There was much media angst over Donald Trump declaring he would be a dictator on “Day One” of a second term in office to promote border security and oil drilling. Scrape off the spicy language, and it sounds more like the standard executive orders every president issues upon taking office, as even a Trump-hostile PBS Amanpour & Co. guest admitted last week.
Will the same press also cringe over former New York Times science reporter Donald McNeil, proudly calling himself a “public health fascist” and recommending even more draconian measures to fight a future pandemic?
McNeil was unfairly fired from the Times during the COVID pandemic, a firestorm ignited by gossip from a “woke” bunch of privileged high school brats he’d chaperoned on a ill-advised paper-sponsored trip to Peru. But at least Times readers have been spared his illiberal public health advice, like his 2012 defense of Cuba’s quarantine of anyone who tested positive for HIV. It almost makes one welcome his COVID-beat replacement Apoorva Mandavilli, who mangled pandemic math in the alarmist direction and accused lab leak proponents of racism.
Host Christiane Amanpour set the table.
Amanpour: Now, it's four years since the U.S. registered its first COVID case. While the world has mostly moved on, we do remember the virus killed more than 7 million people worldwide, cost trillions of dollars, and demanded that we learn from all the mistakes that were made, in order to prepare for the next big one….
She introduced McNeil, who has a new book, The Wisdom of Plagues.
Amanpour: ….you said some countries did better than the U.S. You name Germany, you name Canada, then you say, and some autocratic nations. Which autocratic nations? And you say, you know, if it was me, I'm going to quote you, I think you say, I would be a public health fascist. Now, you know, I don't like the word fascist, but what do you mean?
McNeil answered, with tongue ever so slightly in cheek but also serious.
McNEIL: What I said was, and I was warned many times not to say this, the longer I covered disease, the more of a public health fascist I turn into. Meaning, I think we need -- if my book is aimed at anybody, it's aimed at people who are now in medical school and now in public health school and may someday be running the CDC or the NIH or whatever replaces them. And in some ways, they need to stop wanting to be as loved as they now are and have a sweet bedside manner and be tougher about saving lives to think maybe more like George Patton and less like Florence Nightingale, that it used to be that if you were public-health leader, you had to make really tough decisions about how you were going to stop an infectious disease….
Nobody likes it when you use the example of China. But in fact, China made itself virus free for almost three years and held its economy together while we floundered and watched, you know, 1.1 million Americans die….
China literally welded people into their homes and denied them life-saving care in the name of stopping an unstoppable aerosol virus, then used an inferior home-brew vaccine. The mass deaths that occurred when China finally relented on the measures just proved that China was never going to be "virus-free," no matter what draconian measures it applied.
After some guff about “conspiracy theorists,” Amanpour raised questions about “the actual effectiveness of lockdowns. Was it the right thing to do?”
McNeil blithely waved basic freedoms aside, suggested we didn’t lockdown hard enough for a shorter time as if such measures would have killed off such an infectious virus.
McNEIL: Well, you have to understand, everybody sort of focuses on, oh, lockdowns, oh, schools. Lockdowns shouldn't have lasted as long as they did. Masks shouldn't have lasted as long as they did. The problem is that if you have, you know, a sort of lockdown light, a kind of garden party version of a lockdown, if you have masks, whereas some people wear masks and some people don't, and people get tired of it and people don't want to accept the vaccines then of course it doesn't work very well.
A transcript is available, click "Expand."
Amanpour & Co,
1/23/24
1:58:43 a.m. (ET)
AMANPOUR: Now, it's four years since the U.S. registered its first COVID case. While the world has mostly moved on, we do remember the virus killed more than 7 million people worldwide, cost trillions of dollars, and demanded that we learn from all the mistakes that were made in order to prepare for the next big one. Joining me now, award-winning, former New York Times health correspondent, Donald Mcneil. His new book is called "The Wisdom of Plagues," and he's joining me now from New York. Donald McNeil, welcome to the program.
DONALD G. MCNEIL JR., AUTHOR, "THE WISDOM OF PLAGUES": Thank you for inviting me.
AMANPOUR: You know, I sort of said demands that we learn from those mistakes. In short, your book, "Wisdom of Plagues," have you concluded that the world, in these four years, has learned the mistakes and will be better prepared for the next big one or disease X as it's called?
MCNEIL JR.: It's country by country, I'm afraid. My argument in the book is the United States lost almost two times as many people as it "needed to lose" in this pandemic. That we could have done a whole lot better about it. And it has a lot to do with leadership and it has a lot to do with our failure to make tests in time and many other things. So, I don't think we are better prepared for a pandemic than we were the last time. Other countries did very differently, took very different approaches the way we did, and I think some of them did better, both autocracies and democracies. And the one thig you can say about disease X, which is a concept that's been around long before COVID came along, and I know it's been talked about at Davos, but it's been around since before Davos, we don't know what the next pandemic is going to be. And, you know, it used to be that everybody, when you asked experts about this, they always said flu. I worry more about H5N1, avian flu, going, pandemic. Then a coronavirus came along, and in fact, it might not be either of those next time. It might be an adenovirus or paramyxovirus, or it might be drug resistant bacteria. It might be a fungus. There are lots of things that are waiting to get us, and we have to be much better prepared. And I argue for a sort of a Pentagon-like response to disease.
