Meet America's Terrifying Line of Defense Against the Next Pandemic

Hard as it may be t believe, the most frightening thing about Trump’s second term isn’t Donald Trump. Shit, I don’t even know if he cracks the top five most frightening things. If history is going to repeat itself in the next four years then the sequel could be a blockbuster.

After the emergence of Covid it’s easy to miss, but scientists have known that Bird Flu, the catchier name of H5N1, has been trying to get into our soft warm bodies for decades. Though it can already infect a human being under just the right circumstances it’s still trying to hack the access codes and it’s getting closer. A couple of years ago when the height of Covid was still ravaging our world, H5N1 quietly unlocked the ability to infect cows.

Now that it’s getting to know the ways of mammal flesh scientists are trying to raise awareness of the sobering possibility that Bird Flu may finally crack human-to-human transmission within the next few years and spark up a brand new ultra-deadly pandemic, and just look who’s going to be in the White House when that happens! Again! Moreover, look who he’s bringing with him.

But look, no matter how much you may have hated the first presidency of Donald Trump, the one thing that his harshest critics “gotta hand it to him” for is his so-called Operation Warp Speed—the swift development and rollout of a vaccine for Covid-19 during the early stages of the pandemic.

Now, don’t get me wrong: There was very little about either Trump or his successor’s Covid response that warrants praise. It was and continues to be a tragic disaster. The positive spin here is that Trump promoted the development of a vaccine which spared a further untold millions of lives in spite of the administration’s incompetence.

He’s not going to make that mistake again.

See, of the precious few things the right actually could use to gel up bipartisan support for Donald Trump, vaccines are the best candidate, but it’s his side who rejects them. It’s one of the reasons he lost support on the right toward the end of his presidency and may arguably have contributed to his second term loss in 2020. His base largely don’t accept the premise or practice of vaccination—they don’t accept its mechanism or trust the science that develops it.

As I’ve pointed out recently, when the right talks about the elites or the establishment they are really just talking about the technocrats—experts, specialists, and educators. It’s how doctors and teachers can be considered “elite” while Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos aren’t. They don’t trust anything that runs counter to their intuition or that would interfere with their liberty, so medical science is intrinsically untrustworthy. The conservative ethos is that it’s much easier to believe Grandma’s ginger and arrowroot chicken broth prevents the seasonal flu than a mystery chemical you can’t pronounce developed by liberal city academics and administered by injection.

The former is old knowledge passed down by people you trust and who love you. The latter is some hokey garbage some people you’ve never met invented wholesale from their godless imaginations.

In the aftermath of his term in office, it rather comically became the task of his media pundits to make excuses for Trump and explain why people should still support him despite his apparent worrying belief in the efficacy of medicine. Candace Owens, who at this time was still employed by Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire because she had yet to reveal her fondness for anti-Semitic groypers, did a whole thing where she defended Trump to his audience on the basis that he’s an elderly man from a time when everyone believed in silly myths like the sun went around the Earth and vaccines were effective.

I have no idea whether Donald Trump thinks vaccines are legitimate or not. It seems likely he assumes they are but he’s not susceptible enough to human vulnerabilities for it to be much of a concern. His notorious Covid press conference kind of reveals that he doesn’t know or believe much of anything when it comes to medicine (contrary to the widespread myth, he did not tell people to drink or inject bleach, but he did suggest that doctors were looking at ways of putting disinfectants into the body somehow. It’s not as reprehensible as the bleach thing but it does betray he has no idea what he’s talking about and no interest in learning.)

But then, Trump is not a conservative. He’s not an anything. In almost all arenas of life and politics he professes whatever belief he thinks will earn him the most fame and wealth. What makes the incoming second Trump administration so dangerous is that he’s decided to surround himself with people who share this execrable reverse-utilitarian mindset.

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