THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, April 4 - 5, 2020 |A
prioritizes problems, has command
of the subject matter, is human, elo-
quent, tireless.
By rising to the moment he has
become a unifying force.
Looking back maybe we’ll see
some of the nation’s governors the
way we speak of generals at Gettys-
burg—“And then there was Hogan of
Maryland, who wouldn’t budge, and
DeWine comes up the hill with the
Ohio volunteers.”
Senators have never been so use-
less, or governors so valuable. What
a status shift.
Everyone is fascinated that every-
thing is closed but liquor stores re-
main open. This is because there isn’t
a politician in the country stupid
enough to prohibit alcohol in a na-
tional crisis. They may know on some
level that no nation in the history of
the world has closed both its
churchesandits liquor stores simul-
taneously and survived. Russia after
the revolution closed the churches
but did its best to keep vodka avail-
able because they wanted everyone
drunk, which is the only way to get
through communism. And how Rus-
sia did get through communism.
But we are outdoing ourselves.The AP reports alcoholic-beverage
sales rose 55% in the week ending
March 21. Online liquor sales were up
243%. An executive with the Nielsen
market-research firm speculated that
people were stocking up for a pro-
longed stay at home.
Those Zoom meetings are going to
get fabulous.
Everyone is having thoughts about
the meaning and implications of the
pandemic. Here are two.
The first is that America’s immi-
gration struggle will be prompted by
circumstances nearer to resolution.
Public sentiment will back harder
borders and a new path to citizen-
ship for illegal immigrants living
here.
Global pandemics do nothing to en-
courage lax borders. As to illegal im-
migrants, you have seen who’s deliv-
ering the food, stocking the shelves,
running the hospital ward, holding
your hand when you’re on the ventila-
tor. It is the newest Americans, immi-
grants, and some are here illegally.
They worked through an epidemic
and kept America going. Some in the
immigration debate have argued,
“They have to demonstrate they de-
serve citizenship”—they need to payNew York Is the Epicenter of the World
banging pots together and applaud-
ing our health-care workers, the doc-
tors and nurses, orderlies and clean-
ing people who are getting us
through it. The first time I heard it,
early this week, it sounded like kids
after school in a playground. Now it
sounds like Yankee Stadium, like
someone got a hit and you feel some
new kind of roused tenderness.
Here’s who was being cheered:
A nurse in New Jersey, a friend,
sent a series of texts. “Our dead are
multiplying in my hospital. We have
a refrigerated trailer behind the hos-
pital for the bodies. We went from
oneto3to9in3days.”
I asked if she felt safe. “My fellow
nurses, we are terrified. We now say
‘when we get sick’ not if.” They gen-
erally have personal protective gear,
but it’s not always enough. The night
before, a patient walked into the hos-
pital and gave birth 14 minutes later.
“No masks on, doc barely got gloves
on. She is, we hope, negative, but if
positive we were all exposed.”
My friend’s grown son, also a
medical professional, asked her to
get her will and her advance direc-
tive, stating end-of-life decisions, in
order. She did.
I asked where they are. “Oh, it’s
propped on my kitchen table.” So if
things are hurried he can’t miss it.
When we spoke she told me every-
one in her little town decided to get
together on the edge of their prop-
erty last Friday at dusk and wave to
each other. It was nice, everyone
came out, lifted a glass, yelled hellos.
“They applauded me,” she said.
I teased: “Because you’re cute and
sexy.”
“No,” she said, with wonder. “Be-
cause I’m a nurse.”
She had never received applause
for that before.
Our governor is a folk hero. You’re
on the phone, you see the briefing,
you say, “I gotta go, Cuomo’s on.”
Andrew Cuomo has the latest, most
pertinent information and knew a
month ago what a ventilator is. Hepunitive fines, jump through hoops.
“They need to earn it.”
Ladies and gentlemen, look
around. They did.
Here is where the debate is going.
When it’s over, if you can show in
any way you worked through the
great pandemic of ’20, you will be
given American citizenship. With a
note printed on top: “With thanks
fromagratefulnation.”
