Public health experts are confusing Americans
When I was a Pentagon speechwriter, I would sit down with four-star generals for a briefing on their plans to reorganize the Army or unveil a new weapons system. Inevitably, they would speak in military jargon, at times stringing together three acronyms in a single sentence. My job was to translate for the American people. So, I would say: General, imagine you are home for the holidays, and your mother says, “Honey, what are you working on at the Pentagon these days?” How would you explain this to her? Eventually we would get a simple English translation that any American could understand.
I was reminded of this while listening to Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), at a recent White House news briefing. Here is how she updated Americans on the spread of the virus: “As of yesterday, we have confirmed 1,277 cases of the B.1.1.7 variant across 42 states, including the first case of the B.1.1.7 variant with the E484K substitution that had previously been found in the U.K. Nineteen cases of B.1.351 variant have been found across 10 states, and three cases of the P.1 variant has been found in two states.” Got that? Me neither. I consulted some medical experts, and here is an English translation of what she said: “We have confirmed 1,277 cases of the U.K. variant across 42 states, including the first case of the U.K. variant with a mutation of the spike protein that had been seen in the South African variant. The U.K. variant with this South African mutation had only been found in Britain, but has now appeared in the United States. In addition, 19 cases of the South African variant have been found across 10 states, and three cases of the Brazilian variant have been found in two states.”
That’s a lot clearer, isn’t it? So why doesn’t Walensky just say that? Maybe, like the generals I once worked with, she’s so immersed in the medical jargon it sounded clear to her. For some public health experts that may be the case. But I suspect there’s something more pernicious going on here. Public health experts, whose job it is to inform the American people, are instead confusing them in the name of wokeness.
When the variants began arriving, experts and journalists did refer them by their place of origin. This was in keeping with tradition. MERS is called the Middle East respiratory syndrome because that is where it originated. The Ebola virus is named for the Ebola River in Congo. The Zika virus started in the Zika Forest of Uganda. Lassa fever is named for the Nigerian town where it originated. Marburg virus is named for German city where it first emerged. We refer to Guinea worm disease, Japanese encephalitis, West Nile virus and German measles — as well as Lyme disease (Lyme, Connecticut), norovirus (Norwalk, Ohio) and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
But when the pandemic began, and some suggested calling this pathogen the “Wuhan virus” — or, as then-President Donald Trump called it, the “China virus” — they were accused of being racist. Calling it “kung flu” (as Trump did) is bigoted. Calling it the Wuhan or China virus is not.
Then the variants began arriving on our shores. In the name of clarity, many experts and journalists began to correctly refer to them as the U.K., Brazilian and South African variants. But when news organizations got called out for hypocrisy, the use of source names quietly dissipated, and we began to get the alphabet and number soup we now hear every day.
It is unlikely the experts will stop speaking in gibberish anytime soon, so here is a cheat sheet to help you translate what they are saying:
• D614G or “wild-type” = original covid strain
• P.1 and P.2 = Brazilian variants
• B.1.1.7 = U.K. variant
• B.1.351 = South African variant
• B.1.526 and B.1.525 = New York variants
• B.1.427 and B.1.429 = California variants
Of course, you should not need a cheat sheet. We pay our public health officials to inform, not confuse us. But apparently, in the age of wokeness, that is too much to ask.