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Trump calls for Warp Speed to develop and distribute coronavirus vaccine 

Trump calls for Warp Speed to develop and distribute coronavirus vaccine 
Forgive us, Locutus, the Borg

After several months of failing to deal with Covid-19, alternatively dismissing it as a common cold, then blaming China, Trump finally announced a Manhattan Project-style effort to deliver a vaccine so we could all go to the beach without being afraid of dying. Amazingly, he borrowed the project’s name from the Star Trek universe. 

Over the past three years, we’ve got used to a whole buffet table’s worth of word salad from Donald Trump – misspelt words, bewitched grammar, capitalisation, and syntax, mysterious or portmanteau word choices, random punctuation, and sentence fragments that go everywhere but to the usual usage conventions of subject, verb, object. We’ve been exposed to wild, over-extravagant self-praise and incessant repetition, as well as a kind of arrogance that has bordered on parody.

But, honestly, this past week has achieved a new pinnacle or nadir (pick your preference), paired with administrative decisions that seem to have borrowed some of the more capricious, spiteful elements from the playbook of a Roman emperor like Caligula. Although, to be perfectly fair, Donald Trump has yet to appoint a horse to his Cabinet, but possibly that is only because he seems to hate domestic animals of all types (even if his sons enjoy killing wild animals with high-powered rifles).

But, he clearly appears to revel in secondhand versions of popular culture that he presumably enjoyed while he was a rather non-studious teenager, or from his illustrious career as a world-famous entertainer and his faux reputation as a trend and pacesetter in world leadership. Just ask him.

Last week, the president ratcheted up the rhetorical threats (now increasingly reciprocal) against China over where the Covid-19 virus came from, how China better fess up to having created it somehow by design or accident and thereby pay suitable reparations, and how such dreadful behaviour might even force the US to sever all trade and economic ties with the Chinese. In response, the Chinese have pointed their own finger at the US for creating HIV/AIDS (two can make up stuff, after all) and then unleashing it on the planet, and that the US better pay penalties for that in return. Take that, they seem to have been saying.

And remember, all this is less than six months since Donald Trump had praised Chinese leader Xi Jinping and the country he runs to the hilt for their effectiveness in dealing with Covid-19. And it is only a couple of months or so since Trump had heralded the two nations’ trade agreement that was supposed to put to bed the raging tariff and trade arguments that had consumed 2019. I shall resist quoting from Nineteen Eighty-Four right now, with respect to those zigzag changes in international policies and mind-numbing shifts in foreign policy positions, all without regard to whatever had come before today’s comments must be consigned to that infamous “memory hole.”

Oh, right. We were slightly sidetracked there for a minute by some of the madness that purports to be the Donald Trump agenda in foreign relations. The main news this week, just as it has been pretty much every day since late January, is the Covid-19 virus and the flailing, untidy, inconsistent US response to it.

Over the past several months, the national government in the person of Donald Trump initially argued that shutting the borders to Chinese visitors would keep everything fine, with the fatalities kept down to a mere handful. Then the issue became why afflicted passengers on cruise ships shouldn’t be allowed to disembark in the US. That, eventually, morphed into the idea testing was probably a bit of a bad thing since it would drive up the number of cases: No tests meant no record of cases, meant a low case count.  That meant we won against that invisible enemy. We won. We won! Ipso facto. QED. The proof is in the pudding, or something like that. Well, things didn’t work out that way, as we all know, now. No siree, Bob!

Instead, the infection and death counts have continued to rise, pushing well past the number of fatalities from the entirety of the Vietnam War, together with the military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan and a few other small police actions thrown in for good measure. The federal government fumbled around, looking for a silver bullet that would banish this plague.

In his various White House media events, the president first fell in love with the idea that summer temperatures would naturally vanquish the invisible foe. Then he embraced the old anti-malarial drug, hydroxy-chloroquine, following reports that one French doctor’s study had shown some possible benefits. Then it was on to truly bizarre public musings about kitchen and bathroom disinfectants and ultraviolet lights shoved into the human body somehow.

That kind of advice panicked the healthcare sector and the household cleanser product industry alike. And that led commercial producers of such chemicals to run public announcements to the effect that their customers should not ingest, inject or otherwise consume their products, and only use them on cleaning toilets and dirty floors where they were supposed to be used, lest someone somehow confuse Donald Trump and his ramblings with the advice of an actual medical practitioner. And still, the number of deaths kept rising.

