The Politics of Pandemics: a Primer
The Black Death Hits Venice
In October, 1347, the Black Death, a variant of bubonic plague, arrived in Europe and began killing about half the population, thus changing the social order and transforming the European continent forevermore. Although it was no means the world’s first pandemic, it did carry with it the most memorable of all history's fatal taglines: “The Black Death.”
Despite being largely discredited by the vast majority of medical historians like the Swiss-born Iris Ritzmann, millions of central Europeans fervently believed that Jews were to blame for the plague, and as such gruesomely killed them off by the hundreds of thousands. Hey, if you’ve got to blame someone for being the cause of an otherwise inexplicable disease which wound up killing off more than 200 million men, women and children, why not make it the Jews?
The first of history’s horrific pandemics was known as The Plague of Justinian (541 C.E.). It was caused by a single bacterium known as Yersinia pestis, and hung around most of the inhabited world for more than a thousand years. The Plague of Justinian arrived in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, in 541 CE. It was then carried over the Mediterranean Sea from Egypt, a recently conquered land paying tribute to Emperor Justinian in grain. Plague-ridden fleas hitched a ride on the black rats that snacked on the grain. This plague decimated Constantinople and spread like wildfire across Europe, Asia, North Africa and Arabia killing an estimated 30 to 50 million people, perhaps half the world’s population.
When the Black Death finally made its way to Venice in 1347 the Doges (city fathers), although possessing no scientific understanding of contagion, were able to fathom that it had something to do with proximity. As a result, forward-thinking officials in the Venetian-controlled port city of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) decided to keep newly arrived sailors in isolation until they could prove they weren’t sick. At first, sailors were held on their ships for 30 days, which became known in Venetian law as a trentino. As time went on, the Venetians increased the forced isolation to 40 days or a quarantino, the origin of the word “quarantine,” and the start of its practice in the Western world.
In England, the Black Death kept popping up every decade from 1348 and 1665; each decade found nearly 20% of the population succumbing to this plague. Then there was smallpox, which wiped out entire populations in Mexico, North Africa and parts of Asia. In 1801. British doctor Edward Jenner famously inoculated his gardener’s 9-year-old son with cowpox and then exposed him to the smallpox virus with no ill effect. Jenner’s vaccine was right on the money, but wouldn’t totally eradicate the disease until 1980.
The 1918-1920 “Spanish Flu,” the deadliest in history, infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide —about one-third of the planet’s population—and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million men, women and children, including some 675,000 Americans. Here in the United States there were 2 waves; the first wasn’t nearly as lethal as the second, which saw the Wilson administration ordering U.S. citizens to wear masks, close and shutter schools, theaters and businesses; bodies piled up in makeshift morgues before the virus ended its deadly global march. There is little evidence that people declared these steps to be illegal obstacles to freedom . . . unlike what we see and hear today during our current COVID-19 crisis.
In brief, the history of pandemics has shown progress on many fronts including the superstitious, the social, the scientific and today, something rather new: the political. The progress with which biochemists, epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists have created, tested and vetted innumerable vaccines (two of which have just this past week received FDA emergency approval) is nothing short of the miraculous. In my work with the medical and scientific experts at Advarra (for which, by law, our primary mandate is to protect the rights and safety of participants in clinical trials), it has never ceased to amaze me how much distance there is between pharmaceuticals, procedures and just plain politics. From our side of the aisle, it has been both deeply tragic and utterly laughable to observe the countless roadblocks and phantasmagoric pronouncements of politicians who haven’t got the slightest idea of what they’re talking about. They have placed an altogether psychotic roadblock on the pathway to cure.
More and more, we read or hear the declarations of so-called community leaders who aver that COVID-19 is a “hoax” nefariously created and funded by the likes of the late Hugo Chavez, Bill Gates and George Soros; that vaccines created by the likes of Pfizer and Moderna have not been created to stem the tide of the COVID-19 pandemic but rather to implant microchips into those receiving vaccinations for the express purpose of tracking every human being on the planet. Further, these same people claim that the wearing of masks, observing social distancing and other sensible precautions represent nothing less than the death of liberty.
