The Daily Beast Podcast - Trump Isn’t the Only Person Whose COVID Response Cost Lives

Episode Date: March 21, 2021

Since the spread of COVID-19 launched a global pandemic in 2020, over half a million Americans have been killed by the virus. And experts agree that the death and infection rates have been much worse in the West—mainly the United States and Europe—than many other places in the East. In other words, while other countries like China, Cambodia and New Zealand were able to temper the spread, the U.S. had its ass handed back to it. There are a lot of reasons for this, says David Wallace-Wells, New York magazine writer and author of How the West Lost COVID. Factors like population age and geographic location played a role in these places’ ability to control the virus, but ultimately, one of the most “catastrophic” factors that played into the death roll, is something we very much had control over. And that is how our leaders responded and our collective culture, on both a federal and local level. “I think the toll of the disease really throughout all of Europe and all of the Americas shows you just how devastating cultural and political inaction is,” he said. “South Korea looked at what was happening in January. And they said, ‘Holy, this is really bad. Like if China is locking down an entire city of 10 or 11 million people for a period of months, like this must be really scary and we should get our act together in response.’ And in the West, we just didn't.” Host Molly Jong-Fast is adamant that having a person who wasn’t inept in office, aka someone other than Trump, would have made a huge difference in saving lives. Wallace-Wells agrees. He also thinks even the Democratic leaders and bipartisan health officials dropped the ball, too, though, at least in the beginning. “Gavin Newsome, Andrew Cuomo, and even Anthony Fauci, all of them were sort of saying to some degree the same thing, which was, ‘we don't want to disrupt things too dramatically unless we need to,” and that cost lives. “Our wealth, our medical capacity, our cultural capacity was gonna prevent us from being vulnerable in the way that these other countries elsewhere in the world were vulnerable,” he added. It’s also a scary indicator of Americans’ lack of ability to take immediate action if it’s uncomfortable for future crises, like climate change Molly points out. But there is some good news: “I think the cultural lesson of this pandemic is [that] we under reacted and it's likely that we're going to be much more aggressive in the future.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to another members-only Beast Inside episode of the Daily Beast, the New Abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Today we have a really, really exciting guest, what I'm particularly excited about, with David Wallace Wells. You may know David from his incredible writing at New York Magazine, as well as his incredible book, The Uninhabitable Earth.

This week, he wrote an incredible story called How the West Lost COVID, and we're going to dig into that with him. Welcome, David Wallace Wells. Thank you. It's great to be here. Great to talk to you. Very excited to have you on the new abnormal, first-time guest. Very exciting. The piece you wrote how the Westloss COVID is amazing, and I'm hoping that you could give us, like, the top line on it. Well, there's sort of two big points. The first is that a year into this disease, we still actually don't really understand why and how it spreads in the way that it does, nearly to the degree that many of us think we do. Americans, we spent the last year debating masks and social distancing, and that stuff obviously

does seem to have an effect. But when you look at the global picture, it's clear that these policies don't neatly correlate with national outcomes. And so there's just a lot of, you know, virus being the virus running by its own rules going on. And I think we haven't really, you know, come to terms with how little we can really do, especially once the disease sort of gets a hold in a particular community, how powerless we are to totally direct the course of the disease. But even given that mystery and that sort of enduring uncertainty about exactly what drives spread and what we can do to stop it, there are these really, really clear global patterns. There are basically three groups of nations. I want to stop you before we talk about this and add an extremely important caveat,

which I think is really important to just go into quickly. So Alex Barron, who is like one of the kind of worst COVID truthers, got very excited by that quote and said, virus got a virus. You see, I'm right. And he tweeted it. And that's one of his favorite kind of ways to twist misinformation. So I just want you to stop first and explain to our listeners. Well, it is true that the virus behaves in a very, you know, we've all seen this and we've talked to a lot of people on the show that there are machinations that the virus, you know, there are things the virus does that are unpredictable. You are not in any way saying that we should just go for it. No. I think the, I think the toll of the disease on, I mean, especially America, but, you know,

really throughout all of Europe and all of the Americas shows you just how devastating cultural and political inaction is. But I think that we also should be sort of clear and think clearly about what the tools are at our disposal, what they can do and what their limitations are, in part so that we can be more aggressive when we need to be and, you know, just smarter in our responses to these kinds of threats. I think at this point, as one of the scientists put it to me, the toothpaste is sort of out of the tube. Some of the things that we would have wanted to do last spring or just would be practically speaking pointless. But in thinking about how important it is, especially to do whatever we're going to do really quickly, which is one big lesson of all of this,

