Voodoo epidemiology

Ronald Reagan had his voodoo economics. It was based on a zany theory invented by Arthur Laffer, the Laffer curve, which held that lowering taxes increases government revenue. There is no need to go through the working of the thesis because experience has shown that every time the theory has been put into practice—under Reagan, George W. Bush and Trump—the Laffer curve turned out to be a laugher of a theory. Each time, tax revenues shrank and the deficit skyrocketed.

But Donald Trump always does things “no one has ever seen before” and, accordingly, not only has Trump practiced voodoo economics, he also practices voodoo epidemiology. The clearest example came last week when the president retweeted a video featuring Dr. Stella Immanuel, who peddles some bizarre theories, including a Trump favorite, the idea that the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment for Covid-19. That goes against overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.

The Immanuel video, which Trump disseminated and endorsed, calling it “interesting,” was viewed by 14 million people before Facebook took it down as disinformation. Immanuel and Trump are well-matched partners in delusionary beliefs. Immanuel has said endometriosis is caused when women have sex with demons in their dreams. Trump has suggested household disinfectant as a treatment for Covid-19. And he keeps blaming the explosion of COVID-19 cases on too much testing, a theory which scientists have thoroughly debunked.

The reasons Trump’s favorite pretext for the coronavirus wildfire (which he enabled) holds no water are elementary.  If the number of cases was being artificially inflated by increased testing, then the percentage of positive tests would be dropping. But the opposite is the case because coronavirus cases really have been increasing. Increased testing is the result of the increased number of people with symptoms characteristic of Covid-19, a reflection of the fact of an increased number of actual infections. The number of hospitalizations tracks the same logic.

In a recent article I argued that the ultimate reason the United States response to Covid-19 is and has been the most disastrous in the developed world is that we practice the most savage form of capitalism in the developed world. “The business of America is business,” stated a president during the antediluvian early 20th century era of American capitalism. Trump’s embrace of the priorities implicit in that statement in his response to the coronavirus are at the root of the Covid-19 carnage unique to the United States among the rich countries. So, the long answer to the question of how we got here when all the others managed to dodge the bullet is hyper-capitalism, our uniquely ultra-radical form of capitalism.

How the priority of business enabled Covid-19 to become such a vastly worse catastrophe here than in the European Union, Iceland, New Zealand, Taiwan, South Korea, you name it, was explained succinctly in testimony to Congress this week. To paraphrase the dean of U.S. epidemiologists, while the others locked down 95 percent of their societies to curb the spread of the virus, we only locked 50 percent of ours. Put differently, it’s clear that a soccer team with a goalie that lets through half of the shots on goal is a losing team.

Confronted with the coronavirus, the countries of the world were faced with an agonizing but fateful choice: crush the economy for as long as it takes to crush the virus or spare the economy and let the virus romp to crush human lives. Everybody else chose to spare lives. We chose to save the economy. But even that callous calculation turned out to be flawed. Not enough people are willing to die for a craft beer, spicy chicken wings, and a MAGA hat.

The cynic in me might say that the U.S. IQ, by which I mean not intelligence quotient but idiocy quotient, has proved quite high and resilient, judging by the fact that 48 percent voted for Donald Trump in 2016, and that he maintained about that level of support almost throughout his spectacularly failed presidency. But 155,000 Americans dead on your watch for no good reason seems to have smarted up some people. Today, those who approve of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus make up 34 percent of the population, fourteen percent lower than those who voted for him for President.

Yet, the American Idiocy quotient is still way too high. I cannot imagine any other country where more than a third of the people would approve of a policy that is leading to at least 250,000 deaths, many of them avoidable, in about eight months or less. In most other countries, the approval rating would be in the low single digits.

On Covid-19, this country is easily the biggest loser in the world. Only Brazil, Russia and, potentially, India, come close. But none of those countries have the economic resources or the scientific firepower of the United States, so they have more of an excuse for screwing up. Not coincidentally, these three country’s leaders—Putin, Bolsonaro, and Modi—also are members of an exclusive club led by Donald Trump, the Horse’s Ass Academy of National Leadership. They stand at the intersection of authoritarianism, thuggery, and ultra-nationalism. They are the big losers in the world-historical war against the coronavirus. Donald Trump, who has contempt for almost anything and anyone decent but who reserves his worst contempt for those whom he considers losers, is the biggest loser of the lot.

It’s too late to avert the tragedy or even to curb the toll significantly. But in the November election we can make Trump a big loser in the only thing he cares about. Let’s hand him his just desserts, an electoral massacre that will crush his grotesquely inflated but flimsy ego in a way nobody has ever done before.