Safeguarding America from COVID-19: A failed promise

The United States is presently contending with the viral health threat known popularly as ‘the Coronavirus’. Known more technically as the SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 virus, this viral health threat is presently having a profound effect upon just about every aspect of American life, massively disrupting our social, economic and public health affairs as more and more individuals are found to have been infected by clinically detectable traces of (infections with) the viral entity in reference.

As the epidemic, now officially described and referred to by NIH, WHO and CDC agencies as being of pandemic proportions, continues to spread, the predictable psychological effects any biological threat entity intrinsically carries with it are having a far greater and wider-ranging impact on the public than any actual physical health threat the virus poses.

Experiences with other major chemical and biological threats to health and well-being have shown us over and over that allaying fear, quelling needless anxieties and separating fact from fantasy are the chief critical challenges that our health agencies face whenever something like the COVID-19 virus appears unexpectedly or suddenly, on a burgeoning scale. This has been the case from the dawn of recorded history, beginning with humanity’s earliest experiences with biological diseases, including the notorious ‘Black Death’ (Plague, or more properly Yersinia Pestis) and continuing through similar outbreaks that include various influenza epidemics, the ‘Spanish Flu’ epidemic of 1918, the poliomyelitus scare of the 1950s and dozens of similar, potentially life-threatening health crises, right up to the present day.

Sadly, instead of assuaging fear and soothing rampant anxieties, instead of helping allay needless hysteria and forestall panic, the modern industry that is our contemporary broadcast media has fed obscenely and incessantly upon every slight detail of the COVID-19 outbreak, by so doing shamelessly fanning the flames of fear and uncertainty to the point of collective mass hysteria. The reason for this dynamic is readily understandable, if one considers that news media is now a global, multi-billion dollar business just like any other, that, vestigial moral ethics be damned, has seized upon the public’s imagination by fostering the present state of highly aroused emotion, a dynamic that tends to bury whatever factual information may exist in the waves of rumor, conjecture and baseless speculation that have contaminated the ‘public mind’. The ‘rewards’ derived from such covert motivations are, of course, increased revenues, heightened statue and exponentially increased viewer ratings in a nation whose capital-based system considers everything nothing but fodder for commerce to exploit and mercilessly plunder. And all under the hypocritical banner that loudly proclaims ‘We’re just trying to keep the public informed’.

Of course the distinction between ‘keeping the public informed’ and preying upon all the darkest fears of the uninformed mass mind has long since been lost, as legions of high-pitched and overly emotional young reporters and new anchors (mostly of the female variety) appear on the near verge of wetting themselves as they pitch the latest tidbits of ‘news’ to an already anxious and overwrought viewing public.

To all these journalists and media people, I say “Shame on you!”, but when did insular, critical voices in the vast wilderness that is the collective American public awareness ever resonate in the slightest way with the public? The gross insult that corporate organisations pathologically foist off on us, by sniffing out obscene self-enhancement as they self-righteously ride the crest of whatever crisis currently has seized the collective public imagination, never seems to register. Ever.

That opinion shared, and turning away from the perverse morphology that characterises the MO of modern media institutions, the present ‘pandemic’ that is the COVID-19 health threat should have long ago triggered a pre-structured, pre-conceived and pre-emptive governmental response that experts in chemical and biological warfare threats have long been warning us is urgently needed. Predictions of such a biological threat are almost stock-in-trade for professionals whose work centers in the unique and singular field of CBRN/CBW (Chemical, Biological, Radiographic and Nuclear/Chemical and Biological Warfare) prevention and defense affairs.

Atlantic writer Ed Yong in his excellent 25 Mar 2020 commentary (How the Pandemic Will End), makes mention of the fact that a few prescient individuals have consistantly warned that a pandemic event of this magnitude is a given, that could occur almost at any time, and that adequate preparations should already have been instituted long ago against such a certainty. Among them is Microsoft magnate Bill Gates, whose video-taped cautionary alert on this subject is presently getting a great many hits on You Tube. Gates is merely one more such Cassandra who has been almost completely ignored.

