COVID-19 • The Greatest Ask

March 20, 2020

In the end, to fix this pandemic, we are going to need some new heroes.  To be sure, they’ve been in our communities for ever, but we need them now even more.

Some folks are willing lay down their arm on a soft cushion and allow a stranger, in a lab coat, to inject a substance into their vein or their muscle. A substance that has never been in a human before. A novel drug.

Someone is going to have to be the first or second or maybe hundredth patient to have a drug tried on them to see what it does.  To see if it can beat this bastard virus that is eating up our citizens.

Though drug development has come a long way, the risk of putting any any new substance into a living body is very real.  And in some cases, this novel-drug is given while folks are sick or dying.  Someone has to say yes. 

If you wanted to manage this process, this whole pandemic, you’d beg Dr. Luciana Borio to be that person for you.

Her resume is no bullshit, having worked epidemics and pandemics and built a real-world mastery of the subject.  Indeed, all but a handful of people in the world command the depth and scope of knowledge she has.

And I have absolutely no doubt, had professionals like Dr. Borio been given the authority to do their job during this pandemic, we would now have a coordinated, comprehensive process for both shutting down and restarting a country.  Surveillance testing would have been widespread 2 months ago done based on targeted information, manufacturing would have been well on the way for millions of new masks and thousands of ventilators.

We failed to do that.  We are still failing to do that 3 months in.

That the pandemic response group was taken out of the white house has been seen as another major POTUS failure.  I would counter that it is unlikely he would have listened to them in time or at all; and especially if information came from a woman.

Pandemic preparedness takes ’a stiff upper lip’.  You need to be confident in your path and stick to it even in the face of stiff ridicule.  We faced the same conspiratorial forces with a good dose of racism during H1N1.  And we faced the backlash that it was hyped once we learned that H1N1 wasn’t ‘as bad’ as we had feared.  Not much in that situation makes me angrier.  The 1918 Spanish Flu was an H1N1 – we had every right to have this scare the shit out of us.

But we are here now.  Looking back only helps with future planning.  The heroes we need to fix this problem are in homes all throughout the country.  They need to be seen for who they are.  More than that, we need a way to honor their sacrifice – and their families.  These heroes, in the middle of a battle for their lives, accept a stranger, and allow them to be experimented on for the benefit of all.

We know how to honor those few who can put on a badge, strap on a weapon, battle fires, whatever.  That we know how to do; we have the playbook.

But the kind of bravery that puts an arm on a pillow, accepts the needle willingly, then lays its head back and trusts … for all of us?

What do we do for them?