The COVID crisis is exposing many inconvenient facts, making our weaknesses visible. Some of this has political Implications. In a recent book Richard Horton, the editor of the medical journal ‘The Lancet’ flatly accuses U.S. President Trump of a ‘crime against humanity’.
The review of this book in ‘Nature’ says
The COVID-19 Catastrophe is a sort of history, diagnosis and prescription, in real time. It is wide ranging, querying the changing role of international cooperation and the fallout of austerity economics, and taking a deeper dive into China’s scientific and political response to the crisis than most Western media have offered. But the book returns again and again to the catastrophe in both the United Kingdom and the United States. It is haunted by the question: how did two of the richest, most powerful and most scientifically advanced countries in the world get it so wrong, and cause such ongoing pain for their citizens?
Horton levels the accusation that US President Donald Trump is committing a “crime against humanity” for defunding the very World Health Organization that is trying to help the United States and others. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in Horton’s view, either lied or committed misconduct in telling the public that the government was well prepared for the pandemic.
But politicians are not the only ones failing. Horton has hard words for the performance of some scientists in this crisis.
this is a corruption of science policymaking at every level. Individuals failed in their responsibility to procure the best scientific advice, he contends; and the advisory regime was too close to — and in sync with — the political actors who were making decisions. “Advisors became the public relations wing of a government that had failed its people,”
Mark Honigsbaum is the author (2020) of The Pandemic Century: A History of Global Contagion from the Spanish Flu to Covid-19 (Which is, alas, another must-read). In his review in The Guardian of the Horton book, Honigsbaum says:
Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of medical journal the Lancet, is already sure of the answers and so, to a lesser degree, is Debora MacKenzie, a journalist for New Scientist (whose Covid-19, currently an ebook, is published in hardback on 21 July). Both single out complacent politicians, scientists blinded by group think and bureaucrats wedded to pandemic plans modelled on influenza. But whereas MacKenzie ultimately comes down on the side of science, Horton calls the UK response to Covid-19 “the greatest science policy failure for a generation”. As befits the editor of a publication with a history of exposing medical corruption and cant in high places, Horton is properly angry: like a compositor punching out hot type in pre-digital days, his prose is full of steaming barbs. You can almost smell his contempt on the page.
It is possible that similar criticisms might apply to the situation in the USA. When the current wider political mess is sorted there will still be a massive amount of work to do.