Tom Cotton's name has been in the news in the last week for his warnings about the covid-19 virus early on. The national press has recognized the junior senator from Arkansas, and have noted his study of the virus in its early days in Wuhan, China, all of weeks ago. He deserves the solemn nods in his direction.
But so does another politician, who's just now getting some credit for his early warnings.
This is from a speech from 2005, just now being noticed by the American press, including us. This is a repeat, dug up from the archives, courtesy of ABC News:
"Today I've come to talk about our nation's efforts to address this vital issue to the health and safety of all Americans. I'm here to discuss our strategy to prevent and protect the American people from a possible outbreak.
"First, we must attack outbreaks that occur anywhere in the world. Second, we must protect the American people by stockpiling vaccines and anti-viral drugs. And improve in our ability to rapidly produce new vaccines against a pandemic strain."
"A pandemic is unlike other national disasters. Outbreaks can happen simultaneously in hundreds or even thousands of locations at the same time. And unlike storms or floods, which strike in an instant, and then recede, a pandemic can continue spreading destruction in repeated waves that can last a year or more.
"And one day many lives can be needlessly lost because we failed to act today."
--President George W. Bush
at the National Institutes of Health,
Nov. 1, 2005
That wasn't the only thing that George W. Bush said about a possible pandemic during his time in office. Fox News also reported on the speech. The former president said: "A pandemic is a lot like a forest fire: If caught early, it might be extinguished with limited damage. If allowed to smolder undetected, it can grow to an inferno that spreads quickly beyond our ability to control it. A flu pandemic would have global consequences, so no nation can afford to ignore this threat, and every nation has responsibilities to detect and stop its spread.
"It is vital that our nation discuss and address the threat of pandemic flu now. There is no pandemic flu in our country or in the world at this time--but if we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare . . . ."
Faulty memory says that President Bush was not only the chief executive and commander-in-chief of its armed forces during 9/11, but also during SARS. One of his more high-profile advisers, Karl Rove, has said the most frightening meetings during his time in the White House were about pandemics, not the War on Terror.
Word has it that somebody handed the president a book--John M. Barry's The Great Influenza, about the 1918 plague--and the president began ordering changes in the government. Which is an advantage of a president who reads.
(John M. Barry's most famous book--until 2020--was Rising Tide, about the flood of 1927. We expect his book on the flu to be popular again, as soon as the bookstores re-open.)
But then, 15 years ago, the world was a different place. After some planes crashed, on purpose, into New York and Washington, and were downed by the first heroes of a war in a Pennsylvania field, folks took these things seriously. That is, they saw that the next enemy could come out of nowhere, and sometimes disaster movies unfold on the television news. And they made plans for it.
Until the American giant fell asleep again. As it always does. And we are reminded of another George of note in the American story: George F. Kennan. He once compared this country to a dinosaur:
"I sometimes wonder whether in this respect a democracy is not uncomfortably similar to one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin: He lies there in his comfortable primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment; he is slow to wrath--in fact, you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed; but once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat. You wonder whether it would not have been wiser for him to have taken a little more interest in what was going on at an earlier date and to have seen whether he could not have prevented some of these situations from arising . . . ."
Some leaders in this country very much had an early interest in what was going on. But as one wag put it in social media: The only good Republican is the last Republican.
Editorial on 04/07/2020