The Wall Street Journal - 07.03.2020 - 08.03.2020

C2| Saturday/Sunday, March 7 - 8, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

Pundits,

myself

included,

who

wrote off

Super

Tuesday’s

big

winner

have

some

explaining

to do.

OVER THE PAST MONTH,you

may have read, here and else-

where, that Joe Biden had

about as much of a chance of

winning the Democratic presi-

dential nomination as he had

of playing point guard for the

Brooklyn Nets. Phrases like “on

life support,” “dead in the wa-

ter” and “stiffer than Elvis”

might have given the casual

reader the impression that the

former vice president was fin-

ished. Bernie Sanders, Mike

Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg,

Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clin-

ton, the lead singer of K-pop

sensation BTS and my neigh-

bor’s cat were all deemed more

likely to be the Democratic

nominee than the 77-year-old

from Scranton with the cogni-

tive deficiencies, the cashless

campaign and the perfect re-

cord of losing every presiden-

tial race he’d ever contested.

In the light of recent events,

we now realize, of course, that

In one brief, unaccountable

moment of midsummer mad-

ness last year, I even suggested

that Kamala Harris was the

front-runner.

There are larger lessons

here we could relearn.

The cynical thing to say

would be (to use a quote often

attributed to Samuel Goldwyn),

“Never make predictions, espe-

cially about the future.” Or, as

a clever British prime minister

said, “When giving a forecast,

give a number or a date, but

never both.”

But the bigger problem in

news these days is an irresist-

ible temptation to substitute

commentary for reporting,

conjecture for analysis. There

is an almost willful lack of

willingness to be surprised.

Too much reporting and com-

mentary—not just in the news

business, by the way, but in ac-

ademia too—now involves the

pursuit of evidence, data and

anecdotes that confirm our

priors. We seek affirmation,

not information.

We could all resolve to be

better listeners—to be open to

the possibility that what we

think we know is completely

wrong. It so often is, after all.

Now on to what I really

wanted to write about this

week: There is absolutely no

way that Joe Biden will beat

Donald Trump in November... PATRICK T. FALLON/BLOOMBERG NEWS

EDITOR

AT LARGE

GERARD

BAKER

An Apology

To Joe

Biden, the

Unbeatable

Favorite

Mr. Biden was

all along the

unbeatable fa-

vorite, a man of

unsurpassed or-

atorical talent,

peerless politi-

cal gifts and a

wily cam-

paigner’s ge-

nius. We would

liketoextend

our apologies

to Mr. Biden,

his family and

our readers for

any misleading information

they may have inadvertently

received.

It’s easier to laugh, I sup-

pose, than to acknowledge the

humbling truth: When it comes

to political commentary (to

borrow the immortal phrase of

the late, great screenwriter

William Goldman), “Nobody

knows anything.”

You would think by now

that pundits would have

learned a little humility when

commenting on the likely fu-

ture decisions of voters. Our

capacity to be surprised is, cu-

riously, undimmed by the fre-

quency with which we are sur-

prised. Barack Obama, the Tea

Party, Brexit, Donald Trump:

all major political upsets that

have reshaped our world in the

past dozen years alone. Who

saw them coming?

pointing in a

different direc-

tion. For all of

Mr. Biden’s re-

cent improba-

bility, until a

few weeks ago,

we were all not-

ing that no so-

cialist had ever

been a major-

party presiden-

tial candidate.

Events follow a

pattern—until

they don’t.

Doubtless we

will find a way

to frame Mr. Bi-

den’s historic

success as a

precedent—until it isn’t.

I’m not (for once here) just

attacking others. I have been

wronger than anyone on this

topic, and readers of The Wall

Street Journal would have

been better informed about

the presidential race by exam-

ining the patterns made by the

scraps of food left on their

breakfast plates than by read-

ing my observations. While

carefully avoiding prognostica-

tions, I have joined the chorus

of those who asserted confi-

dently, without evidence, that

Mr. Biden’s prospects were

dire. I have, at various times,

been of the mind that pretty

well everyone else would win.

