There has been more information coming out about the Pandemic lately, the most recent one. We have discovered that some of the policy decisions were based not on Science, but on Policy. Splash was muttering as the meeting lurched into Wednesday norms, the one where the themes of the week teeter on the balance point in the middle of the weekdays tipping down toward another weekend.
We have a member of the Writer’s Section who was on the SARS Task Force in 2003. It was a scary thing that seemed to work out in an acceptable manner. He told us how he wound up working for Dr. Anthony Fauci and wound up getting a stern lecture of the nature of Quarantine- what the Good Doctor explained was a social response that was more damaging to the economy than to the viral infection spreading around the globe.
Looking back on it is sort of amazing after our recent Pandemic adventure. Here is how some of it was tracked:
“American Flight 128 from Narita in Japan to San Jose in California was the issue next up at the meeting. We were on the 4th Floor of the Hubert Humphrey Building that is headquarters to the Department of Health and Human Services. The cabin stew crew reporting to the flight deck that some people looked sick in the back. The Captain radioed ahead and Gray Davis, intrepid Governor of the Golden State, had the airplane quarantined when it arrived. The sick passengers were whisked away. The remaining travelers were issued cards that instructed them to monitor themselves and call in if they didn’t feel well in the next week or so.
The “Q” word- what we called “Quarantine” in short hand- is fraught with peril. The last time it was used in earnest, with the power of law, was in the McKinley Administration in the year “1901.” It wasn’t even used in the 1919 pandemic. The power of the “Q” is reserved to the States and locals, although there are multiple and disorienting spheres of authority.
Dr. Fauci informed the group that the Transportation Secretary was on travel himself, and he wanted to “Q” Flight 128. That would be unprecedented, at least up until 2020. It would also cause of some consternation in the Health Community. Not to mention the swirl of the new Department of Homeland Security. It meant meeting with them and swearing undying support to the new Department. Then there was a speech to the regional directors of our Department on how we will craft and execute our Continuity of Operations program, the one where we need to vacate our official buildings and go to someplace safe.
Then there was the explosion of SARS itself, and the pitch the group needed to get to the President, and the questions drafted to put the Spooks on record for what they knew, and differently, what they thought. If they waffle, they will be hoisted on their own petard of secrecy. This was a huge deal. At the senior staff meeting this morning it was asked, ironically, what we would do when SARS came to our staff. It was coming. The recommendation was self-diagnosis and ten days in quarters to see if the diagnosis was correct. A very distinguished physician from NIH opined that he felt a little feverish and thought he needed to get to the liquor store to see if Maker’s Mark or Jack Daniels was the better prophylactic. A field trial, he said, one with the left hand and the other the right.
Sometimes I don’t think they take us seriously.
The explosion of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was significant enough to come right after the story of the beginning of the Battle for Baghdad. It was 2003, 21 years ago that this unfolded in a dramatically different fashion than Covid. There were hundreds if not thousands of cases of SARS diagnosed in China. Hundreds in Hong Kong and hundreds in Hanoi and hundreds possibly in Canada and nearly seventy dead from it. SARS starts with a headache and a fever and then it gets into the lungs and then it interferes with breathing and then, in around 4% of the cases, the patient dies. Doesn’t sound like much, after all 96% live, but think what a number 4% of China’s population is. Or anywhere.
From what we have learned, SARS first popped up at the Metropole Hotel in Kowloon, and then leapt over to the Amoy Garden Apartment Building in Hong Kong’s New Territories. It got there from four visits to the hospital bed of one of the ill patients at the hospital. Then it jumped into the lungs of a few hundred residents there.
The World Health Organization physician who first identified it died from the exposure. But the queer thing is how it jumped from Guangjong Province to the smoking floor- the one where lit cigarettes are permitted- of the Metropole Hotel and then across the Pacific to Toronto and then across the province of Ontario. And London and Paris and Australia and now it is popping up across the U.S. The fear was that it was going to be visiting a city near us soon.
We tried to apply those long ago lessons. Supply chains are vital and always have been. Since the Western nations outsourced manufacturing to the global network, the linkages are complex and more important than ever. For that reason we think back to publications like the Navy’s “Targets That Count.” Looking at the global vulnerabilities the way we used to analyze Saddam’s networks and take them out.
There are people are working on the concept of disruption. Houthi Rebels were a group of people none of us had heard of before last week. They decided the time was right to close the Red Sea. That would block ships similar to the ones outbound from the Black Sea and prevent them from delivering cargoes necessary to keep the global economy functioning.
So, there is peril on the sea for those intending to deliver products- edible or manufactured. Potential vulnerabilities include the entire agricultural chain: including growing, harvesting and distribution. The means to do so include tanker trucks and cranes, rail, big and little ships as liquid or powdered product in some other state and the whisper that it might have been bound for the production of Meals Ready to Eat. Or Meals Rejected by Ethiopians, as the troops called them in the Horn of Africa.
So, that was some of the view of another dread disease that did not play out the way the Covid Adventure did. There is more, of course. Layers of deliberately misleading information to deflect blame or accountability. You can follow it through Dr. Fauci’s various positions on masks. The changes have been that since it may have resulted from testing on the original SARS vaccine that escaped- or was let out- of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And it was played in a much different manner by people who reacted less to something more severe. SARS.
It will be interesting to see if the history of this will ever be revealed. The real history, we mean.
Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com