By David Harsanyi
Wednesday, April 01, 2020
This morning, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough claimed that,
unlike the Trump administration, “Everybody saw this coming in early January.”
If Scarborough knew that a deadly, once-in-a-century
pandemic was about to descend on the nation in early January — I assume he
considers himself part of “everyone” — why on God’s earth didn’t he warn his
susceptible viewers that they should begin social distancing? Why didn’t his
producers book a single expert who could beseech his viewers to start wearing
masks, to shutter their non-essential businesses, and to avoid church and
sporting events? Why didn’t he mention coronavirus at all? Even in late
January, nearly a full month after “everyone knew,” Scarborough’s show was
dominated by the Donald Trump impeachment trial.
As far as I can tell, in the entire month of January,
Morning Joe didn’t reference the coronavirus once to his 2.6 million followers
on Twitter. Imagine the thousands of lives Scarborough could have saved if he
had only shared his insight.
Does “everyone” include the World Health Organization,
which claimed in a January 14 tweet (reflecting
earlier findings) that preliminary investigations into Chinese authorities
found “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus”?
Does “everyone” include the Chinese government — whose
propaganda Scarborough shares as
reliable data? Because it was China’s downplaying and lying about coronavirus
that ensured its spread around the world. The blood is on their hands, not on
the hands of your least favorite American politicians.
In early March, when reporters were fixated on a vacuous
debate over the political correctness of affixing “China” to the virus’s name,
researchers at the University of Southampton released a
study indicating that 95 percent of COVD-19 cases would have been
prevented around the world if the Communist regime had acted three weeks
earlier. If China had intervened just one week earlier, there would have been
an 66 percent mitigation, while two weeks would have led to 86 percent fewer
cases.
Scarborough, like most of us, was busy talking about the
impeachment trial in early January. And that’s exactly the topic we should
have been focusing on. We had no business expecting our elected officials or
our media outlets to obsess over every outbreak in China. No doubt I’m older
than many of you, but I can recall warnings about perhaps a dozen potentially
dangerous epidemic breakouts around the world, and none of them ever
materialized in a legitimately scary way for us. It’s human nature to assume
similar outcomes. And if China had acted like a first-world nation, coronavirus
would have been contained.
Even if Scarborough had warned us, what would the
public have done differently in early January, before a single confirmed
case in the United States? When Trump “did something” in late January and
restricted travel to China, I don’t recall a single mainstream pundit
applauding him for taking the virus seriously. (In fact, the opposite
happened.)
And even if we had “listened to the scientists,” the
United States wouldn’t have been able to avert the coronavirus. Expert
predictions were all over the
place, and very few researchers or scientists came close to calling the
spread correctly. But now we’re going to act as if politicians were negligent
for failing to try to lock down the entire economy in early January? In mid
March, you could hardly get people off beach in Florida, but you think the
American public was going to consent to deep-freeze the economy and shut down
the NFL in January? To say such things is just armchair quarterbacking of the
most cynical kind.
Major media outlets, incidentally, ran plenty of
their own stories in January and February tempering fears over coronavirus. And
that’s okay, too. As I’ve argued elsewhere, it’s impossible to be on a
perpetual war footing, organizing and planning for every known emergency and
eventuality at all times. Of course there is great room for improvement. Of
course we should have more flexibility to produce ventilators or other
emergency equipment. But it’s unrealistic for the public to expect there is any
policy proposal or political leader that can immunize us from disasters such as
this one.
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