Sensible steps

Serial under-response was the tragic story of U.S. and global reaction to the mislabeled Spanish flu of 1918. That pandemic claimed at least 675,000 lives in the United States and as many as 100 million around the world.

The best guess is that the carnage of a century ago started in, of all places, rural Kansas. What isn’t a guess is the vast and efficient killing machine that that strain of influenza became.

Fear of creating panic and harming national morale during World War I led President Woodrow Wilson and his vast machinery of government to withhold facts about the flu. What citizens saw with their own eyes—corpses stacked on porches, a run on coffins, sudden and calamitous deaths of young healthy military men not at the front lines—destroyed confidence in government.

Wilson was not an authoritarian the way that President Donald Trump is routinely (and hysterically) accused of being by the chattering class. Wilson was a real-deal authoritarian who jailed enemies and controlled the press as well as the economy to an extent not seen before or since in the United States.

A cursory read of John Barry’s The Great Influenza—which President George W. Bush was seen carrying when fears of a bird-flu pandemic surfaced in 2005 as a means of alerting the public toward useful background—sketches Wilson’s iron lock on the economy, dissent, and the propaganda apparatus of a nation at war. Wilson demanded the country follow him into the carnage in Europe, and he observed secrecy at home about the contagion.

There is no worse strategy than secrecy for safeguarding the public from a pandemic. It is true that panic is a threat, but secrecy and innuendo fuel panic. Whispers and rumors lead to hoarding, irrational behavior and economic upheaval. Already, the U.S. government is behind the curve despite Trump’s demands that it get and remain ahead of coronavirus worries.

Trump could be assisted in this effort by the oldest trick in the Beltway book: a special commission. Led by Vice President Mike Pence, the commission could be co-chaired by a bipartisan group of the nation’s smartest, most effective governors—perhaps Arizona’s Doug Ducey, Florida’s Ron DeSantis, and Rhode Island’s Gina Raimondo—and include leaders of great medical institutions such as the Mayo and Cleveland clinics, Mass General and M.D. Anderson.

Public health is the first concern, but every pundit knows that if anything like what happened in 1918 plays out, Trump faces the sort of political disaster that became attached to Bush in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Here’s the chilling echo of 1918 that 21st-century leaders must seek to avoid: The first manifestation of the killer virus surfaced then went underground, moving through at least a dozen “passages,” or mutations, before its deadliness crested and began to weaken and humans developed immune responses. What has exploded out of Wuhan, China, may be just the first, not the last, act in a deadly drama. Certainly, Trump should treat it that way.

A virus can’t be killed with words, but panic can be steamrolled with information. Hopefully the Trump administration won’t settle for business as usual, because this isn’t a usual flu. Better to be accused of over-reaction than convicted later of indifference.