A Looming National Security Crisis of Incoherent Contradictions
The Self-Inflicted Hole in America's Biosecurity
The official position of the Trump Administration is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was engineered in a Chinese laboratory, developed with funding from the National Institutes of Health. They also believe that Americans should have blindly embraced this new virus with nothing but a smile in 2020, even as hospitals were overwhelmed and massive numbers of Americans were dying. This is an obscene contradiction that will only end in horrific tragedy if made policy for future pandemic events.
What the Trump Administration has done is constructed a massive neon billboard for the whole world to see: if a bad actor with an unlicensed virology lab seeks to engineer a pandemic-level threat to devastate the American population, the federal government will shrug its shoulders & let wreak whatever havoc may follow. Like it or not, but America has made a lot of enemies, and long before Trump, has been considered the greatest threat to world peace and global stability. The federal mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with wealthy interests' empowering of the anti-vaccine movement, has only established a template for a potential bioweapon attack in the future.
Worse yet, with RFK Jr. and his rogues’ gallery slashing funding for mRNA vaccine research, we won't have another Operation Warp Speed. Should another pandemic kick off in the next few years, there won't be any room for debate as RFK Jr., Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, Tracy Beth Hoeg, Kevin Bardosh, etc. stand atop a mountain of dead as their crowning achievement. America will inevitably find itself crawling on its knees, begging to buy new mRNA vaccines at a markup from some other country, possibly China. As we unfortunately saw with Africa and our failure to deliver COVID-19 vaccines, this runs the risk of devastating consequences for post-acute complications: “Nearly half of COVID survivors in Africa have lingering symptoms, data reveal” (CIDRAP, December 2023)
A New Model of Public Anti-Health
While the most likely candidate for another pandemic resides with H5N1 aka "Bird Flu," as a result of destroying federal safety regulations on the agricultural industry, this irrational and erratic federal meltdown as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic has become an ever-growing hole in our national security. The conspiracy theorist mindset which has infested the Trump Administration is gravely opposed to preventing outbreaks of lab-engineered viruses, however. Irrationally, they believe the best defense is to embrace any and all viruses as early as possible, without vaccines, treated solely by unregulated supplements & quack cures sold on weird websites owned by anti-vaccine friends of HHS Secretary RFK Jr.
There is no historical or scientific foundation for such a belief, mind you, barring centuries old anti-vaccine propaganda. Pandemics have never ended via mass infection. Instead, this myth is meant to downplay the massive amount of suffering such an approach causes and liberate the government from its basic responsibilities to the public, prioritizing the whims of wealthy interests over civic society.
Nobody, especially New Yorkers, want to relive the carnage of Spring 2020, much less experience another pandemic that makes COVID-19 look like a picnic by comparison. Part of the responsibility of our federal public health agencies is to ensure this doesn't occur, contributing to our national security. This willful neglect is outright criminal.
Now our federal public health institutions are compromised while the Trump administration has focused its energy and resources on terrorizing hairdressers, Canadian tourists, delivery drivers, and other everyday civilians in a campaign of what will one day have to be prosecuted as crimes against humanity. This extended temper tantrum of state-sanctioned domestic terror has already begun to devastate America's tourist economy and further shred the nation's social fabric. If another 9/11-scale terror attack were to occur tomorrow, the world would have little sympathy - and many would openly cheer at the carnage.
No number of armed soldiers on the streets of Washington, D.C. could ever be enough to intimidate a foreign bioweapon. Considering the toxic mix of arrogance and incompetence in our federal leadership, it would not be surprising if they were among the first to start dropping dead in the streets. The incompetence of Trump's COVID-19 response being the lynchpin of his (narrow) 2020 election loss has driven a multi-year temper-tantrum, leading to a degraded mental state rife with erratic paranoia.
