Splitsville SICK-O'S

The Indomitably Courageous Newsletter for Fans of THE SPLIT

Don’t look now, but there’s a new strain of the Ebola virus flaring up in Africa. And while the odds are v. remote that it will cause problems here in the United Snakes, they (the odds) aren’t zero. Ebola has been here once before, if you really want to know. And for that, we should actually be grateful—because it was from our experience in 2015 that we developed, as it were, medical and institutional antibodies (drugs; techniques; protocols) enabling us to deal with it should it ever make it here again.

That fact would be reassuring under the best of circumstances. It’s especially crucial now, because what we’re dealing with, of course, are the worst of circumstances. The nation’s health is overseen by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (a crackpot, a cretin as regards medical science, and possibly a sociopath), and Donald J. Trump (a frontotemporally-demented ignoramus, a malignant narcissist, and possibly—no; definitely--a fuckhead). One is hostile to science and the other is hostile to humanity. We saw how Trump “handled” COVID. Does anyone think his managing a new pandemic would be any less stupid, dangerous, and cruel?

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’ll start with last week’s stats. From the Daily Beast:

The World Health Organization has revealed that the death rate for the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a devastating 30 to 50 percent. Speaking to reporters in Geneva on Friday, Anaïs Legend of the WHO’s high threat pathogens team called the death rate “huge,” and said it means “five out of 10 people are likely to die.” The organization has recorded 10 confirmed and 223 suspected Ebola deaths in the DRC since the outbreak was declared on May 15, out of more than 1,000 confirmed and suspected cases.

This strain of the disease seems to actually be a bit deadlier than the one that hit Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia in 2014-2015. But there are similarities between the two outbreaks, as detailed in National Geographic:

For Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious disease doctor and founding director of Boston University’s Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases, the initial details took her back to 2014’s massive West African Ebola epidemic.

“The delay of months for identification, the presence in multiple urban areas before detection, cases in many different geographically disparate places,” she said—all these were parallels to the present and indicated an outbreak that had simmered undetected for some time before boiling over.

The situation “on the ground,” though, is worse today than in 2014, because of civil war:

Ongoing armed conflict in the area also creates conditions that favor viral spread locally and beyond the DRC’s borders, especially when international observers and funding are abruptly cut off as they have been recently, says Bhadelia. Less funding to diagnose and treat malaria and other Ebola mimics means it’s harder to find an Ebola signal in the noise of many other flu-like illnesses. Furthermore, borders in Central and East Africa are porous and the capacity to identify, isolate, and treat Ebola is scarce, fueling fears that the virus will spread beyond Uganda into other neighboring countries.

The virus spreading into other neighboring countries would be a bad thing, and not just because it would mean more illness and death. It would also increase the chances of something happening today that happened 11 years ago, when America’s attention was finally drawn to what was originally ignored as being just Africa’s problem.

Ebola emerged in Guinea in late 2014. In September of 2015 a Liberian citizen named Thomas Eric Duncan flew from his native country to Dallas, Texas, to visit family. If he was asymptomatic on the flight, he was totally fucking symptomatic after he arrived. He was hospitalized on September 30 and, on October 6, he died. Within a week, two nurses who had been caring for him also died.

OKAY, LOOK. IT’S BOTH NATIONAL HUG YOUR CAT DAY AND NATIONAL CHEESE DAY. RECONCILE THOSE TWO, PERHAPS BY HUGGING CHEESE.

As everyone who has seen Outbreak, 12 Monkeys, or Pluribus knows, communicable diseases and a robust global transportation system form a marriage made in Hell. One of us (EW) is currently writing the biography of a man who spent 25 years working for NGO’s in humanitarian aid and rescue. The purpose of one of his postings, to Liberia and Sierra Leone during their Ebola outbreak, was to wire up remote areas of each country with satellite dishes (and, often, with electricity itself, via generators and diesel fuel). This, so PhDs in the field from WHO and other organizations could track infections and send data to the countries’ capitals, WHO offices, and the CDC.

One of his colleagues put it best: “We were all deploying and coming to the disaster area because if we didn’t do it, the disaster area would come to us.”

It was only when the disaster area arrived in Dallas, in the person of a Liberian citizen, that the US response to Ebola got into gear. (With a vengeance. They sent the Army Corps of Engineers to Liberia with heavy equipment, flattened acres of jungle, and built Ebola care centers—which, at least at first, were little more than warehouses for people waiting to die. Later, as medical science got a grip on things, they became clinics.)

We should note here that the poorest town in the US is a medical paradise compared to many villages in rural Africa. More from Nat Geo:

The way Ebola is transmitted—by close contact with body fluids, not through respiratory routes—and the broad availability of tools to diagnose and respond to the disease in high-resource countries means the infection is not a threat to the international community, says Bhadelia.

(snip)

In the United States in particular, infectious threat response systems like the National Special Pathogen System have created “a ton of capacity” to treat infected patients and protect health care workers, she said.

There’s a possibility sporadic cases could be imported into the U.S., but Bhadelia is not concerned that would lead to a stateside pandemic.

