We need a different kind of coronavirus task force

Last update: Saturday 11/28/20

Editor's note: I was hugely disappointed, but not surprised, by the poor performance of the coronavirus task force appointed by President Trump. President-elect Biden recently announced a similar task force, so I expect to be similarly disappointed. That's why this note proposes a different kind of task force.

Roy L Beasley, PhD
Editor, Neoskeptics blog

Good news and bad news
Recent announcements by Pfizer and Moderna that data from their clinical trials suggests that the effectiveness of their vaccines may be 95 percent and 94.5 percent, respectively. Our future may be even brighter considering the likelihood that at least one or two of the scores of other vaccines currently under development might also prove to be highly effective.

• "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

My smile begins to fade when I reflect on one of the most essential features of any vaccine: it must be taken by a high percentage of the population. Black Americans have good cause to be less than trustful of rapidly developed new medications that have not undergone years of extensive testing in the field. 

• "Black doctors want to vet vaccine process, worried about mistrust from years of medical racism", Meryl Kornfield, Washington Post, 9/26/20
  
  
• "Coronavirus Vaccine Hesitancy in Black and Latinx Communities", William Wan, Washington Post, 11/23/20

My smile disappears completely as I contemplate another recent headline from the Washington Post:

• "President-elect Biden announces coronavirus task force made up of physicians and health experts", Yasmeen Abutaleb and Laurie McGinley, Washington Post, 11/9/20

Here we go again!!! Another gaggle of doctors and health experts who will once again try to use tables and charts to persuade us to resist COVID fatigue and maintain steadfast adherence to the dogmas of social mitigation as laid down by the "the science".  

No one doubts that doctors and health experts have a deep understanding of the behavior of the coronavirus in laboratories and in human bodies; nor does anyone doubt their clear perception of the kinds of human behaviors that will retard the spread of the virus in our communities if followed by a supermajority of the population. What doctors and health experts don't seem to understand is that scary tables and charts will not persuade a supermajority to abandon lifelong habits.

Neither their academic training nor their subsequent professional experience has provided these kinds of experts with the skills that would enable them to induce a supermajority of our population to abandon lifelong habits that conflict with mitigation guidelines. Where do appropriately trained and experienced persuaders usually come from? The most important source, of course, is politics.

Georgia's vote for Biden

Speaking of politics, I now ask for the reader's indulgence while I digress for a moment before proceeding with this thread of my discussion. Here's the first sentence of a recent NY Times article about Ms. Stacey Abrams:

• "Celebrities, activists and voters credited Ms. Abrams for building a network of organizations that highlighted voter suppression and inspired an estimated 800,000 new voter registrations."
  
  "As Biden Inches Ahead in Georgia, Stacey Abrams Draws Recognition and Praises",  Hakim, Danny; Saul, Stephanie; Thrush, Glenn, NY Times, 11/6/20

After the defeat of her bid to become governor of Georgia in 2018 wherein there were substantial indications of massive voter suppression, Ms. Abrams launched a social movement to fight voter suppression in Georgia. Wikipedia offers a succinct definition of a social movement:

• "A social movement is a loosely organized effort by a large group of people to achieve a particular goal, typically a social or political one ... This may be to carry out, resist or undo a social change. It is a type of group action and may involve individuals, organizations or both."

The success of Ms. Abram's movement in registering 800,000 new voters was a major component of candidate Biden's success in capturing Georgia's 16 Electoral College votes. 

Question: 

What does Ms. Abrams' voter registration movement have to do with overcoming the resistance of Black Americans to new COVID vaccines?

I answer this question with another question: 

Do any of my readers seriously doubt that Ms. Abrams and her activists would be immeasurably more effective in overcoming Black resistance to new vaccines than the doctors and health experts on President Trump's old task force or the doctors and health experts on President-elect Biden's new task force? 

Evangelists

Leaders of social movements, like Ms. Abrams, have been called various names, e.g., activists, community activists, community organizers, etc. As a retired tech, my favorite name originated in the tech community wherein these leaders have been called "evangelists" ... with deliberate echos of the original Christian evangelists: Peter, Paul, and others. Recall that the apostles journeyed from town to town spreading the gospel, the "good news", and encouraging those who heard their words to go forth to spread the "good news" to others. 