Regrettably, the mass mind of what I often refer to as ‘the herd’ has an extremely attenuated memory (constituting a beautiful example of what philosopher George Santayana referred to when he made his famous observation that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”) and once a crisis…any crisis…has been successfully dealt with, all traces of it, no matter how catastrophic, quickly vanish from popular awareness. Only specialists and academicians remain mindful of the greater issues involved and their opinions and consequent concerns are generally ignored by the rest of society.

Such was the case with every single modern (and most past) mass human crisis, excepting perhaps the Jewish ‘Shoah’ of WW2 (since Jews are determined to never let the rest of the world forget what they suffered at the hands of the German National Socialist movement of Adolf Hitler…a determination that is constantly evidenced in their unrelenting and highly publisised admonishments to keep its memory fresh).

The US Government likely counts upon this characteristic trait of the social masses to conveniently fail to remember and concern themselves with subjects that not only should, but ought religiously to be remembered, when instituting public planning and national policy. One of those ‘should be remembered’ awarenesses that the passage of time conveniently obfuscates is what the devastating potential of adverse biological public health events can wreak.

We often these days hear the phrase ‘preventive medicine’ casually bandied casually about in the American health environment. Preventive medicine, as it turns out, is FAR and away vastly cheaper and less costly than the cost of actively treating the actual adverse health consequences of disease, pestilence and infectious illness. Hence, our Government has, over the past 70 years, slyly co-opted the ‘mass thoughtlessness’ exhibited by the public to spare itself countless billions of health-related dollars that would otherwise be required, were America to not conceive, prepare for and deal with that which has actually been foreseen for scores of decades: a massive pandemic of the scope that COVID-19 has suddenly presented to world-wide health authorities.

Curiously enough, America once did have a program in place to deal with emergent crises such as our present one. It was known as ‘Civil Defense’ and its inception first came about as a direct result of our participation in WW2, although the concept gained far greater and broader impetus with the horrific prospect of nuclear war that development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs produced in 1945.

After suffering near-unimaginable casualties from what in 1914 was the then utterly new and shocking scourge of so-called ‘chemical warfare’ (in which weaponized chemical compounds were deliberately developed and fielded for the first time with the specific intent of both disabling and even killing large numbers of an enemy), steps were quickly taken both to deal with this new form of warfare offensively and to institute preventive (defensive) programs to insure that America would not again be caught unprepared by these new and radically advanced weapons. The US Army Chemical Warfare Service was instituted and quickly developed in a very short period of time, after the initial shock of chemical warfare in 1914 faded somewhat. Public awareness of the ravages of ‘gas warfare’ quickly became wide-spread as reports continued to pore in from European battlefields that painted a graphic picture of the appalling capability that such weapons had to inflict extreme suffering and grievous injury.

When the Second World War loomed on the horizon (brought on principally by the massively unfair and largely undeserved inequities created by the victorious powers and imposed upon Germany in the form of harsh economic sanctions and disproportionate war reparation penalties), America and the rest of the Western world was at least still quite mindful of and prepared for the potential threat that chemical warfare posed to combatants in any new major conflict. It is indeed fortunate (and a quirk of fate), anecdotally speaking, that the German Fuhrer (Adolf Hitler) had personally suffered from chemical warfare effects in the first war, which he had served in as an ordinary soldier. His own personal experiences made him determined to refrain from using such weapons against any new European enemies that Germany might face, despite the fact that Germany stockpiled such weapons as a contingency. Since he considered the major combatants in the ‘new war’ (America, England and France) to have shared racial ethnicities, that fact also served to deter his use of chemical weapons ‘against fellow Aryans’.

Meanwhile, during the pitched battles of the first war, research was first conducted on both sides to explore the feasibility of using biological weapons against an enemy. Research experiments in both Germany and Soviet Russia had actually developed weaponized forms of bacteriological and viral agents that, had they been used on a massive scale, could conceivably have done huge damage to any enemy aggressor. Although this even newer, even more insidious form of war weaponry was not deployed as an actual offensive weapon, its potential was not in the slightest lost on the United, States, France, England, Japan, Italy and Soviet Russia.

Fortunately, the world was thus spared the horrors that the new biological war agents could inflict…with one egregious exception. That exception took the form of Japan’s infamous ‘Unit 731’, a highly classified unit of the Imperial Japanese Army, based in Manchukuo (Japan’s term for the province of Chinese Manchuria that it had invaded and appended in the 1930s), that existed solely for the purpose of investigating the possible war uses of biological war agents and that conducted active experiments along those lines.