I think especially the next time we face a pandemic threat, you know, I hope that we can sort of implement these changes immediately. I'm definitely not in a, you know, let the virus circulate freely. What difference does it make kind of a position? Right. I just thought it was important to clarify that because I saw, you know, we, I feel like. Like, at this point in the COVID pandemic, one of the things were really in the media trying desperately to push back against is this kind of anti-vaxxer, like, it is what it is, sentiment. So I just wanted to get that out there. He did get so excited by that.

To punctuate that just a little bit more, like the uncertainty is an argument for more vigilance and focus. We don't understand precisely the dynamics of disease spread. that means that we need to do everything we can to try to control it. It's, you know, an argument from the precautionary principle, which is something I know a lot about having, you know, covered climate really deeply for a long time. And it's something that we're kind of bad at in the U.S. and Europe. In every way.

In every way. And that is really, that shows up in these global patterns that I was mentioning a few minutes ago, which is, you know, when you look at especially like the global, it's sort of a crude metric, but like deaths per million citizens across the world, it is just really clear that there are basically three categories of countries and they are geographically, you know, adjacent. So in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, in, you know, that part of the global south of developing world, we've seen where there has been good testing, we've seen evidence that there are relatively high levels of infection and zero prevalence, but basically very few deaths. And there are a lot of reasons for that, but the dominant one, I think, is just the age structure of the population. These are countries that are much younger, and so the disease can circulate pretty widely without causing a huge uptick in deaths.

There are other factors, climate, public health initiatives, et cetera, but age really seems to have made a big difference there. In East Asia and Oceania, you know, almost all of the countries there, which range from quite wealthy ones to quite poor ones, range from authoritarian right-wing governments to left-wing governments, range from national healthcare systems to something that, you know, much more patchwork. all across that region, countries have done really, really well in containing the disease. And there are reasons for that that we can get into in a bit, but it's just striking when you observe it from a global perspective how Japan and Taiwan and South Korea and New Zealand and Australia and Cambodia and Vietnam, not to mention China, all of these countries have just done phenomenally well in terms of limiting, you know, to some degree the infection rate, but certainly the death rate all across that region. And then in what we sort of

used to call the West, for me it's an uncomfortable term, but it's the easiest shorthand to describe Europe and the Americas. You've just seen a sort of catastrophic failure where no nation in those regions has done anything approaching as well as any of the countries in Asia have done. And really, when you look at the EU average, for instance, compared to the East Asian average, the European countries have done 5,000 times worse in terms of. of death toll than the East Asian countries. Not great. And so we can look at like the difference between European countries that did relatively well

or American countries that did relatively well, say Canada or Germany and think as Americans or as Brits or whatever, why didn't we do as well as those countries? But when you pull back and take in the global perspective, I think you have to sort of start from the presumption that like we all in the West did badly. There are some variations. Some did slightly less bad. Some did slightly more bad. but like we all did badly.

And when compared, especially to the countries in East Asia and Oceania, we obviously have a lot to learn. Right. But do you think some of that was because they had had a, they had already had a run with COVID with SARS? Absolutely. I think that that's one of the, definitely one of the factors,

you know, that they had had a pandemic experience not that long ago and not just SARS in 2003, but MERS in 2015. Those are really important. And they sort of... They had a culture of masking. Yeah, and also just a comfort with a kind of medical surveillance.

You know, in the West, I think we talked about like what happened in China early and we were like, that is so crazy. They're like barging into people's homes and giving them tests and like we could never tolerate that in the West. And now I would say that what's happened in the last year when we've essentially lived in a quasi lockdown for a whole year suggests that actually we probably were capable of doing something like that. We just had to be forced into it with a moment. much higher level of infection than they had over there. But even putting that argument aside, those kinds of measures were, you know, they were acculturated to them because of these pandemics that they've experienced over the last couple of decades. That's obviously a big part of why they responded more quickly. I think another big part of it, which I talk about in some,

at some length in the piece, is that they did not suffer from this kind of patronizing orientalism in which, you know, people in South Korea looked at what was happening in Wuhan in January, and they said, holy shit. This is really bad. If China is locking down an entire city of 10 or 11 million people for a period of months, like this must be really scary and we should get our act together in response. And in the West, we just didn't. We saw the same lockdowns.

