*The way we carry on nowadays, we're kinda begging for one of these.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/15/17948062/pandemic-flu-ebola-h1n1-outbreak-infectious-disease
By Ron Klain Oct 15, 2018, 6:00am EDT
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The possibility that an epidemic could take a huge number of lives here and around the world should be no surprise, given our collective experience with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which has killed more than 35 million worldwide. More recently, the West African Ebola epidemic of 2014-’15 (for which I served as the White House response coordinator) killed more than 11,000 people there and spread panic worldwide before it was contained.
The past two decades have seen a roll call of near-miss catastrophes. The SARS outbreak of 2002. The H1N1 flu of 2009. The MERS outbreak of 2012. And, of course, the Ebola epidemic of 2014, which at one point was forecast to take 1 million lives. They all were horrible, but each could have been significantly worse.
H1N1 offers a telling story. At a time when the world worried about a pandemic flu coming from Asia, H1N1 exploded from Mexico and California across the US. Once it was identified as a pandemic risk, an all-out effort to create a vaccine was launched — but the vaccine wasn’t made widely available to the public until after the epidemic’s peak. Even then, manufacturers were able to produce only a limited supply. Government officials gave conflicting guidance about the danger and the safety of routine actions (like keeping schools opened or air travel with infected people).
In the end, about 60 million Americans contracted H1N1 that year — which, by pure luck, turned out not to be a particularly lethal strain. Had it been even one-tenth as deadly as the Spanish flu (which was estimated to have killed about 10 to 20 percent of those it infected), even our modern medicine could not have prevented hundreds of thousands of Americans from dying in a relatively short period of time, in an event that would be more searing in contemporary consciousness than 9/11.
New political and social trends further increase our risk level. (((Yup.))) A rising tide of anti-vaccine sentiment in the US and Europe is raising the risk of a resurgence of once-vanquished infectious diseases (like measles), and increasing the likelihood of massive vaccine resistance in the event of an epidemic. The ability of social media to rapidly spread false information — painfully illustrated in the 2016 campaign — is another source of danger: Would the directives of public health officials be followed in a crisis? Would they be undermined by misinformation spread by misguided provocateurs or a hostile foreign power? (((Yup.)))
And then there is the risk factor of isolationism and xenophobia. While responsible officials in the Trump administration have responded to two Ebola outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo this year (including one that is far from under control), in a more visible crisis, Trump’s isolationist instincts might assert themselves. In 2014, such views led him to tweet that President Barack Obama should not have evacuated American Ebola fighters who contracted the disease from West Africa, and instead, should have left them to “suffer the consequences” of their condition.
Xenophobic views played a critical role in the tardy response to Zika in 2015-16. Congress delayed acting on a funding package because Zika was perceived to be a “foreigner’s disease.” As I made public appearances promoting this funding, I often heard in response, “Zika isn’t a public health problem, it’s an immigration problem — just keep the foreigners out.”
Never mind that there was no evidence that it was foreigners — as opposed to Americans coming home from vacations — that were bringing the disease to our shores. The anti-Zika funds stalled in Congress, and we eventually saw transmission of the disease in Florida, and the first-ever Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warning against travel to parts of the continental US.... (((Parts of the US that got wrecked by a hurricane and are gonna be swarming with post-flood mosquitoes.)))