One of the most sordid examples of unprincipled, inhumane warfare to date, Unit 731 inflicted a wide range of biological research experiments upon innocent Chinese civilians, resulting by war’s end in an estimated hundred thousand casualties, or more! Shamefully, immediately after the war ended, the chief IJA military perpetrators of this outrage were allowed to strike a secret deal with Allied Forces in exchange for sharing the vast research results and data they had accumulated on the effects of CBW war agents (chemical/biological) warfare, thus largely escaping the sort of war trial prosecutions imposed upon the Nazis. This remains as one of the most outrageous injustices ever in recent history, given the utter barbarity and inhuman scope of Unit 731’s callous transgressions against the Chinese civilian population during their occupation. Of course, the Japanese looked down upon the Chinese as less-than-human, thus having no compunctions whatsoever to carry out such truly revolting depredations on what it considered ‘inferior’ people.

What resulted from this contemptable political deal-making was the United States acquiring a knowledge of exactly how terrible the potentials of biological weapons actually were, but moreover, acquisition of the theoretical and actual ability to protect and defend American civilians in the event America ever faced a similar threat. It is to be logically presumed that Soviet Russia also acquired much of this information, due to its extensive ‘Cold War’ espionage activities, and before long both the Soviet Union and the United States had very active research programs in operation to investigate and develop both CBW weapons and defend against them, if need be.

Mainly due to the emerging threat of nuclear war resulting from growing antipathy and competition between America and the Soviets, it was all too clear that although the Second World War had ended, a new ‘Cold War’ was developing. One of the immediate results of this realization was that America’s former WW2 partner was now its formidable new enemy This served to both renew and invigorate a new and even more comprehensive Civil Defense program than had been in place during World War 2.

Part of the assumption resulting therefrom was that should any new conflict break out (this time between Russia and the USA), nuclear weapons as well as chemical and biological agents would very likely be brought into play by both sides’ armies. Especially since the United States had been the first nation to actually use the atomic bomb against Japan, in wartime.

Thus, an uneasy, somewhat nervous status quo of sorts existed right up until the Soviet Union fell apart in 1989-91. Although most public and media attention was focused on the very real danger posed by the new Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), the just as deadly and perhaps even far more dangerous threat of CBRN/CBW weapons use lurked just on the sidelines throughout the Cold War conflict.

In a demonstration of classical naivete, America concluded, when the USSR ceased to exist, that fears of a new CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear) threat were effectively over and done with and one of the immediate results of this new and deceptively hopeful spirit of overly idealistic détente was the fact that the American Civil Defense program was quietly allowed to die a natural death. Accordingly, preparedness against the horrors of CBRN weapons quickly began to fade, as international treaties banning the use of such weapons as war agents quickly took shape and embraced by most of the world’s nations. Eventually, the formerly quite extensive and active US Army CBRN Research facilities were closed and stockpiles of CBW war agents were destroyed, accordingly. [Russia gave the impression that it too would follow suit, although much later it came out that it had indeed continued to conduct covert research on CBW war agents.]

This was the state of affairs that existed up until the new terrorist threat posed by Islamic radicals suddenly burst forth in America, with the attack on the twin World Trade Center buildings in New York City in 2001. Quite as suddenly as the attack itself had occurred, America was seized by renewed fears that CBRN weapons might be employed by Islamic fundamentalists operating under the aegis of Al Qaida and its many affiliated radical offshoots. In certain sectors of the American military CBRN once again quietly but rapidly became a critical subject for strategic planners to contemplate, once again.

Although the new fear of terrorist use of CBRN weapons by Islamic guerillas prompted much concern by both military and certain industrial research entities having extensive interactions with the military, the old American Civil Defense organisation remained dead and buried, insofar as both official governmental prevention and preparedness awarenesses were concerned. There was, however, still a vague and uncomfortable understanding, buried deep within the highest levels of the military and civil establishment that should a new CBRN war threat ever arise in America, the nation would be almost totally unprepared to meet it in a timely, effective and adequate manner. This threat would certainly, it was felt, take the form of some deliberate use of CBRN agents to threaten America and its population.

