Atlantic Monthly: The Gaslighting Vaccine

I know November seems far away, but the time to start preparing for the coming onslaught of Republican misinformation and gaslighting is now.  Towards that end, I would like to recommend an excellent series of articles in The Atlantic starting with this one entitled "We were warned."

We were warned in 2012, when the Rand Corporation surveyed the international threats arrayed against the United States and concluded that only pandemics posed an existential danger, in that they were “capable of destroying America’s way of life.”

We were warned in 2015, when Ezra Klein of Vox, after speaking with Bill Gates about his algorithmic model for how a new strain of flu could spread rapidly in today’s globalized world, wrote that “a pandemic disease is the most predictable catastrophe in the history of the human race, if only because it has happened to the human race so many, many times before.” If there was anything humanity could be certain that it needed to prepare for to prevent the deaths of a lot of people in little time, it was this.

We were warned in 2017, a week before inauguration day, when Lisa Monaco, Barack Obama’s outgoing homeland-security adviser, gathered with Donald Trump’s incoming national-security officials and conducted an exercise modeled on the administration’s experiences with outbreaks of swine flu, Ebola, and Zika. The simulation explored how the U.S. government should respond to a flu pandemic that halts international travel, upends global supply chains, tanks the stock market, and burdens health-care systems—all with a vaccine many months from materializing. “The nightmare scenario for us, and frankly to any public-health expert that you would talk to, has always been a new strain of flu or a respiratory illness because of how much easier it is to spread” relative to other pandemic diseases that aren’t airborne, Monaco told me.

Never forget that in the face of all these warnings, Donald Trump closed the White House pandemic office.  He fired Tim Ziemer, the head of global health security on the White House’s National Security Council, and did not replace him. He tried to cut funding for the CDC (happily that bit of insanity was thwarted by Congress). He called the corona virus a Democratic hoax.  And, despite failing piled upon failing, he steadfastly insists that he's doing a terrific job and takes no responsibility for anything.

James Fallows has been writing a long series in The Atlantic documenting all of Trumps disastrous decisions in real time since 2016.  There are so many it can make tedious reading, but we're all going to have more free time on our hands in the coming months.  One of the ways you can use that time is to inform yourself about how we got into this mess so that we can start to make better decisions going forward.  You can start with the first four installments of Fallows' series dedicated specifically to the corona virus, because even the most die-hard Trumpeteer is going to have a hard time avoiding the reality of the situation.  It is true that Donald Trump is not singlehandedly responsible for the disaster that is currently unfolding.  But there can be no doubt in any sane person's mind that he has made the situation much, much worse by failing to provide leadership at a crucial time, in other words, by utterly failing to do his job.

Pay attention.  This matters.  A lot.  Our last chance to rid ourselves of this pariah comes this November.  Success depends on convincing people who have been very effectively vaccinated against facts, so this is not going to be easy.  But in this case here are, quite literally, lives at stake.  We can't afford to blow this again.