Then there are those who are scaring the daylights out of people by telling them that these vaccines are purposefully made to inflict lethal harm, not healing.
A couple of examples might be useful. Just the other day, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro criticized Pfizer, bizarrely warning that their BioNTech vaccine could result in such strange side-effects as women growing beards and people turning into crocodiles. He also announced that under no circumstances would he submit to being vaccinated. And by the way, Bolsonaro is one of the autocrats that our current POTUS most admires.
Closer to home, just this past Friday, Representative Ken Buck (R-CO) told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto that he will not be taking the coronavirus vaccine, explaining that he is “more concerned about the safety of the vaccine” than the “side effects of the disease.” “It is my choice,” Rep. Buck told Cavuto: “I’m an American and I have the freedom to decide if I’m going to take a vaccine or not and, in this case, I’m not going to take the vaccine.” Then there are all those “super spreader” gatherings we see covered on the nightly news in which hardly anyone is wearing a mask or keeping their distance. It seems that for a troubling minority, refusing to wear a mask or keep six-foot distances are marks of all-American machismo or marianismo. (Do note, being a hardcore anti-vaxxer is by no means the exclusive purview of conservative Republicans and political lunatics; If you look at some of the places where opposition to vaccinations for children is highest, it’s places like Santa Monica, Marin County (just across the Golden Gate Bridge) and Seattle, none of which are part of the right wing.
Here in Florida (which, with a few exceptions is the reddest part of the Deep South)-, Governor Ron DeSantis (a.k.a. in umbra Trump (Latin for “In the Shadow of Trump”) has made it next to impossible for counties or municipalities to initiate their own pro-mask, pro-social distancing ordinances and has further mandated that restaurants, bars, gyms, nail parlors and other such businesses remain open so as not to interfere with the state’s supposedly reemerging economy. (It should be noted that DeSantis is giving serious thought to running for POTUS in 2024 should his revered leader not. As such, he is doing everything in his power to keep on the good side of Trump’s right-wing, Libertarian base.) DeSantis has also managed to distort both COVID-19 and COD (Cause of Death) stats so as to make it seem that deaths attributable to the pandemic are much lower than the more trustworthy stats provided by the Johns Hopkins Corona Virus Resource Center.
While the scientific/medical progress made in the pursuit of corralling COVID-19 has been nothing short of a breathtaking miracle, the politics behind it all have been as terrifying as any Wes Craven-directed slasher film. On the science/medical side of the pandemic, researchers and ethicists have done their jobs with tireless alacrity, going through tens of dozens of clinical trials in order to develop vaccines which are both relatively safe and more than reasonably effective. Are these vaccines perfect? No . . . no drug, vaccine or medical procedure is 100% safe. There is always the possibility of “adverse events” (side effects) depending on a host of issues like “comorbidities” (other medical conditions like HIV, diabetes, immune system deficits or advanced age). And of course, any medicine or vaccine must by law include the majority of these possible known side effects. Anyone who has ever watched drug ads on television knows that the majority of a 60-second spot is consumed with telling you all the possible things that could go wrong. Although both the legal and ethical thing to do, it’s nonetheless enough to keep many people from telling their physician to try the drug - although why a patient should be telling the doctor what to try has always seemed to me a bit like putting the cart before the horse.
Knowing that I have been working on COVID-19 protocols for most of 2020 (along with the “Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot Project” for the past 5), I am frequently asked if I will be taking one of the various anti-COVID-19 vaccines. “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes,” I tell them. “I will be doing it for me, for my family and friends, my students, neighbors, coworkers and congregants . . . for anyone and everyone I may come into contact with.”
I always conclude my answer with: “And always remember: the acronym for “United States” is “U.S.,” as in “us.”
We are all in this together.
15 days until the Georgia Senate elections
30 days until the beginning of the Biden/Harris administration.
Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone