the saying except in the context where she used it. It would be later in life that I would learn the saying had its foundation with our British origins and the pound was currency and not weight. The explanation is that someone is closely watching the minutia but missing the big picture.
In this case, Republicans are looking for a quick reset from restrictions that put a damper on the economy. They want to ignore the big picture of an under-vaccinated nation facing a new mutated virus foe, in deference to opening the economy with the removal of mask mandates. They are promoting no vaccine requirements, no masking restrictions, and even issuing executive orders preventing private businesses, school districts, and local municipalities from making such adjustments as needed. This political polarization of the pandemic has exacerbated the economic harm it has already caused.
Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana have seen nearly 40% of all U.S. hospitalizations, and nationwide hospitalizations have tripled over the past month. We are back to levels not seen since last February. The seven states of Florida, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, have some of the lowest vaccination rates in the nation and account for half the new cases and hospitalizations. Florida set an all-time pandemic record on August 7, 2021, with 24,000 new cases. Louisiana has the highest number of new cases per capita with 693 per 100,000, followed closely by Florida with 627 and Arkansas with 502. If Louisiana were a country, it would be #2 in the world in cases per capita, right behind Fiji.
 |
| The green line is Louisiana and the Orange line is Florida |
Economic impact? Louisiana just canceled their Heritage Jazzfest for the fourth time since the start of the pandemic. This festival is a major revenue engine for the entire economy of Louisiana. I had my airline reservations for the festival but now must cancel.
It has only been recently that a few Republicans and even some conservative news figures have changed their minds. Faced almost daily with news videos of gasping hospital patients who had gone unvaccinated pleading with others to take this pandemic seriously, the tide may be turning. It’s too bad they couldn’t have seen the light before now. It is now apparent that you can’t see when you are wearing political blinders. The facts and information are readily available for those willing to open their eyes. It is time to take a long-term approach to business and realize that short-term investments (vaccination and mask-wearing requirements) can pay long-term dividends. To paraphrase President Joe Biden, be part of the solution, don’t become the problem. In short, lead, or get out of the way. Hopefully, Republicans like Ron DeSantis will listen, if not to the suffering, at least to the threat to their political careers.
No comments:
Post a Comment