From Scams to Scorched Earth
Truth be told, there's a hard argument that might, in the eyes of some, justify the unleashing of such a horrific bioweapon nightmare upon the United States of America. The cuts to foreign aid mean that the Trump Administration will have the blood of millions of lives on its hands from disease alone. The political and economic chaos being unleashed here at home is inherently destabilizing and will leave scars that may haunt this nation for decades to come. Denial of such humiliating incompetence will come in many forms from our federal leadership, desperately clutching to myth, directly mirroring another failed regime from history…
The mythology of the Nazi regime is that they were a wonderfully efficient, well-oiled machine that, after a devastating end to The Great War, was able to revitalize the nation and make massive advances in infrastructure and technology. In reality, the economy of Nazi Germany was an incoherent minefield of scams, helmed by emasculated creeps desperate to reclaim their past glory, popping meth like breath mints. Their focus was on rearmament above all else, after the technological horrors unleashed across Europe wreaked so much unprecedented devastation: armored tanks, rapid-fire machine guns, the birth of combat aviation, and even chemical weapons such as mustard and chorine gas.
The entire German economy was centered around building this atrocious behemoth of a war machine. The plan always was to pillage and loot the continent, establishing a new "golden age" of the Reich, completely unrestrained. Narcissistic arrogance of the highest degree. Sound familiar yet?
America talks now of annexing Greenland and Canada, boorishly renaming the Gulf of Mexico and the Department of Defense, and so on - yet this isn't a new phenomenon. America has a long and bloody history of killing and looting to expand its borders and influence for the sake of economic exploitation. Even well-intentioned liberals can be found talking about the importance of "soft power" over other nations, handwaving away decades of unspeakable atrocity, going all the way back to Korea where, under guidance from bioweapons researchers that previously committed unspeakable atrocities as part of Japan’s Unit 731, American soldiers dispersed smallpox-contaminated feathers in Korean homes:
As the Axis powers attempted to plunge the entire world deep into the bowels of Hell itself, countless tens of millions of lives were wiped out in the untold carnage. If any of us were ever given a chance to go back in time and prevent death on such a massive scale, few would shy away from the opportunity. Even at grave risk of causing a space-time anomaly or losing one’s own life in the process.
As the United States of America has foolishly chosen to go down the same road that ended in agony, one might consider the necessity of accelerating such a fragile house of cards into the later stages of societal collapse, dooming one nation to potentially save billions of lives. Consider the tens of millions of lives that American weapons have extinguished from the face of the Earth in the aftermath of the Second World War: from Korea, to Vietnam, to Cambodia, to Laos, to Afghanistan, Iraq, and dozens of other nations with little to show for it outside of record profits for American arms manufacturers and cargo planes full of coffins wrapped in the Stars and Stripes.
Even with over a half-century of horror & failure in military interventions around the globe, the alleged opposition party in the United States cannot bring itself to renounce support for endless war in any & all its forms - the last Democrat President even diverted pandemic relief funding to buy even more military toys for domestic police. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, the United States has made no meaningful opposition to Trump's agenda and many even endorse his reign of terror. Why should billions stand by defenseless, waiting around for an erratic and narcissistic Sword of Damocles to finally drop upon their heads?
The Twilight of American Hegemony
Between the demolition of public health and the constant, vulgar saber rattling, we may be walking into an utterly horrific crisis that threatens the life of every American. The extended temper tantrum the Trump Administration is presently engaged in, destroying the NIH and other essential federal institutions, does little more than hand the rest of the century to China as the world's global superpower. Firmly established as xenophobic, untrustworthy, and unreliable, the rest of the world is learning that the United States is not worth bothering to deal with. This will not end well for us.
Whatever leading political bloc arises in 2028 to clean up Trump's mess, they cannot be permitted to skate by on empty promises of "sanity" or "normalcy," much like Biden got away with, only to get Donald Trump elected President for a second time. We must make a national commitment to one-another to rebuild, reinvest, and rejuvenate. Anything less is a passive endorsement of Trump's agenda and RFK Jr.’s deliberate sabotage of Americans’ health.
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