Harder borders and compassion-
ate resolution is what this column
has asked for, for almost 20 years.
Good things can come from bad
things.
Second thought. The hidden gift
in this pandemic is that this isn’t
the most terrible one, the next one
or some other one down the road is.
This is the one where we learn how
to handle that coming pandemic. We
are well into the age of global con-
tagions but this is the first time we
fully noticed, stopped short, actu-
ally reordered our country to fight
it.
This is when we learn what
worked, what decision made it better
or worse, what stockpiles are needed,
what can be warehoused, where re-
search dollars must be targeted.
We’re on a shakedown cruise.
Knowledge of how to handle a com-
ing, more difficult pandemic is being
gained now, by all of us.
People have asked about great
speeches for hard moments. There
are many. Here is Elizabeth I at
Tilbury, England, in August 1588. The
very existence of her nation was un-
der challenge; her people needed
faith in their leader. She waded into
a crowd of common people saying
she’d been told not to but she would
never fear them, they were blood of
her blood. Extemporaneously: “I have
the body of a weak and feeble
woman, but I have the heart and
stomach of a king, and of a king of
England, too.”
Always remember who you are.
Never let anything—a germ, an ar-
mada—put you off your game.Gov. Andrew Cuomo at New York’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center March 24.MIKE SEGAR/REUTERSNew YorkI
asked for the dateline in pride
for my beloved city. For the
third time in 20 years it’s been
the epicenter of a world-class
crisis—9/11, the 2008 financial
crisis and now the 2020 pandemic.
No one asks—not one person has
asked—Why us? We think: Why not
us? Of course us. The city of the sky-
scrapers draws the lightning. There
are 8.6 million of us, we are compact,
draw all the people of the world, and
travel packed close in underground
tubes. Of course we got sick here
first. The crises are the price we pay
for the privilege of living in the most
exciting little landmass on the face of
the Earth.
What do we know? That we’ll get
through it. We’ll learn a lot and it
will be hard but we’ll get through,
just like all the last times.
You have seen the pictures of
Manhattan—streets sparse, no traf-
fic. You can hear the red light click.
We feel a little concussed, not by a
blow to the head, which is what daily
life in New York is, but the lack of a
blow to the head. We’re not used to
quiet! Or rather silence interspersed
by sirens.
And so the power of our commu-
nal moment, the phenomenon of
what happens every night now at 7—
people leaning out the windows, on
their balconies, screaming, cheering,
The hidden gift in this
pandemic is that we learn
howtoprepareforthe
worse one still to come.
DECLARATIONS
By Peggy NoonanOPINION
Was Dr. Strangelove an Epidemiologist?
“There is no price
too high to save a
life,” says New
Jersey Gov. Phil
Murphy.
“We will not put
a dollar figure on
human life,” de-
clares New York’s
Andrew Cuomo.
These state-
ments would be in-
sane if anyone considered them se-
riously. Or take an icon of high-
status wisdom, Bill Gates, who calls
for a 10-week national shutdown in
the Washington Post. He does not
offer any cost-benefit analysis but
he knows his audience: “Through
my work with the Gates Foundation,
I’ve spoken with experts and leaders
in Washington and across the coun-
try”—i.e., people like himself.
The problem here is not an in-
ability to think clearly. It’s an un-
willingness to be seen thinking
clearly.
Let’s understand something: The
point of cost-benefit analysis is not
the one that launched a thousand
op-eds, to trade human lives for
mere dollars. Its purpose is to help
us weigh different kinds of harm
against each other so we can
achieve our goals at the least possi-
ble cost.
A voice of realism is UCLA’s Jo-
seph A. Ladapo, perhaps because
he’s a medical doctor who has been
treating Covid-19 patients and has
permission to be realistic. In USA
Today, he writes that we missed any
chance to corral a virus that will
spare most of us but kill thousands.
The shutdowns if prolonged will
only make our situation worse. They
will add mass unemployment, pov-
erty and missed schooling to our
problems.
“The epidemiologic models I’ve
seen indicate that the shutdowns
and school closures will temporarily
slow the virus’ spread, but when
they’re lifted, we will essentiallyemerge right back where we
started. And, by the way, no matter
what, our hospitals will still be
overwhelmed.”
