VARIANT RISK IS REAL; STOP THE BLAME GAME

When evidence first surfaced that a new and deadly virus had emerged in Wuhan, China, the initial U.S. response fell into three rough categories: alarm, dismissive scorn, silence.

Among the first to sound warnings of various kinds in the United States were four Republicans: Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark.; then-national security adviser Robert O’Brien, and O’Brien’s deputy, Matthew Pottinger; and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Among those Democrats in D.C. who also sounded the klaxon was Ron Klain, now the White House chief of staff under President Biden, and who also served as the Ebola czar, among other posts, in the Obama administration.

What matters now is not, “Who was right in early 2020?” What matters now is that the alarms were muffled by skeptics, and responsible people were ignored because of the weight of the uncertain nature of the information available — and our inherent tendency to ignore problems. There is a lesson for everyone in this: When a few smart people are alarmed about a threat, we’d all be wiser to stop and consider whether our broader reflexes and instincts are not merely wrong, but catastrophically so.

This is one of those moments. Right now, there is a wholly misplaced sense of virus complacency settling into place in the United States. Those who have been vaccinated may be thinking, “I missed that bullet,” or experiencing a sense of relief.

Those who refuse or decline to get the vaccine, for other than reasons affirmed by science, are gambling that the responsibility of others will provide a collective shield under which they can wait it out. That shield, however, is far, far from 100% effective. This false sense of security is unfortunate, even as the vaccines stop or diminish the worst effects of the virus, including its known variants.

At this moment, the national security case for the federal and state governments to mandate vaccinations among the active-duty military and National Guard is so obvious as to foreclose debate. The same is true for all employees at all levels of federal, state and local governments. We don’t know what is ahead; it could be awful, and so the governments have to act accordingly. Mandates on the private sector are beyond the government’s authority right now, but it may not remain that way: The risks are that real.

What we don’t know — the “known unknown,” as the late Donald Rumsfeld memorably put it — is how many more variants will arrive, and whether one or more will not only defeat the vaccines that exist but also prove deadlier and more contagious than the first waves. We just don’t know.

We are, right now, much closer to a follow-on pandemic stalking the globe than we were at the time of the initial confirmed Wuhan outbreak in late 2019, for the simple reason that we have hundreds of millions of cases of the virus abroad. Each possesses the chance to mutate into a more deadly form. In his peerless history, “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History,” John M. Barry writes that the original flu virus of that period went through nearly a dozen mutations during the summer of 1918 before it returned in its deadliest form. Our bias now is to assume that the period of unprecedented and stunning death is in the past, that we have already experienced peak suffering. It ain’t necessarily so.

With that recognition should come extraordinary caution — not just about declaring victory in the United States — but about next steps. We can’t demonize neighbors we may need to persuade down the line. We can’t spend all the public funds we may need later to survive another shutdown. We must rebuild credibility among the public health agencies where vast damage to trust has been done.

Mostly we need a cease-fire in the pandemic blame-game wars, and a collective turn toward the future and its threats. Very few are covered in glory during the first 18 months of this pandemic. Humility and watchfulness are needed everywhere.