Who to Believe? The So-Called “Experts” or What Some People are Saying?

To hear the government’s top experts tell it, the coronavirus crisis is very dire and likely to get worse if states prematurely lift restrictions on businesses and public gatherings and reopen schools.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified before a Senate committee on Tuesday, via a video link due to his possible exposure to the coronavirus inside the White House, and warned that it might not be safe to open schools next fall. On the same day Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control, made the same warnings. Dr. Rick Bright, until recently the head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development in charging of finding a coronavirus vaccine, previewed his testimony on Thursday with a written statement warning that due to a lack of needed testing and tracing efforts a premature reopening could result in “the darkest winter in modern history.”

Which is why President Donald Trump and his spokespeople at Fox News and on talk radio would prefer you not listen to the experts, and instead hear their happy talk about a quick end to the epidemic and a rapid economic rebound in time for Election Day.

Trump told reporters he was surprised by Fauci’s answer to a question about reopening, and that “To me that is not an acceptable answer, especially when it comes to schools.” He went on to say that Fauci “wants to play both sides of the issue,” then predicting in the same run-on sentence that next year’s economy will be “phenomenal.” Redfield somehow escaped similar criticism, even through Trump and his spokespeople have been plenty critical of the CDC for allegedly over counting the coronavirus death toll. Bright was recently demoted from his job leading the government’s efforts to find a vaccine for coronavirus, so Trump dismissed him as a “disgruntled employee.”

None of which is quite convincing. Presidents probably shouldn’t find expert opinion unacceptable just because it’s bad news, and we have no idea what Trump means when he says Fauci “wants to play both sides of the issue.” Trump has been touting the extraordinary measures he’s taken against the epidemic but also insisting that it’s not really such a big deal and that states should defy his administration’s guidelines, while insisting he has “total authority” over the states’ restrictions but that it’s up to the governors and “I take no responsibility at all.” That’s what we call playing both sides of an issue.

The CDC can be justly criticized for a slow response to the crisis, but that might well be because its leadership was afraid of offending Trump, who was bragging that the coronavirus was contained and that cases would soon be down to zero and that the stock markets shouldn’t be spooked. Since then the Trump administration has been refusing to release more dire CDC reports, and was probably furious about the leaking of a White House task force report finding an astounding 1,000 percent — that’s right, 1,000 percent –increase in infections in the rural areas of rural states where Trump still enjoys political support. Bright was demoted after he publicly demoted after he disagreed with Trump’s endorsement of hydrochloroquine as a miracle, and subsequent studies have vindicated his judgment, so we can’t blame him for being a disgruntled employee, and don’t worry that he’s lying before Congress to exact his revenge.

These guys all have excellent academic credentials, and have been rewarded for good work by steady promotions to the top of their profession during decades of Republican and Democratic administrations alike, with Fauci’s distinguished career going all the way back to the good old days of President Ronald Reagan, and they seem unlikely conspirators in a conspiracy to prevent America from being great again. Trump’s scientific credentials are an uncle who was a professor of physics at the Massachussets Institute of Technology and as a genetic result he has “a very big, uh, brain” and how he wowed all the doctors at the CDC were by how much he knew about virology and epidemiology, and what some people say about his very stable genius, but he also went on live television and urged the government’s scientists to investigate the possibility of injecting household disinfectants into the human body.

So far all the public opinion polls show that a vast majority of the public is more inclined to believe the so-called experts than Trump, but that the Republican portion of the populace is increasingly siding with Trump. We attribute this partly to the normal human aversion to bad news, but also a populist resentment of pointy-headed government officials telling thrm what to do, and mostly to the average Republican’s blind faith in whatever narrative is most helpful to Trump’s political fortunes. No matter what happens during Trump’s time in office, even in the bleakest scenarios, they’ll always have someone else to blame.

Sorry to sound so gloomy and doomy, but we expect to be hunkering down for at least a few more months of the unbearable status quo, and aren’t counting on it all magically going away in time for school and Trump’s reelection. Our many Republicans friends are entitled to differ, and to act accordingly, but we’d advise them not to be over-confident.

— Bud Norman

The Perils of a Know-It-All President

President Donald Trump is a self-described “very stable genius” with “a very, very large, uh, brain,” and he knows more than anybody about many things, but we’ll not be looking to him for medical advice. During Thursday’s press briefing he urged the government’s top experts to explore the possibility of treating COVID-19 by injecting patients with disinfectants and shoving ultraviolet lights inside their bodies.

The remarks came after William Bryan, the head of science at the Department of Homeland Security, told the assembled press corps how government research had found that sunlight and disinfectants can kill the coronavirus on surfaces in a little as 30 seconds. Clearly excited by the news, Trump took the podium to say “Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but we’re going to test it? And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, either through the skin or some other way.” After getting a seemingly reluctant nod from Bryan, Trump went on to say “And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute — one minute — and is there a way we can do something like that injection, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”

The videotape clearly shows Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, with a rather inscrutable look on her face. When she took to the podium she said, in carefully chosen words, that Trump’s suggestion was not a promising avenue of research. “Not as a treatment,” she said. “I mean, certainly fever is a good thing when you have a fever. It helps your body respond. But not as, I have not seen heat or…” At which point Trump cut her off, saying “I think that’s a great thing to look at, I mean you know, OK?”