The alternative, contrary to much
lazy thinking, is not the “let it rip”
scenario. Politicians couldn’t man-
date doing nothing if they wanted
to. The American people by now are
fully engaged: They will be wielding
300 million scalpels to cut the most
high-risk interactions out of their
lives, and likely more efficiently
than any one-size cower-in-place or-
der from the feds could achieve.
This is not a libertarian antidote.
The government has a role to play
in making testing universally avail-
able, beefing up hospitals, boosting
supplies of masks and gloves.Readers for weeks have asked if
the virus came from a Wuhan weap-
ons lab, an inquiry now raised in
the Washington Post. My answer: A
bioweapon is unlikely but bat vi-
ruses have been an interest of re-
searchers since the SARS outbreak
in 2003. A careless researcher is
more likely to have been involved in
the jump from bat to human than
somebody who had no reason to be
messing around with bats in the
first place.
There is much that we don’t
know, and much that we know that
probably is wrong, thanks to Chi-
nese dissembling. Fresh reporting
points to renewed shutdowns in cer-
tain Chinese cities and counties, un-
recorded deaths, uncounted infec-
tions, a leaked CIA warning to the
U.S. president that Beijing’s claims
can’t be trusted.
The World Health Organizationmay have much to answer for, its
officials having rushed to lend cre-
dence to China’s boast of having
quashed a flu-like disease when it
was already loose in a population of
1.4 billion. “It’s long been thought
that transmission of viruses that
cause influenza-like illnesses can’t
really be stopped,” says the re-
spected medical site StatNews, im-
plying that such “dogma” now can
be discarded.
This may be the miscalculation of
all time, with high consequences for
countries that have taken China as
a model. Far from certain is
whether cooping people up at home
hasn’t just aided the virus to find
its most vulnerable victims. Our
nagging of young people may be ex-
actly wrong according to immunolo-
gists who see only one endgame:
mass exposure and mass immunity
to reduce the virus to a recurrent
nuisance.
Our bodies are home to trillions
more microbes than human cells.
The purity of our essence may not
be protectable.
Donald Trump is mocked for in-
voking the most ancient of medical
advice, “do no harm,” i.e., don’t let
the cure be worse than the disease.
He was right when he called himself
a wartime president, and may have
taken a turn for the worse when he
decided the solution for him politi-
cally and personally is to start talk-
ing about saving lives without re-
gard for the cost to the 71% who
can’t work from home.
I keep thinking of Omar Bradley
before D-Day warning his troops
that pols back home were exagger-
ating potential casualties to ward
off blowback on their own careers—
tommyrot he called it. “Some of you
won’t come back,” he told his men,
“but it’ll be very few.” Many things
are worth doing; many risks are
worth taking, and many are worth
avoiding. It would be great to have
more clear thinking about which is
which in our present crisis.BUSINESS
WORLD
By Holman W.
Jenkins, Jr.A doctor on the frontlines
of the coronavirus crisis
has special permission
to tell the truth.PUBLISHED SINCE 1889 BY DOW JONES & COMPANY
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The Coronavirus Pandemic Will Forever Alter the World Order
T
he surreal atmosphere of the
Covid-19 pandemic calls to
mind how I felt as a young
man in the 84th Infantry Division
during the Battle of the Bulge. Now,
as in late 1944, there is a sense of
inchoate danger, aimed not at any
particular person, but striking ran-
domly and with devastation. But
there is an important difference be-
tween that faraway time and ours.
American endurance then was forti-
fied by an ultimate national pur-
pose. Now, in a divided country, ef-
ficient and farsighted government is
necessary to overcome obstacles un-
precedented in magnitude and
global scope. Sustaining the public
trust is crucial to social solidarity,
to the relation of societies with each
other, and to international peace
and stability.
Nations cohere and flourish on
the belief that their institutions can
foresee calamity, arrest its impact
and restore stability. When the
Covid-19 pandemic is over, many
countries’ institutions will be per-
ceived as having failed. Whether
this judgment is objectively fair is
irrelevant. The reality is the world
will never be the same after the cor-
onavirus. To argue now about the
past only makes it harder to do
what has to be done.