Interestingly, only on the extreme right fringe of popular American culture was there any remaining vestigial concern over the possibility of a chemical/biological threat materializing. Among these, principally consisting of extremely fundamental religionists who feel the world is about to end (according to ‘God’s plan’, as outlined in the Christian Bible), are to be found what we refer to as ‘survivalists’ (and ‘preppers’) who assume that only by preparing against any eventuality will anyone be able to escape what they perceive to be either the pre-ordained Christian Armageddon’ or mankind’s self-inflicted extinction.

Consequently, these individuals have been preparing for decades against what they consider an inevitability: massive, world-wide loss of life due to either natural or human-inflicted causes and most survivalists/preppers are already well equipped with medical gear, food, supplies and CBRN protective gear (including masks, garments and so forth that are used against biological threats). This is not the case with so-called ordinary folks, who constitute a percentage of approximately 95% of the population.

[It would be unfair to fail here to mention a singular individual named Larry Wayne Harris, who some years ago published a book on the possible dire consequences biologicals posed to the world. This book (titled Bacteriological Warfare, 1995), which is available on AMAZON, was prepared for the public as an effective field-manual of how to prepare for and protect against bio-agents. Although at the time he wrote it, the brunt of Harris’s (a Registered Microbiologist) thesis was preparation for defense against war use of bacteriological agents (agents derived from bacteria, rather than virus-derived), the basic principles he covers in his book are excellent and highly recommended for anyone interested in how to best cope with a pandemic of the present viral sort.

Harris appears to be a religiously devout individual who published his 130 page softcover book (ISBN 0-9647-860-5-2) through a printing house named Virtue International Publishing (I suspect it to be a religiously affiliated book business), but although his book has been in past distributed mainly through religious book stores, to his credit the contents of the work constitute strictly scientific fact and it contains extremely useful information on just about anything one would need to know to protect one’s self and family from a CBRN threat…whether weaponised or naturally occurring!

Regrettably, Harris seems to have been disregarded by many in the same way the American ‘survivalists’ and ‘preppers’ have been, but that should not in the slightest prevent him from being recognised as having figured importantly in bringing basic CBRN knowledge and information into the hands of a public whose greater infectious disease awareness needs have been largely ignored and/or dismissed by an uncaring Federal Government, until the present moment.]

What wasn’t equally as clear, when the 2001 Islamic terrorist threat materialized, was that America faced not just the deliberate use of specifically bioengineered war CBRN agents in future, but also the just-as-potentially-catastrophic possibility that this ‘threat’ would come from a natural source. That is to say, not from bio-engineering scientists in a national military research laboratory, but from Mother Nature herself, in the form of a bacteriological or (more likely) viral epidemic.

Once again, as before, the US Government elected to conveniently but completely ignore the very real dangers of bio-weapons and such was the status quo when SARS-CoV-2 suddenly appeared, just three months ago (January of 2020).

That threat would come, as events turned out, from the present COVID-19 pandemic that has succeeded in impacting nearly every nation in the world with the breath-taking rapidity of its spread, and it has had a shocking effect on nearly everyone as it soon became clear that (at least in our case) that America had utterly failed to foresee the looming (and highly predictable) health crisis that we now face and failed miserably to prevent it from having its present wide-spread effects.

Although some initial, early speculation (China expert Steven W. Mosher among them) quickly posited that the COVID-19 virus might actually be an ‘escaped’, deliberately bio-engineered viral entity, investigations (as perfunctory and preliminary as they are at this time) strongly suggest that the COVID-19 virus is not an accidentally released Chinese war agent, but a naturally occurring event that evolved on its own.

Despite this fact, it appears to be inarguable that the virus initially came from China. The fact that China’s sole ‘Level 4’ (a level in which the highest form of individual and collective protection is required for the conduct of biological research work) biochemical research investigation facility is located in the city of Wuhan, thus far it seems merely a coincidence that Wuhan was its point of source origin. Naturally, it’s far too early to draw even the sketchiest of conclusions about any virtually any aspect of COVID-19 and far more investigation is needed before we have the slightest grasp of what the virus’s rapid spread portends to a largely unprepared world.