Individual state governors have tried to fill the void of rational policymaking and leadership, most especially New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo’s daily televised briefings quickly became must-see-TV, notable for their data-driven, fact-filled, no-holds-barred approach. Cuomo demonstrated the kind of behaviour that indicated he had an EQ that was off the charts, even as he advocated forcefully for more federal help and much more federal coordination in making essential protective medical equipment and ventilators available to deeply affected – hot zone – areas like New York City.

The contrast with the Trump media briefings from the White House could not have been more stark. There, the president has continued to insist everything was just fine, and that any and all problems were a holdover from his horrible predecessor, now out of office over three years ago. If New York would just stop whingeing about things, he seemed to say, there would be no problem at all, or, alternatively, it was all their fault in The Big Apple for living so close together.

Presidential media events have recently included attacks on China, miscellaneous threats on all and sundry, and groundless accusations there had been a vast conspiracy, “Obamagate”, that dwarfed anything ever faced by any president since George Washington. This was somehow tied up in General Michael Flynn’s lying to the FBI and the new vice-president just after Flynn had been appointed national security adviser, and even before the Trump administration had actually taken office. (This writer shakes his head, but apparently all the clues are out there, to be found in the cryptic writings on Qanon, the ravings of Alex Jones and his ilk, and the rantings of some of the more aggressive talking heads on Fox News.)

Meanwhile, the president keeps trying to find a nostrum or two or three that will vanquish this plague. This is the pandemic that has led to a vast economic shutdown across the nation, enormous – even unimaginable – rises in new unemployment figures, millions of jobs gone into puffs of smoke, and hundreds of thousands of large and small businesses shuttered or worse.

The Trumpian dream of running for reelection as the man who delivered the best economy ever has now turned into acrid smoke, leaving the president with the remaining card of proclaiming a Covid-19 death toll of less than 200,000 is a tremendous victory over an invisible but deadly enemy. It is enough to make a president ill-tempered and irritable, and something that can’t even be fixed by binge-watching Fox News for hours on end and then firing off dozens of tweets filled with the Trumpian style grammar, language, ellipsis, syntax, word choice, punctuation and arcane meanings.

But this past week was special. Almost supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. For months now, the Trump administration has been appointing various people to serve as the point person on a special effort to develop a vaccine, ramp up procurement and production of protective hospital garb, and direct production of disease test kits so that the president’s early promise that “anyone who wants a test can have one” might eventually be realised.

At one time, the first son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the callow youth of an “eminence grise” fixer for every difficult problem faced by the Trump administration, was the go-to guy to lead the country to victory over the vicious foe.

Prior to that, it seemed to be the usual reliable but unsexy crew of government agencies, NIH, CDC, FDA – all under the loose but visible guidance of NIH’s chief immunologist, the straight-talking, call-a-spade-a-damned-shovel Dr Anthony Fauci. Somewhere in the mix of all this was the secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar, the former pharmaceutical industry lobbyist.

But along the way, Dr Fauci seemed to gain the ire of the president’s right-wing supporters, and so he was eased back from the control room to be superseded by Kushner. Soon enough, the apparent head of the Covid-19 task force then became Dr Deborah Birx, whose demeanour was much less combative than Fauci’s, and who largely held back from publicly correcting the president after one of his public rants. A medical doctor and active-duty colonel, Birx had been the country’s Global AIDS Coordinator for over half a decade, before becoming the White House’s Coronavirus Response Coordinator of the president’s Coronavirus Task Force.

But in the meantime, the vice-president, Michael Pence, the man who has been singularly unable to issue a single sentence without including vast praise for his president, had been given the task of overall leader as well. He, of course, just like his boss or the first son-in-law, is also not a medical doctor or scientist.

Now another wheel has been added to this melange, or perhaps more likely, the dog’s breakfast of overlapping government efforts and committees. On Friday 15 May, at yet another one of those White House Rose Garden media and president taunt-each-other-events, Trump announced the formal launch of the “Warp Speed” project to focus like a laser beam on creating a vaccine against Covid-19. As he said, “We’re looking to get it by the end of the year if we can, maybe before.” Trump compared this newest effort to the Manhattan Project – the World War II effort that constructed the first atomic bombs. Trump went on to say that the name of his newest Covid-19 effort “means big and it means fast. We have the military totally involved.”