We saw the stuff on our social media feeds. We saw it covered in our cable news shows. And yet our political and social response was much, much more wait and see. And that was true not just in the U.S., but all across Europe so that when the disease first showed up in Italy, It wasn't like the Spanish and the French and the Brits took incredible measures. They waited until the disease got to their front door, too. And when it came to the U.S., a lot of the country was waiting for it to get even state by state before they took dramatic measures. So at every stage, when we could have looked at what was happening elsewhere and seen something to be scared about and something to prepare for, we instead took this view that what was happening elsewhere couldn't possibly happen here.

and our capacity, our wealth, our medical capacity, our cultural capacity was going to prevent us from being vulnerable in the way that these other countries elsewhere in the world were vulnerable. And that hubris, I think, is a really big part of, goes a long way of explaining why all of these countries all across Europe and the Americas did so poorly because ultimately, given the exponential way that the disease spreads in a sort of uncontrolled when it's in an uncontrolled state, the most important thing is moving quickly. And if you have a mindset, a worldview that says, let's wait until, it's right here and then we can respond. Invariably, you're going to be too late in mounting

whatever responses you do mount, which is, you know, tragically what happened. And also, I feel like it's a scary sign of what's to come with climate change. For sure. I mean, you know, you heard a lot, I've heard a lot over the years people saying with climate in particular that we had to, we were going to have to have a really scary encounter with some climate catastrophe and that was going to whip us all into shape. But I think this shows us that like even when we have a really scary encounter, we don't manage to get our shit together in time. Right. And the flip side of that, which is another parallel with climate,

is that over the course of the disease, we've managed to really normalize an enormous amount of death and suffering such that, you know, passing 400,000, 500,000 deaths made kind of considerably less of a cultural splash than when the U.S. hit 100,000 deaths. And I see that in climate reporting too, where, you know, people in California are living through wildfire seasons that are twice as bad or four times as bad as anything they've ever had before.

and their response is to essentially treat that as on a continuum of earlier fires and not see themselves as living in a really terrifying new fire state to which they have to respond because you know that's just it's human nature in certain ways it's a sign of our our strength and adaptive capacity that we can normalize some of this stuff on the other hand it's yeah as you say it's a really bad omen for our ability to respond to really large-scale threats and particularly those kinds of threats like a pandemic that we see as sort of like, you know, long-tail risks that are unlikely in any given year, but which require a really large-scale response when they do arrive. We look at those kinds of risks and we think, well, we'll wait till

they're here. And, you know, as we've been talking about, like, waiting until you're here. It's just too late. It's so interesting because in January, I was like, this is going to be really bad. And I was talking to someone really, you know, who's like a pretty prominent TV person. And they were like, no. And I remember watching it go from like China to Milan and seeing it. I mean, we had two weeks where it was decimating Milan and we knew it was coming here. And we did nothing. Yeah.

And, you know, the really depressing thing about our whole response, I would say, and I'll get back to the really initial response. But the really depressing thing about our whole response, but the really depressing thing about our whole response is that not even that we did nothing in January and February, although that ended up up being, I think, the really catastrophic failure. The really depressing thing is that, like, when we did go into lockdown in March and April, we didn't do anything then. Like, we could have spent those six weeks. That was supposed to be the purpose of a lockdown. It was like, we get a month or six weeks, we put the disease on pause, and we stand up a public health infrastructure that will allow us to live more comfortably, more normally on the other side of lockdown while preventing or at least sort of suppressing

And almost everywhere, not just in the U.S., but really all across the Americas, we just didn't even do that. So even while we were taking this sort of maximally invasive, maximally intrusive, disruptive approach, we couldn't build out any state capacity, any medical capacity that would allow us to live more comfortably on the other side. It was like we weren't even willing, even then, to make investments in that kind of near-term future. And that's really, really bad. But yeah, in the early months, you know, I think we had this real, real problem at almost every level of our society. So obviously we had this cancer at the top of our federal government who was, you know, a sociopathic narcissist, was not interested in anything about the disease except how it was going to affect his popularity. Right. Wanted to slow down.