We need a different kind of task force

We need a different kind task force, one that is derived from a different model than President Trump's old task force and President-elect Biden's new task force. These efforts are akin to the classrooms of most colleges and universities wherein the task force experts are the "professors" and we citizens are their "students". They specify the new behaviors that we must learn in order to control the virus; then they applaud us when we learn, but chide us when we fail to learn, as evidenced by increases of decreases in COVID infections.

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, this model might work for some of the people some of the time, but it will never work for a super majority of the people any of the time if the new behaviors that must be learned conflict with deeply ingrained behaviors. Unfortunately, social mitigation guidelines conflict with some of our most deeply ingrained social and workplace habits. 

COVID control via social movements

I suggest that President-elect Biden should appoint a different kind of task force composed of political administrators who could mobilize evangelists. These administrators would be advised by a panel of medical experts and by a panel of non-medical experts.

• The Medical Advisory Panel would recommend guidelines for social mitigation and vaccination, guidelines that are based on the documented findings of the sciences that are relevant to pandemic control. For the duration of this pandemic, the CDC would issue its detailed guidance through this panel.
  
  
• The task force would facilitate the mobilization of social movements at the national, state, and local levels that will motivate the populations of the fifty states and territories to adhere to these guidelines. 
  
  
• A Non-Medical Advisory Panel would advise the task force with regards to the likely economic and other non-medical impacts of the medical panel's recommendations.

It usually takes a few years for social movements to gain traction, so I am not suggesting that the new task force start from scratch. I am suggesting that the evangelists within existing movements repurpose some of their efforts during the next six to nine months to include activities designed to encourage the folks at the grass roots of their movements to observe mitigation guidelines more consistently and to become vaccinated at the earliest opportunity.

For example, the original goal of Ms. Abrams' voter registration drive was to get more Black people in Georgia to vote for Democratic candidates in the November 2020 elections; but as soon as those elections were over, she persuaded her evangelists to shift their focus to electing the Democratic Party's two candidates to the U.S. Senate in the special runoff elections that will be held in January 2021.  

While I am confident that Ms.Abrams would be a highly productive member of the new kind of task force, her voter networks are bounded by the borders of the state of Georgia. In my efforts to identify a social movement that covered all 50 states and territories, I could not think of one movement, but I did identify two collections of social movements ==> the Democratic and Republican Parties. 

COVID control via the Democratic and Republican Parties

The election machinery at the state and local levels of both of the nation's major parties are activated before every election, e.g., governors, congressmen, and mayors. But every four years when there's a presidential election, the election networks of each party's activist volunteers, i.e., their evangelists, are mobilized at all levels. The following bullets briefly describe a few of the most important components of the repurposed networks of the major parties, networks whose members would be connected by a cloud-based, multi-purpose COVID app that is downloaded to each user's cellphone.

• Party Evangelists (national, state, and local) -- The recent election's contact information for these volunteers is still accurate (or easily updated), so they could be activated quickly.
  
  
• Voter databases -- The recent election's contact information for registered party voters and independent voters who were leaning towards one party or another is also accurate (or easily updated).
  
  
• Local news -- The party networks should provide easy access to local news about the virus to the residents of local communities, i.e., the news people can really use. I suggest that the new task force should mobilize the networks of the major parties to deliver up-to-date local statistics about the virus -- tests, infections, positivity rates, hospitalizations, hospitalization rates, remaining hospital beds, deaths, and death rates -- via the COVID app. The app should also enable users to request county, state, and national statistics so that users can understand the contexts of their local situations.
  
  The Trump task force placed undue emphasis on national data, especially on unflattened national curves. If the national trends are going in the "right" direction, this info could mislead local communities to become careless in their day-to-day activities; if it's going in the "wrong" direction, national info could wrongly cause people in local communities who are doing the right things to become discouraged. 
  
  The COVID app should employ GPS to identify the user's location; then it should automatically display the latest local COVID statistics. Furthermore, the app should provide links to other sources of local COVID information available through multiple media, e.g. blogs, Web pages, podcasts, Facebook groups, Zoom sessions, TikTok, etc, etc, etc. (Alternatively, the user might provide his/her zip code to receive local data and local info links.) 
  
  
• Learning & persuasion
  Although we are more than nine months into the pandemic, I think it would be a great mistake to assume that everyone understands the logic of social mitigation and vaccinations. As I have argued elsewhere on this blog, a substantial share of the blame for this confusion must be borne by the White House coronavirus task force and the CDC.
  