In essence, America was heretofore inadequately prepared to cope with only half of the potentially massive adverse health casualties that might result from a surprise terrorist use of CBRN weapons, but was completely caught off guard by a naturally evolved biological threat, such as has quite suddenly emerged in the past several months! And even then, what little civil defense preparation did exist had largely been emasculated and put to rest long ago!

At this time, America has been faced with a ferociously daunting challenge in having to disadvantageously from behind in coping with sobering potentials of the new SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic. It is probably safe to say that we are not alone in this quandary and that every other nation on the planet has similarly been caught, as the saying has it, ‘with its pants down.’ As of this time (28 Mar 20), supplies of already existing health protective gear, clothing and equipment are nearing exhaustion, with what Federally stockpiled items being steadily depleted almost exponentially each day. The Adminstration’s response has been most untimely, tardy and sporadic as the President seems to alternate daily between highs and lows of extreme optimism and pragmatic pessimism, and it is quite clear that whatever his other (many) faults and failings, Donald Trump may be a great booster shot for American commerce and business, but his leadership qualities in a time of genuine, urgent crisis have so far been utterly abysmal.

As an individual who has been involved with CBRN/CBW/NBC issues from the 80s and 90s onwards, it greatly saddens me to observe the sweeping effects of the present SARS-CoV-2 crisis, for it is plain enough that despite the persistent warnings and alarms various members of the international CBRN community have raised over the past three decades, virtually no one has taken them seriously, to the slightest extent. The results of such gross governmental negligence are apparent for all to see as we enter another week of the very early and still largely unpredictable phase of the viral threat that has now enveloped the entire world.

Having said all of the above, and despite its horrifically untimely response to the present SARS-CoV-2 crisis, what Americans should most demand from its leaders and legitimate authorities right now is reassurance that despite all the seething anxieties, fears, semi-hysteria and near-panic that are each day being capriciously tossed at us by a frenzied media establishment, the very best resources available to all of us remain the application of ordinary common sense.

In a social media environment awash with rumors, false information, half-baked theories and downright malarkey, only information from sources such as the NIH (National Institute of Health), the WHO (World Health Organisation), the CDC (Center for Diseased Control) and selected others should be heeded by the public. Individual hygiene precautions such as scrupulous, frequent handwashing, regular use of 70% (or greater concentration) hand sanitizer, use of N95 (or higher, such as N99, etc.) NIOSH breathing masks (respirators), and social-distancing should be adhered to conscientiously. The rapid development of a safe vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 should not be relied upon, since indications are that it will take at least a year or more to accomplish that.

Unfortunately, although there is no shortage of food, consumables, water and other daily necessities, the panicky, herd-like response of the ‘less astute’ to sweep store shelves clean of items like toilet paper, eggs, milk and other items has created in itself an artificial shortage of some of these products. There is NO NEED for that sort of panicky reactivity whatsoever and yet it continues (hence the need for our broadcast media to stop inciting public hysteria by ceasing to over-saturate their viewing audience with breathless emotionalism and start acting as the voice of calm, moderation it should be).

It saddens me to reflect that when this crisis is finally adequately dealt with (and it shall be), the chances are great that once again all public mindfulness of the present trying circumstances shall once again fade quickly into the background of traditional collective national amnesia…until the next such crisis occurs with the same predictable consequences.

All we can do is hope that in the meantime, at the highest levels of US Government, a strong memory of the present difficulty will remain latent and that long-term efforts will have been long-since initiated to prepare for it well in advance!

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References

1) Defense Against the Poor Mans Nuke, Kalikiano Kalei, 2000, American Survival Guide Magazine (article). Revised, 2020.

2) US Chemical and Biological Defense Respirators, by Christopher T. Carey, 1997, 224 pages, hardcover (ISBN 0-7643-0387-2), Schiffer Publishing.

3) Bacteriological Warfare, by Larry Wayne Harris, 1995, 129 pages, softcover, (ISBN 0-9647860-5-2), Virtue International Publishing.

4) Chemical and Biological Warfare: A Comprehensive Survey for the Concerned Civilian, by Eric Croddy, 2002, 306 pages, hardcover (ISBN 0-387-95076-1), Copernicus Books (Springer-Verlag).

5) How the Pandemic Will End: The US may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialised world. This is how it's going to play out., by Ed Yong, Atlantic article, 25 Mar 2020.