Trump's failure and the next pandemic

“The political folks believed that because was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.” —Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban quoting Jared Kushner’s team in March, 2020. And it appears that the virus that has her at death’s door is a recent mutation: “But researchers have homed in on three key differences between those viruses and the teenager’s: two possible mutations that could enhance the virus’s ability to infect human cells, and another that could allow it to replicate more easily in human cells, not just in the cells of its usual avian host.” There’s a broad scientific consensus that the H1N1 flu of 1918 acquired its ability to easily infect humans and transmit from person to person because a pig with a case of a random human flu virus was simultaneously infected with bird flu. Herd immunity is the theory that when enough people are infected with a disease, the survivors have leftover “natural” immunity; some advocates even suggest it’s superior to vaccine-induced immunity. Nonetheless, Makary went so far as to publish an article in The Wall Street Journalin February of 2021 arguing, as the headline read, “We’ll Have Herd Immunity By April”: “Some medical experts privately agreed with my prediction,” he wrote, “that there may be very little Covid-19 by April but suggested that I not to talk publicly about herd immunity because people might become complacent and fail to take precautions or might decline the vaccine. That’s the Bob Kennedy who Trump wants to head up the Department of Health and Human Services who argued that: — Efforts to deal with Covid were part of a “biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race”; — The mRNA Covid vaccine was “the deadliest vaccine ever made”; — The Covid virus was “ethnically targeted” to spare “Jews and Chinese people”; — And efforts to mitigate the spread of Covid were “instruments of compliance for authoritarian regimes.” Leadership matters, particularly during times of crisis, as do expertise, experience, and competence.