You know, you can literally not cast a worse villain to be in that role of like government leadership. And yet, you know, all of these people to whom he was contrasted at the time, Gavin Newsom, Andrew Cuomo, and even Anthony Fauci, all of them were sort of saying, to some degree, the same thing, which was we don't want to disrupt things too dramatically unless we need to. And then, you know, Cuomo has become a bit of a villain in this story, I think, understandably to a large extent. In his book about the crisis, he writes at some length about wanting to, you know, about panic being the bigger threat than the disease. And that is, you know, that is, I think, expressive of the deep failure of our society, not just at a policy level, but at a social level, to really reckon with the meaning of this disease. And I think it's, you know, we thought because we were so rich in advance that pandemics couldn't happen here. But it's also the case that the value of running our, especially our economic system in an uninterrupted way, the value of that is so high that the threat has to be enormous for us to really take any real meaningful action. And that went for not just the denier in chief or whatever.

It went for almost all of us who really preferred to preserve our regular way of life as much as we possibly could. rather than taking, you know, the step of, say, like, submitting to thermometer checks every time we went into an out of a building or, you know, embracing rapid testing, or, you know, there are a lot of measures we could have taken that we didn't. But for me, I write about this a bit in the piece, I found this incredibly eye-opening panel from mid-February that Anthony Fauci and Nancy Messonnier were on, along with Ron Clayne. She really, by the way, called it so early.

early. Do you remember when she came out? Yeah, I mean, you know, I think that a lot of these figures were both right and wrong in the early stages. And they, both Fauci and Messonnier were also playing this complicated game of trying to maintain position and authority within the Trump administration. But this, I think this panel was on February 11th or so. And, you know, Fauci said this virus represents a really low risk. And Helen Brandswell, who was the journalist who was leading the conversation, pressed him on. And she was like, how can you say that? I think she, you know, like you, Molly, she was like, I'm looking at what's happening in China. I see how fast is spreading. How can you possibly say this is low risk? And he then backtracked a little and said, well, I think there is,

you know, a chance that this really gets out of control in the U.S. But right now, if I was ringing the alarm, I would lose all credibility. And I don't think he was talking there about losing credibility with Trump. I think he was talking about losing credibility with the American public. But that fear of being too much of an alarmist in a moment when real alarm could have made a meaningful difference, it's really, you know, I think that that's the real rub of it. That's the real, you know, the real thing that we botched and failed. Because even if Trump would not have responded at that time in mid-February by, say, building out, you know, production for testing or whatever, even if Trump would have done nothing. You know, the governors and mayors of the country might have been inspired by seeing someone

like Fauci really, really raising the alarm then to do something much more aggressive on their own. And, you know, governor and mayors, their power is limited. Their budgets are limited. You know, they can only do so much when the federal government is playing an absentee role, but they could have done something. And instead, we just sort of sat on our hands. And Messonnier in the same panel was saying, you know, more or less the same thing. She acknowledged that the disease could be a real threat. She said if we get real sustained local transmission in the U.S., like we're not going to be able to contain it.

She said that. But she also said, you know, we're being really aggressive about finding new cases, which was ridiculous. Like we weren't even testing people who weren't very obviously symptomatic at the time. And, you know, at the moment she said that, you know, for most Americans, the disease is not really something all that much to worry about. And for a whole other month past then, we're hearing from figures like them, not just those in government, but in the academy, in the sort of commentary, we're hearing from people who are saying, this disease is not as scary as the flu. Focus on your flu shot if you're worried.

Right, which was insane. And don't wear masks. Yeah. Well, you know, the mask thing is an interest. So I've had a number of long conversations with this Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina who's been, you know, an advocate chiefly for rapid testing throughout the pandemic, a sort of lonely voice crying in the wilderness for rapid testing. one of the things he said to me more recently when we were talking for this piece was, you know, one real problem that is shared between the U.S. and all of these other European countries in particular is that we really have a medical focused view of public health, rather than a public health or population level focus of public health. And what he means by that is, in the mask issue, is that, like, in the spring, scientists and doctors knew that masks would help.

