Tastes like Chicken Posted by Michael Signer

Amid news today that Canada is trying to quell public concern after finding three pigeons with avian flu antibodies, while there's a counterreaction among the press to the Bush Administration's panic-mongering, I'd like to sound a wholly uneducated cautionary note -- while at the same time making the improbable tesseract from this issue to the Administration's foreign policy (bear with me). 

So.  Let's begin at the beginning.  We've been told this is a crisis where millions of Americans could perish, if the virus leaps from birds to humans (which has happened) and mutates into a form transmittable between humans (which has not).  The government recently held a briefing where Representatives and their staff were told:

"This is a nation-busting event!" warned Tara O'Toole, CEO of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Center for Biosecurity. Speculating that 40 million Americans could die -- that's about one in eight -- she warned: "We must act now."

Yet one expert writes in WaPo:

Despite all the hysteria, there isn't a shred of evidence that a pandemic is actually on the way.

Given the disagreement, it's the politics of all this that's most interesting.  As the WaPo commentator notes, the Administration has used the flu to bolster its case that Posse Comitatus should be overruled:

The administration seems to want this epidemic-risk to capture the public's imagination, and to provide useful fodder for the repeal of the "posse comitatus" doctrine, which prevents the use of troops as domestic police. Bush has announced that, in effect, he wants troops to carry out the mass-slaughter and cleaning of most of the U.S. factory-farm bird population.

The reason to be skeptical -- even worried -- about the politicization of the flu is that it dizzyingly parallels in hubris and chutzpah the Administration's similar manufacture of crises in the past.  The evidence for their claims is quite simply poultry.  Consider:

1)  The Orange Alerts Crisis in 2004 (wherein the threat level to the country was jacked up repeatedly in advance of the Presidential general election)

2)  The Flu Vaccine Crisis in 2004 (wherein the President overheatedly announced a life-threatening shortage in flu vaccine, mysteriously strengthening his father-in-charge image at a time when he seemed to need it most -- though there never was a shortage).

3)  The Social Security Crisis in 2005 (wherein the President suggested that Social Security was in "crisis" -- though any fiscal problem was actually three to four decades away).

The Administration, as I have noted here, takes a strange, shameless pride in blurring the lines between ordinary and outrageous political conduct.  It's like they're playing chicken with the media! 

Note the way the Administration has documented and discussed Avian Flu.  It has required the following:

1)  Immediate action.  This is as opposed to thoughtful, long-range planning.  By shifting our attention to action, the Administration requires from us commitment -- meaning we can't just be boneless; we have to take sides.  The flu becomes politicized.

2)  Emotional reaction.  By demanding a visceral connection from the public to avian flu, and that we run around like chickens with our heads cut off, the Administration generates panic -- which the President then assertedly tries to quell, making him seem in control, and Presidential -- which he needs because, at a 39% approval rating, he's less and less our President every day.

3)  Dissolution of debate.  By making the issue urgent and emotional, it becomes something (like the Iraq War, like Social Security) beyond discussion.  This means that the President is either winning or losing; and we're either with him or against him.

Now, you might argue that all this is unfalsifiable.  If the Administration treats all threats this way, there's no basis for saying their approach to Avian Flu has been any worse than anything else -- indeed, maybe all Presidents would deal with something like these Avian Flu reports by similarly beating their breasts.

But this just isn't the case, as two poignant counterexamples show:

1)  Stem cell debate:  If, as many conservatives say, the utilization of embryos for stem cell research is murder, then it would make sense that stopping ongoing embryonic research would arguably be a calamitous "crisis."  Yet when the President made his cautious, and actually rather thoughtful, approach public to the nation in 2001, he did so in an entirely opposite way, ending in a balanced (if wholly hypocritical) compromise.  Here's what he said on August 11, 2001:

As we go forward, I hope we'll always be guided by both intellect and heart, by both our capabilities and our conscience. I have made this decision with great care, and I pray it is the right one.

No alarm here.  There's even a McNugget of wisdom.

2)  OBL in 2001.  To be most charitable to the President, he reacted to the memo from Condi Rice titled, "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S." with Crawford-style equipoise.  No crisis here. 

