THENEWYORKER,MARCH23, 2020 5
COMMENT
PRESIDENTSANDPAN D EM I C S
I
n late July, 2014, near Monrovia, Li
beria, two Americans, Kent Brantly
and Nancy Writebol, contracted Ebola.
They had been working in a missionary
hospital, trying to ameliorate an out
break then racing across West Africa.
The Obama Administration dispatched
an air ambulance to carry them home,
swathed in white protective gear, for
treatment at Emory University Hos
pital, in Atlanta, and this touched off a
media spectacle. The chyron story line
was: Ebola comes to America. (Brantly
and Writebol soon recovered.) Donald
Trump, who was then less than a year
away from announcing his run for the
Presidency, weighed in on Twitter: “Stop
the EBOLA patients from entering the
U.S....THE UNITED STATES HAS
ENOUGH PROBLEMS!” He tweeted
about the epidemic dozens of times
during the next months, and called for
a ban on travel from West Africa (“STOP
THE FLIGHTS!”). The White House’s
Office of Digital Strategy later con
cluded that one of Trump’s tweets, to
the two and a half million followers he
had at the time, was a “crystallizing mo
ment” in the Ebola crisis, as Amy Pope,
Obama’s deputy homelandsecurity ad
viser, put it, and that Trump had “created
a level of anxiety in the country.”
He was just getting started, as we
now know too well. Last Wednesday,
the President sought to reassure the na
tion in a primetime address from the
Oval Office, as the COVID19 outbreak
was poised to morph from seriously wor
rying into the stuff of a bad Hollywood
pitch: Italy a sixtymillionstrong de
tention camp, the stock market in free
fall, March Madness called off, Disney
land shuttered. The hope that Trump
might someday grow into the dignity
and gravity of his office was never real
istic, but in this speech he put his nar
cissism and his reflexive nativism on ex
ceptionally discordant display. “The virus
will not have a chance against us,” he
said, promising that he had put in place
“the most aggressive and comprehen
sive effort to confront a foreign virus in
modern history”—as if diseases had na
tionalities. He declared that “testing and
testing capabilities are expanding rap
idly,” only to be contradicted the next
day by Anthony Fauci, the respected
director of the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who
told a House hearing, “The system is
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
really not geared to what we need right
now....It is a failing. Let’s admit it.”
(Last week, South Korea, with less than
a sixth of the population of the United
States, administered at least ten thou
sand novelcoronavirus tests a day, while
in this country, according to the Cen
ters for Disease Control and Prevention,
only some thirteen thousand tests had
been administered since January.) On
Wednesday, Trump advised the “vast
majority” of Americans that the risk they
faced was “very, very low.” Fauci had al
ready testified, however, that “it’s going
to get worse,” and that, if the response
proved to be inadequate, “many, many
millions” could be affected.
Trump won the Presidency while
pledging to wall America off from the
world; the COVID19 pandemic has re
inforced his deepseated belief in this
impossibility. Quarantines and travel
restrictions are a necessary part of a
science led approach to containing such
outbreaks, because they can delay the
spread of a dangerous virus, protecting
hospitals from crippling surges of pa
tients and buying time for researchers to
develop treatments and vaccines. Trump
often praises himself for his decision, an
nounced on January 31st, to limit travel
from China, a policy that publichealth
officials had recommended.
Yet travel limitations are only a part
of what is necessary to manage a pan
demic; coördinated action by govern
ments is at least as important. Last week,
Trump blamed the European Union for
allowing the virus to spread on the Con
tinent, and, as he announced a thirtyday
ban on travel to the U.S. from European