The coronavirus has struck with
unprecedented scale and ferocity. Its
spread is exponential: U.S. cases are
doubling every fifth day. At this
writing, there is no cure. Medical
supplies are insufficient to cope
with the widening waves of cases.
Intensive-care units are on the
verge, and beyond, of being over-
whelmed. Testing is inadequate to
the task of identifying the extent of
infection, much less reversing its
spread. A successful vaccine could
be 12 to 18 months away.
The U.S. administration has done
a solid job in avoiding immediate
catastrophe. The ultimate test will
be whether the virus’s spread can
be arrested and then reversed in a
manner and at a scale that main-
tains public confidence in Ameri-
cans’ ability to govern themselves.
The crisis effort, however vast and
necessary, must not crowd out the
urgent task of launching a parallel
enterprise for the transition to the
post-coronavirus order.
Leaders are dealing with the cri-
sis on a largely national basis, but
the virus’s society-dissolving effects
do not recognize borders. While the
assault on human health will—hope-
fully—be temporary, the political
and economic upheaval it has un-
leashed could last for generations.
No country, not even the U.S., can in
a purely national effort overcome
the virus. Addressing the necessities
of the moment must ultimately be
coupled with a global collaborative
vision and program. If we cannot do
both in tandem, we will face the
worst of each.
Drawing lessons from the devel-
opment of the Marshall Plan and the
Manhattan Project, the U.S. is
obliged to undertake a major effort
in three domains. First, shore up
global resilience to infectious dis-
ease. Triumphs of medical science
like the polio vaccine and the eradi-
cation of smallpox, or the emerging
statistical-technical marvel of medi-
cal diagnosis through artificial intel-
ligence, have lulled us into a dan-
gerous complacency. We need to
develop new techniques and tech-
nologies for infection control and
commensurate vaccines across large
populations. Cities, states and re-
gions must consistently prepare to
protect their people from pandemics
through stockpiling, cooperativeplanning and exploration at the
frontiers of science.
Second, strive to heal the
wounds to the world economy.
Global leaders have learned impor-
tant lessons from the 2008 financial
crisis. The current economic crisis
is more complex: The contraction
unleashed by the coronavirus is, in
its speed and global scale, unlike
anything ever known in history. And
necessary public-health measures
such as social distancing and clos-
ing schools and businesses are con-
tributing to the economic pain. Pro-
grams should also seek to
ameliorate the effects of impending
chaos on the world’s most vulnera-
ble populations.
Third, safeguard the principles of
the liberal world order. The found-
ing legend of modern government isa walled city protected by powerful
rulers, sometimes despotic, other
times benevolent, yet always strong
enough to protect the people from
an external enemy. Enlightenment
thinkers reframed this concept, ar-
guing that the purpose of the legiti-
mate state is to provide for the fun-
damental needs of the people:
security, order, economic well-be-
ing, and justice. Individuals cannot
secure these things on their own.
The pandemic has prompted an
anachronism, a revival of the walled
city in an age when prosperity de-
pends on global trade and move-
ment of people.
The world’s democracies need to
defend and sustain their Enlighten-
ment values. A global retreat from
balancing power with legitimacy
will cause the social contract to dis-integrate both domestically and in-
ternationally. Yet this millennial is-
sue of legitimacy and power cannot
be settled simultaneously with the
effort to overcome the Covid-
plague. Restraint is necessary on all
sides—in both domestic politics and
international diplomacy. Priorities
must be established.
We went on from the Battle of
the Bulge into a world of growing
prosperity and enhanced human
dignity. Now, we live an epochal pe-
riod. The historic challenge for lead-
ers is to manage the crisis while
building the future. Failure could set
the world on fire.Mr. Kissinger served as secretary
of state and national security
adviser in the Nixon and Ford
administrations.By Henry A. Kissinger
The U.S. must protect its
citizens from disease while
starting the urgent work of
planning for a new epoch.