Just as an observation, the Manhattan Project took over four years and every part of it – in facilities across the country – was totally under the direction of a formidable team that comprised lead scientist J Robert Oppenheimer and the engineering and logistics genius, General Leslie Groves. Even at warp speed, few if any experts believe a viable, thoroughly effective vaccine can be developed, fully clinically tested, and manufactured in the vast quantities needed, all within the varied time-frames the president keeps offering, ranging from six months to a year and a half.

As NPR reported the other day, “At present, there are 14 promising vaccine candidates, Trump said, noting that it would be ‘risky’ and ‘expensive,’ but that the federal government plans to invest in manufacturing the top candidates even before they are approved to eliminate any delay once approval happens.” The leader of Warp Speed will be former GlaxoSmithKline executive Moncef Slaoui, a man who had managed the company’s global vaccines division. He also was on the board of Moderna, a company with its own coronavirus vaccine candidate, although Slaoui has now resigned from that board on conflict of interest grounds. 

Paired with Slaoui is General Gustave Perna, commander of the US Army Materiel Command, who will be the CEO of the programme. At the announcement, Trump did add the project would work with other nations, including China, to develop, manufacture and distribute a vaccine quickly. (Later he strangely added that he hoped the vaccine would be developed, but that if it didn’t, the country would continue to open up economically anyway. “Que sera, sera, Whatever will be will be, The future’s not ours to see” as theme song?) Lapsing into his inevitable superlatives, Trump went on to explain, “They’re viewing us as the leader, and the relationship with other countries on solving this problem has been incredible. We’ll be very happy if they are able to do it. We have no ego when it comes to this.”

Along with this vaccine crash course, the president also promised to ramp up production of vaccine supplies such as storage facilities, vials and syringes and that the nation’s military would deploy “every truck, plane and soldier” to distribute the vaccine quickly once available. Apparently the previous welter of government agencies, committees, task forces and Covid czars was insufficient to deal with the current crisis.

But this choice of the name, “warp speed”, seems more than a bit curious. In the first case, it derives from science-fiction stories and TV shows, with one important, early mention coming in Isaac Asimov’s 1950 volume, I Robot: “ ‘You get it, chief?’ The general manager was wildly jubilant. ‘You get it? There isn’t any industrial research group of any size that isn’t trying to develop a space-warp engine, and Consolidate and U.S. Robots have the lead on the field with our super robot-brains.’ ” Hey, that’s pretty close to warp speed, yes? There are actually one or two even earlier versions of a similar idea by EE Smith, but without the critically important use of the word, “warp”. 

Of course, the way warp speed entered popular parlance is from the Star Trek television series and the films and spinoff series that have followed it. No trekkie can forget Captain James T Kirk telling the crew of the starship Enterprise to go to warp speed, with a crisp, “Warp speed, Mr Sulu.” The only problem with all this is that “warp speed” is fiction. It assumes that somehow, a way around all the rules of modern physics, as laid down by Albert Einstein and others, will allow us to exceed the speed of light.

One simply must wonder if the actual scientists, engineers and other adults in the room are entirely comfortable with the idea that the very health of the nation depends on a scientific pedal to the metal, crash research project named after a science-fiction device so that Captain Kirk and the rest of them can zoom around the galaxy at warp speed, dealing with everything from tribbles to Q, to Khan. Personally, I wonder if the remains of Gene Roddenberry, now ashes in an interplanetary reliquary are spinning in zero gravity at the thought of this.

The same day that Alexander Courage’s theme music must have been playing in some ears at the announcement of Warp Speed as an official US government crash project, the brand spanking new US Space Force delivered its official flag to Donald Trump in a ceremony in the White House. Now, I don’t know about others, but the ensign in the centre of the flag looks entirely too much like that little do-hickey pinned to Star Trek crew members’ uniforms so they can communicate with everyone. How did Star Trek infiltrate the very heart of the Trump White House?

Personally, I think the rights holders of the Star Trek franchise should sue for copyright infringement or grand theft auto or something. Or just admit that whoever is in charge just loves those old television reruns of the show in syndication on cable television. But the patriot in me and someone who really hopes a viable vaccine is developed at warp speed, hopes that weird name or not, this project can actually get off the ground and succeed at warp factor nine. DM

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"Information pertaining to Covid-19, vaccines, how to control the spread of the virus and potential treatments is ever-changing. Under the South African Disaster Management Act Regulation 11(5)(c) it is prohibited to publish information through any medium with the intention to deceive people on government measures to address COVID-19. We are therefore disabling the comment section on this article in order to protect both the commenting member and ourselves from potential liability. Should you have additional information that you think we should know, please email [email protected]"

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