We can take only a

little refuge in the fact

that we live in an age

when politics mocks

history. Until Mr.

Obama, no senator had been

elected straight to the presi-

dency in almost half a century.

Until Mr. Trump, no one out-

side of politics or the military

had been elected president.

Now Mr. Biden stands ready to

break the historical law that

no candidate who fails to place

in the top three in Iowa or

New Hampshire can go on to

win the Democratic nomina-

tion.

History is a compass, not a

map. We should never be so

constrained in our thinking as

to imagine that historical prec-

edent applies with scientific

rigor. In any case, for every

precedent, there’s another

Joe Biden beams

during a primary

night rally Tuesday

in Los Angeles.

REVIEW

The past century has reinforced

the importance of thoughtful, prin-

cipled, decisive leadership in com-

bating epidemics. Smallpox was of-

ficially eradicated in 1980, in what

might be the greatest achievement

in the history of public health. Dr.

D.A. Henderson of the U.S. Centers

for Disease Control and Prevention

was the tenacious advocate who

convinced the World Health Organi-

zation to take up the challenge of

eliminating smallpox everywhere in

the world; he then led the campaign

to victory.

In 2003, President George W.

Bush launched his Emergency Plan

for AIDS Relief, which was crucial in

helping the people of Africa to con-

front the AIDS epidemic. He an-

nounced the program with words of

grace and compassion, without

blame or judgment: “I propose ... a

work of mercy beyond all current

international efforts to help the

people of Africa.... This nation can

lead the world in sparing innocent

people from a plague of nature.”

Rely on classic public health

measures.In 1918, the lack of na-

tional leadership meant that every

city and state pursued its own ap-

proach to dealing with the epi-

demic. This created a series of natu-

ral experiments that allowed later

researchers to assess the effective-

ness of different approaches. They

found that cities which imple-

mented isolation policies (such as

quarantining houses where influ-

enza was present) and “social dis-

tancing” measures (such as closing

down schools, theaters and

churches) saw death rates

50% lower than those that

did not. The cities that

fared best were the ones

that started isolating pa-

tients early and continued

until the epidemic was un-

questionably under control.

In the century since the

1918 outbreak, studies of

seasonal flu infections and

occasional pandemics have

underscored the benefits of

hygiene instruction and regular

handwashing, which can reduce in-

fluenza cases by more than 40%.

During the 2009 “swine flu,” school

closures in Texas reduced acute re-

spiratory illness by 45% to 72%.

Such classic public health measures

are sometimes as effective as the

seasonal flu vaccine, which reduced

infections by less than 40% in four

of the last 12 U.S. flu seasons.

Give accurate information and

build community trust.In every

pandemic, people fall prey to stig-

matization, distrust and rumor-

Continued from the prior page

Above, the virus that caused

the 1918 flu pandemic, seen

through an electron microscope.

Right, the Red Cross Motor Corps

in action in St. Louis in 1918.

mongering. The “Spanish” flu, as

the 1918 pandemic is still widely

known, did not originate in Spain.

Rather, because the country was

neutral in World War I, its uncen-

soredpresswasthefirsttoreport

on the disease. As a result, many

around the world blamed the Span-

ish for the epidemic, and the nick-

name persists to this day.

As the flu spread in 1918, many

communities found scapegoats.

Chileans blamed the poor, Senegal-

ese blamed Brazilians, Brazilians

blamed the Germans, Iranians

blamed the British, and so on. In the

U.S., the country’s millions of new

immigrants had often been stigma-

tized as disease carriers during pre-

vious epidemics, but the 1918 flu

struck every social class and every

part of the country, so no single

ethnic group was blamed for it.

Some populations, though, were

more vulnerable to the disease than

others. A study of data from 438

U.S. cities, published last year in the

journal Economics and Human Biol-

ogy, found a wide variation in pan-

demic-related mortality rates, rang-

ing from 211 deaths per 100,000

people in Grand Rapids, Mich., to

807 in Pittsburgh. Half of this dif-

ference was attributable to three

factors—poverty, prior health status

and urban air pollution. The same

will likely be true with the coronavi-

rus, which means that ensuring pre-

vention and care for the most vul-

nerable is vital for saving lives.