They didn't know how much they would help. And they were, you know, they thought that the efficacy would be sort of well short of 100%. So like the best studies of the time said that they had some effect, but they weren't perfectly protective at all. And they processed this information and decided essentially collectively, although I think it wasn't like there was a backroom meeting. It was just the sort of the shared impulse of a lot of these people. They decided that if a mask was only going to give you sort of 50% protection or 60% protection,

that the risk of telling people to wear masks and therefore sort of encouraging them to behave more or less normally only wearing masks was higher than saying that they shouldn't wear masks at all, which would encourage a sort of more fundamental, you know, vigilant approach. And that idea that anything short of a total guarantee of protection was not worth encouraging is a really, you know, it's, I say in the piece, it's sort of like, that's the sort of advice you might give a single sick patient. But when you're talking about a population of many millions of people, something that cuts transmission by 50% is an enormously useful tool. And the fact that our sort of public health apparatus was incapable of moving from the perspective of an individual patient to the view of the population as a whole was in that sense really catastrophic. And mine also focuses on the rapid testing thing, which is sort of the same story. Rapid tests, these are things that it cost a dollar. You can do them at home.

They're like a home pregnancy test. they're not quite as accurate in terms of measuring infection as the sort of gold standard PCR test. But when I say not as accurate, it's like they're like 95% accurate instead of 99.98%. And if you double them up and take two, which only costs $2, they're basically as effective in terms of measuring infectiousness. And in fact, they're more effective in measuring transmission, which from a public health perspective is, or transmissibility, I say, is more important. And yet throughout the entire year from all of these medical experts and the FDA, and all down the line, there was this real resistance to saying,

okay, really cheap, easily manufactured $1 test that are a little bit less accurate than what we're going to do in a lab. That's a useful tool. Instead, they said, well, no, we need everything to be absolutely as accurate as the PCR test to be deployed in the public. And that, you know, again, really, really slowed our testing capacity when we could have used much more of it. Right.

The quotes from Ron Claim in your piece do not exactly inspire optimism for the future. I know there's something like a dozen movies in production about COVID 23 through 29 and whatever. His quote really makes a grim look at like what the federal government could do to prevent this in the future. Do you have any thoughts on like what can be done that we can learn from this to shape the government to react well in the future? Well, one thing I think is that, you know, the rollout of vaccines can actually happen much more quickly, especially once we're comfortable with the MRI technology that has brought these new wave of vaccines. So I wrote a piece a few months ago pointing out that the Mederina vaccine was designed

in early January over a single weekend and was actually shipped to, you know, for the first, its first phase one trial before anyone had died in the U.S. Now, we want to do some safety trials on vaccines, but a lot of that, actually, everybody I spoke to for that piece told me it could be dramatically accelerated. And I think once we're comfortable with MRNA vaccines generally, we could be doing that in the future so that we'd have vaccines within six weeks or eight weeks of a new disease arriving rather than waiting a full year. And that would make a huge, huge difference. But even putting that aside and talking about the public health features, yeah, in general,

I think doing much more aggressive testing, doing much more contact tracing, you know, it's all the things we've been talking about since the beginning of the pandemic, but which I think the pandemic has taught us to do better, we will probably do more quickly. In the last time the U.S. faced a pandemic threat, it was SARS. And we did build out a lot of this capacity. And then it went unused. And I think the lesson of that, the cultural lesson of that was like, we overreacted. I think the cultural lesson of this pandemic is we underreacted, and it's likely that we're

going to be much more aggressive in the future. Now, that may not be centrally directed from the federal government. We don't have a national health structure, as Clayne pointed out, on that panel. And a lot of it will fall down to the states and local health authorities. But I think that we're going to see many more people. we already seeing applications to public health schools going through the roof. I think that public health infrastructure is going to be much better staffed going forward. And at the local and state level, people will be much more aggressive next time than they were the staff.

Right. But you think if we had had a normal president, it wouldn't have gotten this bad. Well, you know, it's hard to say because I think some of these problems run deeper than Trump. If you look at the- Yeah, but still, I mean, like, you might have had 250,000 deaths. I mean, if you had had, if you just had a president who had been like, wear a mask, it's not. mystery. I mean, yeah, I mean, like, I feel like at every point he did. I mean, the tragedy of this thing is like if you had had normal people in office, they might have, you know, sure we would have had, you know, anyway. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics, and science will help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share. share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you again on the next episode.

Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at thedailybeast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast and Sign up today.