AMANPOUR: OK. So, that's interesting because you basically said, just now in your previous answer, you said some countries did better than the U.S. You name Germany, you name Canada, then you say, and some autocratic nations. Which autocratic nations? And you say, you know, if it was me, I'm going to quote you, I think you say, I would be a public health fascist. Now, you know, I don't like the word fascist, but what do you mean?
MCNEIL JR.: What I said was, and I was warned many times not to say this.
AMANPOUR: Donald McNeil.
MCNEIL JR.: The longer I covered disease, the more of a public health fascist I turn into. Meaning, I think we need -- if my book is aimed at anybody, it's aimed at people who are now in medical school and now in public health school and may someday be running the CDC or the NIH or whatever replaces them. And in some ways, they need to stop wanting to be as loved as they now are and have a sweet bedside manner and be tougher about saving lives to think maybe more like George Patton and less like Florence Nightingale, that it used to be that if you were public health leader, you had to make really tough decisions about how you were going to stop an infectious disease. I mean, we're very lucky now we now have. We have bottled oxygen, which we didn't have in 1918 during the 1918 flu. We have antibiotics for secondary infections. We have ventilators and echo machines and all these other things. Had we not had those things, 2020 might have been worse than 1918 if we'd had the technology back then.
And you have to be able to step in at the same -- to buy time until you can produce the vaccines, the monoclonal antibodies and the drugs that will allow you to actually stop the epidemic through pharmaceutical means. And that is essentially my argument. And some countries did better at that. Nobody likes it when you use the example of China. But in fact, China made itself virus free for almost three years and held its economy together while we floundered and watched, you know, 1.1 million Americans die. I mean, the death rate of every country in Asia, whether it's an autocracy like China or whether it's a semi-democracy like South Korea or Japan, but I shouldn't say semi-democracy, you know, they did much better than we did. And they did it because of good leadership and because of the population cooperated with the recommendations that were made.
AMANPOUR: OK.
MCNEIL JR.: You know, some countries like Cuba did well, some countries like Australia and New Zealand did well. It's enormously varies country by country. But I agree that if you take our closest peers, Canada and Germany, they had a little bit more than half the deaths we had. And the difference was leadership and people coming together and believing the leaders. Accepting the lockdowns when they were needed, accepting travel strict restrictions when they were needed, and particularly accepting vaccines when they were available.
AMANPOUR: OK. So, what happens next time? Because clearly in the United States also down south in Brazil, you know, there were the -- you know, the group of deniers, conspiracy theorists and general chaos agents that caused a lot of misinformation and lack of clarity. So, you know, that since there has been an argument in a debate, even in this country, the U.K., where I am, about the actual effectiveness of lockdowns. Was it the right thing to do? Did it cost too much on the economy and all the -- you know, the sort of domino effects that that had? You still come down on that then, do you, on the strict lockdowns, the mask wearings, and things like that?
MCCNEIL JR.: Well, you have to understand, everybody sort of focuses on, oh, lockdowns, oh, schools. Lockdowns shouldn't have lasted as long as they did. Masks shouldn't have lasted as long as they did. The problem is that if you have, you know, a sort of lockdown light, a kind of garden party version of a lockdown, if you have masks, whereas some people wear masks and some people don't, and people get tired of it and people don't want to accept the vaccines, then of course it doesn't work very well. You know, the country's the -- all these "non-pharmaceutical interventions" like masks, like quarantining and stuff, only work for short periods of time when people are actually scared. And eventually, the dam breaks, people get fed up with it. And now, hopefully, by that time, you've got some sort of countermeasure that works. But instead, people began to believe in countermeasures that clearly didn't work, like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.
AMANPOUR: Right.
MCNEIL JR.: And you had misdirection coming from the top. And so, I'm not optimistic about the next pandemic, not in the United States because I feel --
AMANPOUR: And especially if those leaders get back into office, presumably.
MCNEIL JR.: Whether they do or not, the country is so polarized.
AMANPOUR: OK.
MCNEIL JR.: And there are so many people who are inclined to just think all scientists are lying elitists and they ought to be ignored, or that I ought to be strung up. You know, I'm getting hate mail again since this book has come out. You know, as long as that persists, we're going to suffer from the results from the last pandemic.
AMANPOUR: And can we can we just make a fact, you know, the conspiracies about MMR, measles, mumps, rubella, have caused and continue to cause, you know, flare ups of deaths by measles both in the U.S. and in the U.K., countries which had obliterated this stuff because of these, you know, as you call cancer of rumors and the conspiracies and all of the rest of it. So, we know the damage that does. But what I want to also ask you is, do we know -- are you -- how important is it? And are you clear about the origin of COVID and the origin of any pandemic that comes up in the future?
AMANPOUR: The battle over whether COVID came out of a lab or whether COVID came out of the wet market is still on. I wrote an article, you know, three years ago now saying we need to look into the COVID -- the lab leak theory more seriously. Clearly, the Chinese were covering up what they knew. Clearly, they still are covering up what they knew. I don't think we're going to know the answer any more than we know the answer as to whether Cuba was involved in JFK's assassination, or whether Alger Hiss was actually a Soviet spy, or things like that, until an autocratic state opens up its files. And I don't expect that to happen during my lifetime. Nonetheless, given everything I look at, I think it is more likely that the outbreak started in the market than it did in a lab. But I can't prove it and neither can anybody else. And it's an ongoing battle and it's polarized and it's given the Republicans in Congress a lot of of ammunition to beat up on Tony Fauci with and beat up on scientists with.
