Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book…
© Mahabodhi Burton
4 minute read
This excerpt is taken from the appendix ‘No-Man’s-Land: The Unclaimed Area Beyond the Domains of Religion, Politics and Science‘ and follows on from the debate around Ivermectin.
President Bush’s pandemic plan
Still outstanding is the question of the effectiveness of the West’s response to the pandemic: an October 2020 Telegraph article states:
‘Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Imagine if a world leader, a president with unlimited resources, had marshalled a crack team of scientists to devise a pandemic strategy that could have prevented a new respiratory virus from turning western society upside down.
‘A strategy specifically designed to hold back a lethal new pathogen long enough to allow a vaccine or other pharmaceutical interventions to be created without the need for a total lockdown. A strategy that was not just academic but one which had been approved as policy, operationalized and shared with allies around the world, including Britain.
‘Looking at the world today you would think it was China and its neighbours across southeast Asia which had developed such a protocol. They are the nations which acted quickly to control Covid-19 through a carefully crafted set of social distancing measures or “non-pharmaceutical interventions” (NPIs), as they are technically known.
‘Yes, they too have taken a hit, but by acting early, national lockdowns have been brief or avoided completely, as have large-scale deaths, direct and indirect. Moreover, they have dramatically limited damage to their economies and their geopolitical power and status has surged as a result.’[1]
US President George W. Bush, and his deputy Dick Cheney, had, in 2003, ordered a social distancing plan be researched, devised and tested in order to protect America from a new pandemic pathogen, man-made or naturally occurring. They placed the full might of the Department for Homeland Security behind it and made sure it was in place and ready to be deployed before they left office in January 2009. The plan was announced in December 2005.[2]
In that plan were some key recommendations, one of which was that the public needed to hear a coherent message from government and media sources, so that they did not become confused: this is the exact opposite of what actually happened! Back in 2005 the information marketplace as it is now, wasn’t available to us, for better or worse. In 2020, when the pandemic arrived the scientific debate about issues like mask-wearing and social-distancing therefore took place in public, in a cacophony of informed and uninformed opinions over which nobody was in control. Even Presidents fought for space in the debate, not always successfully getting it.
The below quote hints at what the experience might have been like for public officials, i.e. like being a rabbit caught in the headlights:
‘Dr Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a member of the original team puts it two ways.
‘He compares the indecision of western policy makers early on in the pandemic to a man standing on the tracks of a rail line with a fast train approaching, unable or unwilling to move because he doesn’t have the necessary data to calculate the train’s exact velocity.
‘On the other hand, said Prof Lipsitch, constructing ideas and policy is a very different thing from implementing it—something that comes with different responsibilities and consequences.
“Talking about it in some hypothetical future [as we did in 2005] where you imagine how scared you’re going to be of both the virus and the consequences of shutting down society is very different from acting on it”. In a real crisis, the “psychology is totally different”.’ [3]
Moreover, everybody looked to the scientists for salvation. The fact that public trust in science and scientists appears to have increased during the pandemic could be due in part to mass formation:
‘While Pew Research results[4] signal public disapproval of the UK government’s pandemic response, the expertise of the nation’s scientists remain highly valued by the public (to an even greater extent than before the crisis). The UK’s lacklustre pandemic response resulted in one of the highest Covid-19 death rates per capita in the world. As of summer 2020, just 46% of the UK public rated their country’s handling of the coronavirus crisis as ‘good’, while 54% said it was ‘bad.’ This is the lowest approval rate in the survey conducted by Pew Research Centre, comparing 14 developed countries.
‘At the same time, there is a clear pattern of more positive attitudes towards science evident in recent research by the Wellcome Trust. The findings reveal that the pandemic brought the public interest closer to science when results are compared for identical survey questions in 2015 and April 2020. Public interest in hearing directly from scientists about the research they were conducting jumped by nineteen percentage points (63% to 82%).’ [5]
However, holding a scientific debate in the court of public opinion—particularly when there are conflicts of interest within media platforms, was never going to achieve anything like objectivity, just the competing claims and opinions of different lobbies: i.e. the vaccine lobby; the anti-vax lobby; the Ivermectin lobby, etc.
The result could be said to have been a division between the Global North and South. Populations in developing countries embraced Ivermectin. Many of the world’s poor had the advantage of robust immune systems due to tropical climates and poor hygiene whereas the developed North fought itself on social media over the pros and cons of experimental mRNA vaccines, mask mandates and whether freedom of choice was still permitted. Maybe there is some poetic justice in this outcome. In other words, the North got what it deserved. For a society already stratified and atomized, it was an exercise in non-collaboration.
As for the impact on the lives of the unmistaken heroes of the hour, i.e. the medical professionals in the front line whose work was hindered by the muddiness of the waters of the scientific debate. Not only were they personally put at greater risk from lack of clear guidelines but to add insult to injury, their hearts were also broken, in knowing there was more that could be done to alleviate their patients’ suffering but that those strategies weren’t being implemented.
The chapter goes on to explore the Ivermectin debate in the Triratna Buddhist Order.
[1] Paul Nuki. ‘How George W Bush crafted a social distancing plan–and why it was ignored by the US and Britain: Former president ordered scientists to devise a social distancing strategy to slow a pandemic, but it was not used for Covid-19.’ The Telegraph. 4 October 2020. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/george-w-bush-crafted-social-distancing-plan-ignored-us-britain/
[2] Fred Charatan. ‘Bush announces US plan for flu pandemic.’ ResearchGate. December 2005. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7486778_Bush_announces_US_plan_for_flu_pandemic
[3] ‘How George W Bush crafted a social distancing plan–and why it was ignored by the US and Britain: Former president ordered scientists to devise a social distancing strategy to slow a pandemic, but it was not used for Covid-19.’
[4] Kat Devlin, Aidan Connaughton. ‘Most Approve of National Response to COVID-19 in 14 Advanced Economies: But many also say their country is more divided due to the outbreak.’ Pew Research. 27 August 2020.
[5] Eric Jensen, Aaron Jensen, Axel Pfleger, Eric B. Kennedy, Ethan Greenwood. ‘Has the pandemic changed public attitudes about science?’ LSE. March 12th, 2021.
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