It was noted over the weekend that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the widely respected White House coronavirus task force expert, had expressed some ambivalence about the pandemic in interviews earlier this year. Some coronavirus truthers tried to argue it was evidence that the ailment that put five times more people in the hospital in New York state than the worst-ever week of the flu is a hoax or a nothingburger.
More charitably, the commentariat noted that it proved that no one, not even one of the nation’s foremost disease experts, knew or even knows with any certainty the extent of the coronavirus or what effects it will have.
We know the coronavirus is more deadly than the flu, but thanks to the deceptions of the Chinese Communist Party and a lack of testing in the West, we still don’t know by how much. And we know it’s more transmissible than the seasonal flu, but because of a lack of random sampling, we don’t know by how many factors. We know that hydroxychloroquine has helped treat some patients, but we still have no idea how consistently it will do so for the masses.
Months into this pandemic and weeks into a national nightmare, we still know very little. All we do know, and all we have known for some time, is that this is a serious enough disease to shut down the global economy for a time. It’s also a respiratory illness, and as such, wearing masks reduces the spread and contraction of this often asymptomatic disease.
Yet Surgeon General Jerome Adams, one of the nation’s leading authorities on public health, spent months denying this.
In February, Adams claimed the risk of the coronavirus was lower than the flu. By the end of the month, he had declared that masks “are NOT effective in preventing” the spread of the coronavirus. Adams kept up the claim for a month, only to be forced into a sudden about-face.
Now, Adams calls this “our Pearl Harbor moment, our 9/11 moment, only it’s not going to be localized,” warning that this week will be “the hardest and the saddest week of most Americans’ lives.”
“Give us a week. Give us what you can so that we don’t overwhelm our healthcare systems over this next week, and then let’s reassess,” Adams begged of governors who haven’t yet issued stay-at-home orders. We need just one week of a total national shutdown, Adams claims — one that presumably includes task force expert Dr. Deborah Birx’s warning not even to go to the grocery store.
The nation needs to thread the needle between a rapid flattening of the curve and reopening the economy, and in that context, this is not an unreasonable demand. But this is coming from a renowned medical expert who spent months lying to us about the efficacy of masks and claiming complete certainty about the severity of the virus.
We need the nation to take the next two weeks seriously, and that cannot be done when one of the administration’s most important spokesmen has discredited himself so thoroughly. As South Korea and Japan have already proved, wearing masks almost certainly helps — and at least doesn’t hurt. And furthermore, it doesn’t take any epidemiology expertise to understand that if the Communist Party of China was forcibly bolting civilians’ doors shut in the hopes of quarantining all of Wuhan, the coronavirus was probably a pretty big deal.
We absolutely need authorities reminding us that the next two weeks require extreme measures. But for the sake of public health, let’s not have it come from someone who spent his credibility downplaying the disease and writing off what little we can actually do to combat it.