Remarkably, despite the ubiqui-

tous daily horror of the 1918 flu,

there were few instances of flu-re-

History’s Lessons for

Fighting a Pandemic

lated attacks or riots. On the con-

trary, in her book “Pale Rider,” the

science journalist Laura Spinney

finds many examples of good Samar-

itans. In Alaska, 70-year-old Dr. Val-

entine McGillycuddy came out of re-

tirement to fight the flu; in Tokyo,

doctors went out at night to give

free vaccinations to the poor; in Ger-

many, the Catholic Church helped to

train young women as nurses.

During pandemics, the reflex to

help one another is more common

than we might think. At the deadli-

est moments in 1918, when city gov-

ernments in the U.S. were over-

whelmed, volunteer groups—from

Phoenix’s citizens’ commit-

tees to Philadelphia’s blue-

bloods—stepped in to dis-

tribute resources to those

in need. When communities

did lose trust in their lead-

ers, it was often because, in

Mr. Barry’s words, they had

lied about the severity of

the pandemic “for the war

effort, for the propaganda

machine that Wilson had

created.”

What the public needed was ac-

curate answers to the questions

raised by the appearance of an unfa-

miliar, deadly disease. Where did it

come from? How could I get in-

fected? Can I pass it on to others?

How can I protect myself and my

loved ones?

The historian Nancy Tomes has

shown that in 1918, since radio

broadcasts and newsreels were fo-

cused on war news,

people turned to the

print media for infor-

mation on the flu.

From trade magazines

like Variety to scien-

tific journals such as

Survey, journalists

asked difficult ques-

tions about how the

epidemic was being

handled and presented

the best available an-

swers to their readers.

In the face of highly

variable responses

from public officials, the media

served as an essential ally of the

public health community in fighting

the pandemic.

As we now face the spec-

ter of a coronavirus pan-

demic, it is reasonable to

ask: Are we more or less

vulnerable today than we

were a century ago? In

some ways we are clearly

better off. We have modern

vaccines and medical care,

dramatically improved com-

munication tools and

healthier, better nourished

populations. Modern gov-

ernments plan in advance

for how to respond swiftly

to outbreaks, and there are

mechanisms in place for in-

ternational cooperation.

Yet according to the 2019

Global Health Security Index,

less than one in five coun-

tries is fully prepared for a

global pandemic. More than a billion

people don’t have access to essential

prevention services, vaccines and

medicines, and most of the world

lacks intensive care services capable

of handling severe

cases of the corona-

virus.

And we are vul-

nerable in other dis-

tinctively modern

ways. Growing re-

sistance to many

antibiotics makes it

hard to treat pneu-

monia and other

bacterial complica-

tions. Large num-

bers of people suf-

fer from heart

disease, diabetes,

cancer and other diseases that

weaken the immune system. Rapid

international travel has spread the

virus at lightning speed. And as we

are already seeing with the new cor-

onavirus, globalized supply chains,

dependent on just-in-time delivery

of medicines, food and other essen-

tials, are vulnerable to disruption in

a global pandemic.

This face-off between the factors

that reduce our vulnerability and

those that increase it leaves hu-

manity at considerable risk. Thou-

sands, possibly millions, of lives de-

pend on our ability to apply the

lessons of 1918 and other pandem-

ics. Only by taking full advantage of

scientific and public health ad-

vances, investing in strong health

systems and developing new tech-

nologies to prevent and respond to

disease will we be able to meet the

challenge of the new coronavirus—

and the other outbreaks that will

inevitably follow. FROM TOP: ALAMY; CYNTHIA GOLDSMITH/CDC; THE GRANGER COLLECTION

During

pandemics,

thereflex

tohelpothers

ismore

commonthan

wemight

think.

In 1918, a sign warns naval

workers in Philadelphia

about the danger of spreading

the flu through spitting.