So the Administration (and all of us) should step back and consider.  What's most urgently needed with regard to Avian Flu is not a politicized, emotional, immediate response.  It's a strategy focused equally on preempting both economic and public health harms.  The following is from a Foreign Affairs article on the flu:

SARS provided a taste of the impact a killer influenza pandemic would have on the global economy. Jong-Wha Lee, of Korea University, and Warwick McKibbin, of the Australian National University, estimated the economic impact of the six-month SARS epidemic on the Asia-Pacific region at about $40 billion. In Canada, 438 people were infected and 43 died after an infected person traveled from Hong Kong to Toronto, and the Canadian Tourism Commission estimated that the epidemic cost the nation's economy $419 million. The Ontario health minister estimated that SARS cost the province's health-care system about $763 million, money that was spent, in part, on special SARS clinics and supplies to protect health-care workers. The SARS outbreak also had a substantial impact on the global airline industry. After the disease hit in 2003, flights in the Asia-Pacific area decreased by 45 percent from the year before. During the outbreak, the number of flights between Hong Kong and the United States fell 69 percent. And this impact would pale in comparison to that of a 12- to 36-month worldwide influenza pandemic.

While only 43 people died from SARS, it posed an economic catastrophe.  Management of the economic impact of avian flu -- from the public health controls in our international aviation system, to immigration, to banking, to cross-border transactions, to the general tendency of the media to magnify and intensify emotional threats for commercial gain -- can all be carefully managed from the hub of the executive branch. 

Similarly, the management of the public health issue -- basically, wide-scale immunization -- is a matter of thoughtful, mid-long-term management, not hysteria.  Not that we want to henpeck the details to death, but we'll never be able to steadily and surely immunize millions of people if we're panicked.

The Administration ought to focus on calm, forward-thinking public policy -- not on Chicken Little pronouncements.  We have this President -- or he has us -- for another three years.  So he might as well do at least one thoughtful, long-range, well-managed thing. 

He's a lame duck anyway.  Maybe we should be calling this Duck Flu instead.

Comments

[John Penta]

And here I thought it would taste like turkey instead.

W/ that said:

1. I'm not so sure the WH has been hysterical about this one yet. I think what they were trying to do is say "Yes, this is a problem" (Which it is) and "Y'know, this is a possible solution" (It got shot down, and was a bad idea, but they win points for trying).

2. I think we *do* need to review the old quarantine laws, things like that. For example, I'm not sure that in an emergency we could afford people not being vaccinated due to, say, religious objections. Your right to freedom of religion ends when it puts me at risk.

[J Thomas]

People who refuse to get vacciated will be no particular problem so long as they're a small fraction of the population. For some diseases that fraction can be 20%. I don't know what fraction it would be here, but chances are the number of refuseniks would be small enough to tolerate.

This is a "global warming" sort of thing. It's probably inevitable it will happen, but we don't have any idea when and we don't have any idea how bad it will be. Like that, but more uncertainty than global warming.

When the things switch to human-to-human transfer they usually get less virulent -- the longer you're mobile, the more likely you'll spread it. I believe that logic but I don't like trusting my life to it.

We need to arrange for essential services to be mostly uninterruptible even if a lot of key people are sick. Sick people need water and heat, so we need to try to make sure they get them. Also, each household should be ready to last through the debilitating stage of illness without any services, and they should try to be ready to take care of themselves when they're all sick. They should have some easy-to-prepare easy-to-digest meals stored up, along with their regular emergency food and emergency water and emergency water purification gear. Etc.

This is just common sense, and if we have to deal with losing 2% or 40% of the population, we'll just have to cope. Basic care for people who're very sick is vital; if your family all gets very sick at the same time you need to do your best to take care of yourselves. It's bad enough getting very sick, if you don't get food or water or adequate temperature control while you're very sick you may die of that.

Mostly the same preparations will help with any disaster where you should stay put. So it may be useful even if the avian flu gets put off for 20 years. And making our water and natural gas and power grids more robust is worthwhile for other purposes too.

This is all common sense. It's too early to do sophisticated medical preparation when we don't know what we'll be facing. But basic care is essential. Without good enough basic care, something that would kill 10% might easily kill 40%. You can do your part, and after you've recovered enough to go out you can check on your sick neighbors and help some of them. The preparation can be reasonably cheap, and it's useful for a variety of concerns.

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