About a decade ago, I read a book that I consider the most terrifying literature I have ever read. Mind you, my reading list includes Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Robert McCammon, Edgar Allen Poe, H.P Lovecraft, etc. so I am well versed in the horror genre. But the most terrifying book I ever read was not fiction, or even considered horror. It was a non-fiction book about plagues.
The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett kept me up at night after reading it. The book covers the stories of “virus hunters” all across the world. It detailed, in a very interesting and unique way, how the CDC and other organizations tackle pathogens in some of the most remote places as well as in the midst of highly populated cities. The book was written in 1994. The title of the book exemplifies the message: a disastrous plague is coming.
The message of the book is well known in the medical community. Article upon article has been written over the decades about how we need to prepare, in this age of global travel, for a pandemic of epic proportions. It is not a matter of if, it is a matter of when. Everyone in the medical field is aware of this problem and has been aware for decades.
Then COVID-19 came and nobody was prepared. Especially those whose job it is to be prepared: the medical community.
When COVID-19 hit the shores of America, the nation went into lockdown because the hospitals claimed they were going to be over run with patients if we did not “flatten the curve”. Then there was panic because of a lack of medical equipment supposedly needed to tackle the issue. Ventilator and PPE shortages were decried nationwide. In New York City, the government set up temporary hospitals and even sent naval hospital ships to the city as well as to California. Neither the temporary hospitals nor the ships were used when it was all said and done. But better safe than sorry, right? Again, this begs the question, if the medical community has known for decades that this was going to happen eventually, why in the hell were they not prepared? Why in the world would they need the federal government to step in?
The World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control both fumbled the ball from the get go. The WHO claimed, based on false reports from China, that the virus was not transmissible from human to human. The CDC absolutely botched the first testing kits, putting America behind the eight ball when it came to finding out who had the virus and how it was being spread at the beginning of the outbreak. Misinformation and confusion was broadcast to the American public, much of it coming from the medical community, almost from day one of the pandemic. Here we are, 6 months after the initial start of the pandemic, and nobody knows a damn thing.
Should masks be mandated nationwide? Do masks even work? Should we all be in lockdown? Do lockdowns work? Do asymptomatic people spread the virus? Do children spread the virus to adults? Did ventilators actually kill people instead of help with COVID-19? Is hydroxychloroquine a medicine that works against the virus? Is the virus spread through droplets or is it aerosolized? How long does the virus survive on surfaces? Does it survive on surfaces? Should we strive for herd immunity? Not a single question about the virus has been answered through peer reviewed research.
How the virus is transmitted should have been question #1 that the medical community dealt with resolving. But they did not. We still do not know if the virus is transmitted through droplets, aerosolized, skin contact, or any other way. It is a complete failure of the medical community to not even have an immediate answer to this basic question.
I have noticed a very strange thing with this virus. There is very very very little research being done on it. I mean, extremely little. Compared with how worldwide carnage has been reaped by this virus, you would think that every research center on the planet would be working overtime to find out everything we can about it. But that is not the case. The amount of research being done is paltry, even by normal standards, let alone how important this virus. And when I talk about research, I am not talking about meta papers where they gather together previous research papers to make a conclusion, I am not talking about case studies, and I am not talking about research coming from untrusted sources like China. I am talking about legitimate research with double blind if possible, randomized control trials, peer reviewed, and replicated so damn much that it is beyond a shadow of a doubt that the conclusions are truth. Every single research lab on the planet should have been working on this new Chinese virus. We should, by this point, know every damn thing possible about the disease. Yet, here we are, dumber now than we were before it was unleashed on the world.
Take masks as an example. All of the literature I have read since the onset of the new Chinese virus claims that masks are ineffective. The only papers I pay attention to are the analytical research papers that are randomized controlled studies. They all conclusively claim that masks are, at best, minimally helpful in stopping virii and in most cases totally ineffective. Some studies have shown that masks actually INCREASE the risk of infection. Since the outbreak of the new Chinese virus, I have not seen one single randomized control trial study done on masks. Not a single one. Yet we have states and cities all across the nation mandating people wear masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Not based on science, obviously. Where is the medical community at on this issue? Why are they not 1) telling people that, according to their own damn studies, masks are ineffective and 2) DOING STUDIES THEMSELVES TO DETERMINE THE TRUTH! It is actually mind blowing to me at how slovenly the medical community has been during this ordeal. It is an outright travesty. They all know that masks do not work in stopping viral transmission, especially if it is aerosolized. They should all be screaming at the top of their lungs to the idiot politicians and policy makers who are mandating masks across the country. But they are not. They sit in silence, basking in the fake glory they have received for being part of the “fontline workers”.
At first the media reported on the deaths caused by the pandemic. They had daily death counters blasting on every screen. It was later found that some places were counting deaths as COVID-19 when they were in fact not due to the virus. The numbers were skewed. What was the response by the medical community and the media? Silence. Then when the reported deaths started to decline, the media and medical community started freaking out about the “surge” in cases. Each state set up websites showing the death and case counts. The media started reporting on “hot spots” across the nation where cases started increasing. Of course, they never cared to mention that the detected cases were going up because the amount of tests were increasing. They wanted the American people to freak out thinking that the virus was spreading when in truth we were simply detecting cases that were already there. Then word started coming out that some of the tests were faulty. People were getting multiple tests that were showing both negative and positive results. People that had signed up to take tests but never actually did were being notified later that they had tested positive for COVID-19. It was found that some states were lumping in positive tests with positive antibody tests. The antibody tests do not test for COVID-19 specifically but instead show a positive result for a broad range of viruses. All of these incidences erroneously inflated the case numbers drastically. It will take a federal investigation a number of years to get to the bottom of the true numbers, if it ever happens at all. The medical community allowed this to happen for a reason.
