The Second Time As Farce

Yesterday, I ran into an unintentionally revealing quote from Dr Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and regular COVID talking head:

“Now if monkeypox ‌gains a permanent foothold in the U‌nited States and becomes an endemic virus that joins our circulating repertoire of pathogens, it will be one of the worst public health failures in modern times not only because of the pain and peril of the disease but also because it was so avoidable,” Gottlieb wrote in a recent opinion-editorial for the New York Times. “Our lapses extend beyond political decision making to the agencies tasked with protecting us from these threats.”

Gottlieb, who now serves on Pfizer’s Board of Directors and is a partner at the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates, also judged that the U.S. government’s missteps in tackling monkeypox are similar to its failures to combat the coronavirus.

“Our country’s response to monkeypox ‌‌has been plagued by the same shortcomings we had with Covid-19,” Gottlieb wrote.

“With COVID, the virus ‌‌gained ground quickly. With ‌‌monkeypox, which spreads more slowly, typically through very close contact, the shortcomings of CDC’s cultural approach haven’t been as acute yet. But the shortfalls are the same,” he added.

Dr Gotttlieb's theme is similar to other recent remarks from Drs Fauci and Birx, if slightly more consistent: all would agree that something wasn't right with COVID strategy. Dr Fauci thinks people should all have been wearing N95 masks from the start. Dr Birx thinks Biden was wrong to tell people vaccine prevented transmission; she knew that was false all along. Dr Gottlieb thinks there were "shortcomings". All three gloss over the fact that repeated strategies that imposed near-catastrophic consequences on the world public, ranging from total lockdowns to selective business closures to restricted activities to masking to social distancing to vaccines had no visible effect on controlling successive outbreaks of COVID.

His implication is that with monkeypox, we have a do-over. What should we do differently? What on earth, for instance, was "CDC's cultural approach", and what specifically was wrong with it? The piece doesn't quote Dr Gottlieb further, but it does then quote "CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen":

“I do think it’s time for the U.S. to declare a state of emergency [. . .] because that will allow for a much better-coordinated response,” Wen said. “It will allow the Biden administration to appoint a monkeypox czar to oversee these efforts. It will also allow for more resources to be put into this as well. I hope that the window hasn’t closed. . ."

Well, both California and Illinois have done just that. UPDATE: Biden has also now named a monkeypox czar. According to NPR,

Declaring a state of emergency often helps with the logistics and coordination between departments working to respond to the emergency.

That'll sure fix things, huh? Neverthelss, although San Fracisco Mayor London Breed declared her own monkeypox state of emergency on July 28, the city went ahead and hosted the Up Your Alley festival July 31. which

is “usually described as a bit kinkier/nastier, more gay male centric” than other similar leather, kink and fetish festivals in San Francisco, according to an online guide to the weekend. The event draws thousands of revelers each year, with the host organization encouraging its attendees to “wear your gear, your leather, or your birthday suit” while keeping “an open mind” on its website.

Shades of the 2020 George Floyd riots! (Has anyone suggested yet that they might have been a "shortcoming" of the CDC response to COVID?) Now, of course, we're wrong to snicker at gay activites of any sort. Gay is serious business. It has nothing to do with being gay about anything. On the othe hand, the one thing the monkeypox czar is never going to do when we get one will be to suggest guys not do gay stuff. This is another way of saying the response to monkeypox is already front-loaded with the same fecklessness as the COVID response, and the Drs Gottlieb and Wen are fully aware of that.

The CDC "cultural approach" with its partners in the community will basically amount to vague PSAs at kink festivals urging guys to get vaccinated. How will this differ from COVID, except that they'll never, ever threaten to fire gay guys from their jobs if they don't get the jab? As Marx put it, the second time repeats as farce.

But I'm actually coming to quite an optimistic conclusion here. I mentioned the other day the suspicion of some theorists in the early days of COVID that the lockdowns were a dry run to see if they could get people to accept the same thing for "climate emergencies". Here's a paper from Hillsdale College, not a conspiracy site, that suggests the same thing:

In May 2018, the [World Economic Forum] collaborated with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security to conduct “CLADE X,” a simulation of a national pandemic response. Specifically, the exercise simulated the outbreak of a novel strain of a human parainfluenza virus, with genetic elements of the Nipah virus, called CLADE X. The simulation ended with a news report stating that in the face of CLADE X, without effective vaccines, “experts tell us that we could eventually see 30 to 40 million deaths in the U.S. and more than 900 million around the world—twelve percent of the global population.” Clearly, preparation for a global pandemic was in order.

In October 2019, the WEF collaborated with Johns Hopkins and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on another pandemic exercise, “Event 201,” which simulated an international response to the outbreak of a novel coronavirus. This was two months before the COVID outbreak in China became news and five months before the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic, and it closely resembled the future COVID scenario, including incorporating the idea of asymptomatic spread.

The CLADE X and Event 201 simulations anticipated almost every eventuality of the actual COVID crisis, most notably the responses by governments, health agencies, the media, tech companies, and elements of the public. The responses and their effects included worldwide lockdowns, the collapse of businesses and industries, the adoption of biometric surveillance technologies, an emphasis on social media censorship to combat “misinformation,” the flooding of social and legacy media with “authoritative sources,” widespread riots, and mass unemployment.

If that was the plan -- and my instinct is still to stress the "if" -- I've got to ask how this worked out for the lizard people, and the short answer is that it didn't. Let's grant that there were people in places like the Gates Foundation, Johns Hopkins, the CDC, the WHO, and all the usual suspects who got the bright idea of having a virus and planning what was to be done in careful detail. How'd it work?

The result was a stunning loss of credibility and a vacuum of leadership for those very people and institutions. COVID had to COVID notwithstanding the successive remedies that were imposed. The very people who were urging those remedies on us, Drs Fauci, Birx, Gottlieb, and Wen, plus numerous others who are more prudently now laying low, are oh-so-carefully backing away. There were shortcomings. Mistakes were made. Knowing what we know now, but of course, hindsight is 20/20.

But we get a do-over with monkeypox. Because there's nothing farcical about gays and kink festivals. Nothing at all. Let me say again so I'm not misunderstood, there's nothing farcical about hosting kink festivals in a state of monkeypox emergency, nothing. Although Marx said history repeats, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce, he couldn't be more wrong.