We’re piling on the huge heap of ridicule Trump has endured partly for the fun of it, but also because Trump’s worrisome tendency toward wishful thinking and pseudo-scientific hunches have impeded his response to the coronavirus crisis. He delayed a coordinate effort to secure and family distribute medical equipment for weeks he spent assuring the public that it would all go away with the warmth of April and one day miraculously disappear, and continues to resist calls for testing on a per-capita scale that more than 20 other countries have already achieved. On a visit to the Centers for Disease Control Trump boasted that all the doctors were in awe of his scientific knowledge of virology and epidemiology, although he also admitted he’d been surprised to recently learn that the seasonal flu can be deadly, and it does not bode well that he clearly believes he knows more than anybody about almost everything.

Trump has lately abandoned his advocacy of hydroxychloroquine as the miracle cure for COVID-19, after three recent studies from three countries indicate it is not an effective treatment and can have deadly consequences, but he’s still urging his scientists to pursue time-wasting research and resisting calls for the widespread testing that might reveal some numbers Trump does not want to hear. The daily press briefings are intended to reassure a frightened American public that the nation’s best and brightest are on the job, and on a day when the national death toll surpassed 50,000 and the unemployment rate hit Great Depression levels Thursday’s performance was counter-productive.

— Bud Norman

The Smart People Know That What They Don’t Know Can Hurt Them

As a result of good fortune and our own diligent efforts, we’ve come to know quite a few highly intelligent people over our many years. Both of our parents are very smart people in very different ways, the friends they invited to the house also tended to be very smart in various ways that fascinated us as we eavesdropped on the adult conversations, and thus we learned at an early age to cultivate friendships whenever possible with very smart people.

At this point our circle of friends includes all sorts of people, some of them not so bright but endearingly good in other important ways, but also professors at prestigious universities and award-winning authors and journalists and fully-fledged partners at fancy-pants law firms and successful politicians, as well as many artists and musicians and entrepreneurs whose genius hasn’t yet been appreciated. One thing we’ve noticed about very smart people is that they don’t brag about how smart they are, and are more acutely aware than most about how much of the infinite store of possible knowledge that they don’t know.

President Donald Trump has proclaimed himself a “very stable genius,” and has claimed to know more than anybody about everything from taxes and debt to “the awesome power of nuclear” and America’s government and the Bible, and he clearly considers himself the greatest polymath to occupy the White House since at least the administration of President Thomas Jefferson. Which we find worrisome, especially with this coronavirus spreading around the world and spooking all the global stock markets as it inflicts increasing pain on the world economy.

Last week Trump donned a campaign ball cap and visited the Centers for Disease Control, where he boasted that all the doctors he’d encountered were awestruck by his deep knowledge of epidemiology in general and the coronavirus in particular. “Maybe I have a natural ability,” Trump explained, noting that he had a “great, super-genius” uncle who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That’s the same uncle who told his nephew that atomic bombs are very destructive, by the way, which is why Trump claims to know more than anybody about “the awesome power of nuclear.” At the same time he admitted being surprised to learn that the normal seasonal influenza is also often deadly, although that’s pretty common knowledge, and even though the flu had killed his uncle’s father and his own paternal grandfather, which the all the press already knew.

All of the very smart people we know would have let the doctors at the CDC who are clearly smarter about epidemiology in general and the coronavirus in particular do all the talking and be in charge, but Trump has his own ways of doing things. He has hunches that the coronavirus isn’t as deadly as the medical experts say, and that it will all be miraculously over come spring, and that although he’s not going to shake any hands and will keep a cruise ship full of American citizens at sea to contain the virus there’s really nothing to worry about. Unless you have complete faith in Trump’s “very stable genius,” it’s not reassuring.

At the same time, there’s all the economic fallout from what might very well prove an over-blown panic about the coronavirus. Mass public events and private vacations are being cancelled, elementary and post-graduate classes are being sent on-line, workforces are being asked to work from home, supply chains between vital countries in the global economy are being disrupted, and stock markets everywhere are tanking. Trump still touts the “best economy” ever but the federal government is running trillion-dollar deficits and the Federal Reserve Board is already damned near to zero on its interest rates, and more worrisomely the bond markets are offering a zero yield, and all the smart people we know about this stuff freely admit they don’t know what to do in case of a possible recession, as deficit spending and lower interest rates and newly-printed money are the usual answer.

Trump might very well propose a stimulus package of deficit spending and quantitative easing of freshly-printed money to keep the economy afloat, much as President Barack Obama did during the last recession, in which case all t he Republicans and Democrats will probably all change sides. We’ll freely admit that we don’t know what to do, and will retain our usual wariness about what all the smart people admit they don’t know, and continue to hope for the best.

— Bud Norman