And thank Gawd for that, because—like the woman who complains that the food on the cruise is terrible “and such small portions!”—we are saddled today with a president whose ineptitude at dealing with a dangerous disease is mitigated only by his increasing indifference to the job itself.

Jim Stewartson, who writes sharp psychological analyses of Donald Trump, concludes that Trump, after a cascade of failures in Iran, the courts, and in the polls, has succumbed to a fundamental kind of apathy:

Apathy is not just inaction; when the machinery to judge what matters fails, it can be very dangerous.

For example, over the last month, the President of the United States has said he doesn’t care about:

· Whether Iran negotiations are over
Trump told CNBC: “I don’t care if they’re over, honestly. I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less.” He also said the talks had become “very boring.”

· Oil prices
When asked whether he was worried about oil prices after the apparent breakdown of talks: “No, I don’t worry about that, no.”

· Americans’ financial situation
Asked whether Americans’ financial situations affected his Iran decision-making: “Not even a little bit… I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

· The midterms
During a Cabinet meeting: “I don’t care about the midterms.”

· Criticism of the war
Trump posted that Iran talks were continuing “at a rapid pace” and told his critics to “sit back and relax… it will all work out well in the end.”

Well. Give him uncharacteristic honesty points for “I don’t think about anybody.” Still, it takes a certain kind of callousness or obliviousness to tell people concerned about a war, in which people on both sides are getting injured or killed, to “sit back and relax.”

The thing is—and there is always a thing, with Trump—even if you think his professed indifference to these many crises and issues is a bad-faith/sour grapes pretense—a child’s huffy “I don’t care if you didn’t invite me to your birthday party because I didn’t want to go anyway”—Stewartson’s thesis still holds. A less exhausted (or demented) Trump would know that you’re at least supposed to pretend to care about them.

Paul Krugman puts it a different way:

Donald Trump will never admit that his gratuitous Iran war has been a total disaster. But the debacle has clearly broken him. So we are now saddled with a president who has given up governing, but will maintain his grip on power wherever he can. And his power will be exclusively focused on rage and revenge.

All of which should make us extra-glad that we don’t have Ebola here. It’s icky. It’s dangerous. It’s deadly. And Trump would respond to it with even more stupidity and indifference than he displayed during COVID—while the rest of his administration, like the Nazis (and every other authoritarian regime) before them, are waging a war on science itself. Per the (Failing) New York Times:

The White House is seeking to exert more control over billions of dollars in annual government grants, aiming to restrict a vast swath of funding — in health, housing, science and transportation — so that it primarily serves the purposes and organizations politically aligned with President Trump.

Trump may be increasingly apathetic, but his narcissism won’t let him stop fearing and despising anyone who knows more than he does. (Which is to say: pretty much everyone in the world. But he particularly hates and fears those who obviously, verifiably, know more than he does. Hello, scientists!) In this Trump proves himself the useful idiot of the religious nuts behind Project 2025, who can’t wait to repeal the Enlightenment, make everyone a Biblical literalist, and bring back feudalism. Back to the NYT:

The consequences could fall hardest on health and science, a field in which Mr. Trump has pursued some of the steepest cuts in his second term.

In exchange for federal assistance, researchers would face limits on the subjects that they can explore, the foreign labs with which they may collaborate and even the conferences at which they can appear. Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, the chief executive of the American Public Health Association, a professional organization and advocacy group, said the policy could “devastate innovation, science and research” in the United States.

But wait. Why are we pussyfooting around by talking about something that could happen? It—the administration’s sabotage of science, both home and abroad—already has! As the excellent Robyn Pennacchia reminds us in her amusingly-entitled Wonkette Substack, “Oh Good, We’ve Reached The ‘Flesh-Eating Screwworm’ Stage Of The Trump Administration”--

Remember DOGE? Well, DOGE cut about 15 percent of the USDA’s workforce. They also slashed USAID to bits, killing funding for over 5,300 programs around the world. This included programs dedicated to monitoring and containing screwworm populations. Also avian flu, swine flu and — wait for iiiiiiiit! — Ebola! Which, you may have noticed, is also a pretty serious problem right now.

In fact, they specifically cut $250 million from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Global Health Security Program, which ran many of these monitoring programs.

Of course, if Ebola did somehow spread around the US, there would still be a sizable number of people who would believe it when Trump told them to do nothing, or drink motor oil, or blast an air horn up their ass; who would proudly wear t-shirts that say REAL MEN EXHIBIT SEVERE VOMITING, DIARRHEA, AND BLEEDING; who would refuse vaccinations (if one were devised) and would wait for it to magically go away which, with their deaths, it would.

That’s because we live in Splitsville, i.e., a single geo-political entity harboring two or more distinct “nations.” In one are sensible people who respect and admire the accomplishments of humanity, including (but not limited to) science. In the other is a mob of fucking, brain-scrambled morons manipulated by the greedy, the bigoted, the religiously insane, and a bloated, checked-out wannabe king.

TRUMP’S MAGA BASE WILL NEVER ABANDON HIM. WHEN A DEM IS ELECTED POTUS, THEY’LL PUSH TO SECEDE. WHAT WILL THE RESULTANT RED-STATE COUNTRY BE LIKE? WE ALREADY KNOW. LOOK!