Our total war against the Coronavirus ... PS added on 11/23/20

Last update: Thurs 4/30/20

A few months ago when President Trump characterized our struggle to overcome the Coronavirus as a "war", I agreed.



I was hugely disappointed when the president's subsequent statements made it clear that he thought that he was a wartime president presiding over a limited war, like the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, wars that barely affected the lives of Americans who were not members of combat units. Our last total war, World War II, deployed millions of American troops to battlegrounds overseas, while  profoundly altering the lives of millions of civilian citizens back home; but the war did not pose direct threats to our civilian population.

Ever since the 1960s everyone assumed that our next total war, if one occurred, would be a thermonuclear war against Russia (or China) in which millions of citizens would perish. But today we fight a different kind of total war against an inhuman microscopic enemy. Instead of millions of combat troops deployed somewhere over there, our front lines are hundreds of thousands of healthcare professionals here at home. But as with a thermonuclear war, this war threatens millions of our civilians throughout the land. 

Had President Trump grasped the magnitude of the threat we faced as soon as he was warned back in January 2020, and had he then mobilized our entire economy as quickly as possible the way that President Roosevelt mobilized against our enemies in World War II, this might have merely been a different kind of limited war. But President Trump wasted time posturing and fantasizing as the United States became the epicenter of the global Corona pandemic.

So we are now engaged in a different kind of total war than we anticipated, one that will go on until effective treatments, i.e., cures for the virus are discovered ... or until effective vaccinations are developed. Had President Trump quickly convened a multi-billion dollar Manhattan Project to develop effective treatments and vaccines like the multi-billion dollar project that President Roosevelt convened to develop the atomic bomb, we might have some confidence that the war would not last for more than a year or so. But he didn't.

How will our society be transformed by this protracted total war? There are unmistakeable signs that it will greatly exacerbate the dangerous racial and gender inequalities that already exist. This suggests that the barely tolerable current divisions within our society will rise to intolerable levels. When our constitution was adopted back in 1789, Benjamin Franklin commented that we now had a republic, if we could keep it. How long can an intolerably unequal society remain a democratic republic? 

P.S. ... added on Monday 11/23/20

When I posted this note on 4/30/20, I was not aware of the following articles that had been published the day before:

• "Trump’s ‘Operation Warp Speed’ Aims to Rush Coronavirus Vaccine", Jennifer Jacobs and Drew Armstrong, Bloomberg, 4/29/20
  
  
• "Trump Seeks Push to Speed Vaccine, Despite Safety Concerns", David Sanger, NY Times, 4/29/20

Both articles made the following points:

• The president had made no formal announcement about Project Warp Speed yet.
• Its goal was to develop a coronavirus vaccine before the end of 2020 and available to most Americans by January 2021 (300 million doses)
• Dr. Fauci and other experts were skeptical that a vaccine could be produced that fast, noting that a vaccine might be available within 12 to 18 months, at best.

As of today, two companies have announced the development of vaccines that are about 95 percent effective, but they won't be widely available until next April or May, if all goes well:

• "New Pfizer Results: Coronavirus Vaccine Is Safe and 95% Effective", Katie Thomas, NY Times, 11/20/20
  
• "Moderna’s Covid-19 Vaccine Is 94.5% Effective in Early Results, Firm Says", Peter Loftus, Wall Street Journal, 11/16/20

Bottom lines:

• I was wrong -- President did launch a multibillion dollar effort to develop vaccines.
• President Trump was right -- the vaccines were developed before the end of the year
• President Trump was wrong -- the vaccines will not be widely available until next April or May
• Dr. Fauci and colleagues were wrong -- the vaccines were developed in 8 months, not 12 to 18 months
• Dr. Fauci and colleagues were right -- the vaccines would take 12 to 18 months to become widely available, if all goes well