I can tell you what the medical community is doing about all of this for sure: they are being political. There is an organization that is often referenced by journalists for medical authority called Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, or PNAS. They are constantly putting out political “research papers” with a total lack of fundamental science that the media eats up. Their articles include such gems as “Environmental racism and the need for private well protections“, “Contrasting effects of climate change on seasonal survival of a hibernating mammal“, “Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings“. Those papers were put out within the past week. In a time of a worldwide pandemic, a leading science academy is more interested in climate change and racism than solving the fucking pandemic problem. This is political.
President Trump espoused the efficacy of the drug hydroxychloroquine in fighting the Chinese virus. So, as is typical, the media, with assistance from the medical community, sought to discredit President Trump. Despite the fact that hydroxychloroquine has been used as a drug for 65 years to fight numerous diseases, The Lancet, a respected medical journal, published a paper stating that hydroxychloroquine is not effective in fighting COVID-19 and is actually dangerous to use. This paper was later retracted due to the fact that it was shitty science and the authors of the paper were not scientists. What should have been a black eye to the medical community was nothing but a speed bump in their incessant desire to be bumbling idiots in a time when we need them to be stalwarts.
The medical community entered the political arena immediately with the Chinese virus. When hundreds of protesters gathered to request their political leaders to open businesses back up, the medical community roundly condemned this action. They claimed, without evidence, that the protesters were going to kill people by gathering. There was even incidences of medical personnel standing in the street blocking protester’s cars. But then when protesters in the tens of thousands took to the streets to protest “police brutality” days later, the medical community cheered them on. Over 1,200 health and medical professionals, many of whom are part of the University of Washington’s Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, penned an open letter declaring their support of the protesters by stating “…the way forward is not to suppress protests in the name of public health but to respond to protesters demands in the name of public health…as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States…This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders.” Disgusting is the first word that comes to mind. Insanity is the next word that enters my thought. The medical community is more interested in politics than health. Why in the world should we trust them now that we know their motives are political? Hell, even Laurie Garrett, the author of The Coming Plague, is swimming in the political pool. She is adamantly opposed to Trump (surprise surprise) and has spent the past few months touring the media circuit blaming him for the Chinese virus. I find it ironic that the author of a book about how the medical community needs to be prepared for a coming plague, blames a politician for the failure of the medical community not being prepared for a plague that came.
December 1941 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. In the aftermath, it was found that our intelligence agencies had the information that an attack was imminent but those agencies did not communicate effectively with each other. The result was the creation of the CIA to be a central depository for intelligence whose intent was to prevent an attack in the future. September 11, 2001, America was attacked by terrorists causing thousands of deaths. In the aftermath, it was found that our intelligence agencies had the information that an attack was imminent but those agencies did not communicate effectively with each other. The result was the creation of the Department of Homeland Security to be a central depository for intelligence whose intent was to prevent an attack in the future. September 2008, the financial institution blackmailed the government and the American populace with the threat of financial collapse world wide because of bad financial practices by these very same institutions. They were rewarded with a $700 billion bailout, trillions of dollars of free money in the form of Quantitative Easing, and cabinet positions in the Obama administration. The automobile industry followed suit shortly thereafter. In February 2020, a global pandemic arose and entered the United States. The medical community turned to the government for assistance. The result was trillions of dollars in economic stimulus, much of that going to the medical community. The medical community was hailed as heroes. Viral videos of medical personnel dancing in hospitals flooded the internet. Authority figures in the medical community graced magazine covers, threw out baseball pitches in game openers, were welcomed guests on media outlets, and given un-elected political power to implement policy. In each of these major incidences listed, incompetence was highly rewarded. The world has become a place where meritocracy is punished while incompetence is a virtue. Failures are victims. Victims are heroes. Nobody is held accountable for their actions or lack thereof.
The medical community has utterly failed us as a people. There has never been a successful vaccine for any previous coronavirus in history. Yet now we are are all waiting breathlessly, waiting on the medical community to come up with a vaccine so that we can continue on with our lives. We will be waiting forever. But the worst part is that this new Chinese virus is nothing compared to what is going to come. Luckily for us, all of the medical community was completely wrong about the predicted mortality rate of the new Chinese virus. Their failure to accurately model the infection is just one of the many disasters that showed their incompetence. The COVID-19 virus has a very very low mortality rate of currently around 1%. If it was anything like Ebola with a 50% mortality rate, or MERS at 34%, or Smallpox at 30%, or even SARS with a 10% mortality rate, the world would be in absolute devastation right now with dead bodies stacked up on the streets. In The Coming Plague, it is hammered home page after page that the human species needs to prepare for an extremely deadly disease that is going to rip through humanity. There is no avoiding it. The only thing we can do is prepare and mitigate its devastation. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed that we are woefully unprepared. With the absolute abysmal response of the medical community to the new Chinese virus, I have zero confidence that they will be of any help whatsoever when the real plague comes.