  -- See my blog note Trump supporters who reject masks and other mitigations are not stupid and/or crazy"
  
  President-elect Biden's appointment of a new task force provides opportunities for the skeptical segments of the public to regain their confidence in our public health system, but only if the new task force behaves far more transparently than the old one. The COVID app should place its users in touch with four important resources with just a few clicks on users' cell phones: 
  
  (1) tutorials that are understandable by non-experts that explain the logic of mitigation policies and vaccinations. 
  
  (2) data linked to the tutorials that confirm the value of the mitigation policies or vaccines. For example, the Trump task force strongly advised us to wash our hands frequently. How frequently? A recent study by a team of Japanese researchers found that the coronavirus can survive up to nine hours on human skin, four times as long as the flu virus. This finding suggests that we should wash our hands at least four times as often as we would wash them to ward off the flu. The COVID app should provide links to reports like this one for each mitigation guideline and for each available vaccine
  
  -- "Coronavirus Can Survive on Skin 9 Hours", Ralph Ellis,  WebMD, 10/9/2020
  
  (3) credible local, county, state, and national opinion leaders can be featured in videos or live sessions that can be made available to local users of the  COVID app. Their endorsements would reduce resistance to mitigations and vaccinations. For example, testimonials from Black physicians and LatinX physicians would be useful for overcoming resistance of Black and LatinX residents to COVID vaccinations
  
  (4) Peer support for local residents who are having difficulty adhering to the mitigation guidelines or overcoming residual fears of vaccination will be obtained through participation in online meetings with other members of their communities that are organized by local party evangelists.
  
  
• Suppressing holiday surges -- The networks should host continuous streams of COVID mitigation and vaccination activities until fall 2021 when vaccines should be available to most of the public. However, network activities should intensify at least two weeks before each of the major holidays in an effort to boost everyone's resolve to maintain their adherence to the guidelines during the festivities ==> Christmas/New Years, Spring Break, Memorial Day, July 4th, and Labor Day. 
  
  
• Fundraisers -- Party networks could use the COVID app to raise funds to address the COVID needs of local communities. Some examples of worthy recipients include: food banks, hospitals and other health care services in need of additional personal protective equipment (PPE), and families driven to the brink of destitution by the local economic consequences of lockdowns and other mitigation policies. Although I emphasize local causes in local communities, there is no reason why out-of-state contributors cannot contribute to worthy local recipients.
  
  
• Channels for other social movements -- The repurposed party networks could absorb the talents of volunteer evangelists that are embedded in other social movements. Smaller social movements would be like the smaller rivers that become tributaries to the mighty Amazon or the mighty Mississippi. For example, the evangelists within Ms. Abrams' voter movement in Georgia could be channeled into the Democratic party's network ... but not into the GOP's network wherein Ms. Abrams and her activists would probably have zero credibility.
   
• Functions of the task force -- The task force provides top level administration of the network functions listed in the previous bullets. 
  
  -- It supervises a technical support unit that uploads the daily test, infection, hospitalization, and death data received from the CDC and other sources to the cloud. Its tech support also ensures that this data is properly geocoded so that each user's copy of the COVID app will only download data for the user's local community (unless the user specifically requests county, state, or national data to understand the broader contexts)
  
  -- It receives reports and recommendations from its medical advisory panel regarding national, state, and sub-state COVID trends 
  
  -- It receives impact assessments of the medical panel's recommendations from its non-medical panel.
  
  -- It disseminates these reports to governors, together with its overall assessments.
  
  -- It provides weekly reports to the President of the U.S. about the status of its efforts to mitigate the virus and facilitate vaccinations
  
  
• Members of the task force (7) -- The members of the task force should include each major party's top administrators, i.e., the chairs, treasurers, and secretaries of the Republican National Committee (RNC), and the chairs, treasurers, and secretaries of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The the task force itself should be chaired by the Vice President of the U.S.

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Related posts on this blog:

• "Congratulations, Dr. Fauci!!! Thank you for your service. Now would you please, please, please fade back into your full time job at NIH."  Last update: 11/19/20
  
  
• "Trump supporters who reject masks and other mitigations are not stupid and/or crazy" Last update: 11/18/20
  
  
• "Where do we go from here?" Last update: 10/30/20