“A pandemic is a lot like a forest fire: If caught early, it might be extinguished with limited damage; if allowed to smolder undetected, it can grow to an inferno that spreads quickly beyond our ability to control it.” Because of a decade of failures, we are now in the midst of that inferno, waiting for the fire to burn itself out. And there is no excuse for it. — George Bush, 2005
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” — Benjamin Franklin, 1763
By Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel
CHULA VISTA, California — Not long after WW II, civil defense leaders came up with a guidance that was distributed to schoolchildren in the 1950s. A 1952 film provided a prescription how students ought to react in the event of a nuclear explosion. At the time, the Soviet Union was engaged in nuclear testing and the US was in the midst of the Korean War. The lyrics most of us recall went like this:
There was a turtle by the name of Bert
and Bert the turtle was very alert;
when danger threatened him he never got hurt
he knew just what to do …
He’d duck! [gasp]
And cover!
Duck! [gasp]
And cover!
(male) He did what we all must learn to do
(male) You (female) And you (male) And you (deeper male) And you!
[bang, gasp] Duck, and cover!
When we look back at this old memory, we probably chuckle. We wonder, “Did we really think hiding under our desk would protect us from a nuclear explosion?” Our teachers and parents realized that doing something, however minimal, might confer a degree of protection from a potential oncoming nuclear fireball that was likely to cause serious injury or death.
The 2013 Noble Prize biologist Mike Leavitt served as the Secretary of Health and Human Services during the Bush Administration. In 2004, he urged that Americans store canned tuna and powdered milk under their beds for when bird flu hits. But Americans did not take him very seriously, and the comedian Jay Leno ridiculed Leavitt, who quipped, ““What? … Powdered milk and tuna? How many would rather have the bird flu?”
As a case in point, NBC News dismissed the doomsday predictions about the bird flu possibly becoming a pandemic. Rather than erring on the side of caution, the skeptics criticized that “hysteria is sapping money and attention away from more important health threats. . . Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, the National Institutes of Health’s infectious disease chief, recently cautioned against overreacting if the virus surfaces in North American birds, as it is expected to do later this year.”[1] Those who worried about the bird flu were dismissed as exhibiting the Chicken Little Syndrome, who famously announced, “The sky is falling!” The theory suggests that when an unfortunate but isolated mishap occurs, it’s easy to let your imagination run wild with all the possible causes and eventual consequences that will lead to Doom.
Instead of thinking “Chicken Little,” think, “Duck and Cover.” We ought to ask ourselves, “What would have happened if bird-flu morphed into a full-scale pandemic? Were we prepared for the eventuality that the pandemic might have been real? Were we prepared for that eventuality?”
In a word, no.
Turning now to the present coronavirus pandemic: Anthony Fauci; Alex Azar, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS); Robert Redfield, MD, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); and Nancy Messonnier, MD, director of CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease, each concluded back on January 28, 2020, “Americans should know this is a potentially very serious public health threat, but Americans should not worry for their own safety.”[2] But the experts are not always correct—that is why we ought to take a more cautious approach.
Nobody thought of distributing face masks, or rubber gloves. Like a young child, our nation had a sense of invulnerability; we never imagined we would ever need rubber gloves, disinfections, and face masks. The so-called “experts” from the Centers of Disease Control suffered from the type of hubris that Aristotle characterized in his depiction of the tragic hero, who, despite his great or virtuous character was destined for downfall, suffering, or defeat, as seen in the story of Oedipus, the classic tragic hero. But Leavitt wisely observed, “In advance of a pandemic, anything you say sounds alarmist. After a pandemic starts, everything you’ve done is inadequate.”
Our political leaders would love to blame Trump for the lack of America’s preparedness for the coronavirus outbreak. The pandemic revealed how the wealthiest country in the world was asleep at the wheel. Politicians, who lack foresight and wisdom, defunded monies that might have made a difference in our country’s preparedness.
When we chronicle the list of pandemics, we witnessed over the last 20 years, we recall the warning signs:
- the 2002 SARS outbreak;
- the 2003 resurgence of H5N1 avian flu;
- the 2009 H1N1 swine flu outbreak;
- the 2012 MERS outbreak;
- the 2014 Ebola outbreak.
Unfortunately, the experts of the scientific, medical, and political community failed to consider the consequences of their short-sightedness.
The story behind today’s ventilator shortage is even more infuriating. The New York Times reports that in 2008, the Bush administration launched a project to stockpile ventilators for a pandemic, and in 2009 the Obama administration contracted with a California company to provide 40,000 of them. But in 2014, the company withdrew from the contract without delivering a single ventilator. So the government started over with a new contractor. It took another five years for the Food and Drug Administration to sign off on a new ventilator design, and the government did not place an order for 10,000 ventilators until December 2019 — the month that the COVID-19 outbreak began. We lost more than a decade due to government incompetence.[3]
Despite the warnings, we didn’t take the danger seriously enough — and were caught unprepared for COVID-19. We should have learned some wisdom from the cartoon, “Duck and Cover.” Let us hope that we again emphasize preparedness against a potential biological threat, which will serve to keep our country better prepared for whatever the future may bring.
Winston Churchill once said, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.” This proved true when terrorists attacked our country on September 11, 2001, which resulted in the deaths of 2,977 people. Now that a pandemic has befallen out nation, we ought to ask our leaders and ourselves: Must it always take a tragedy to wake us up to danger?
Remember Duck and Cover.
NOTES
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/12358223/ns/health-infectious_diseases/t/skeptics-warn-bird-flu-fears-are-overblown/#.XqdDYGhKiUk
[2] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/01/officials-say-most-americans-not-risk-coronavirus
[3] https://www.aei.org/op-eds/we-were-caught-unprepared-by-a-pandemic-9-11-the-failures-began-long-before-trump/
[i] Voltaire’s Correspondence, vol. 30 (Geneva: Institute et Musee Voltaire, 1958), quoted in Discovering the Western Past: A Look at the Evidence: Since 1500 Merry E. Wiesner, Julius R. Ruff, and William Bruce Wheeler (Boston, Ma: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003), pp. 102-115.
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Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel is spiritual leader of Temple Beth Shalom in Chula Vista, California. He may be contacted via michael.samuel@sdjewishworld.com