Airplanes as Virus Vectors: Are Three Pandemics Enough?

In the past eighteen months, humanity has already suffered three pandemics. All were variants of Covid-19: (1) the original variant Alpha, (2) the first “highly contagious” variant Delta, and (3) now the even-more-contagious Omicron.

In their rate of spread and their effect on human life, each variant caused (or is causing) a separate pandemic. All took three or fewer months to spread around the world—Omicron barely more than one month. Each caused (or is causing) a separate wave of hospitalizations and deaths. Each has stressed (or is stressing) the public-health systems in various places to capacity and beyond. And because of all the foregoing, each had (or is having) a dire effect on city, state, national, continental and global economies.

Even when governments have adamantly refused to impose lockdowns, people have done so indirectly, without orders, due to reasonable fear of infection, sickness and death. Just ask the airline, hotel, restaurant, theater, bar, gym, and brick-and-mortar retail industries.

Is there a pattern here? Each new variant has been more contagious than the last. Each new variant has caused yet another global wave of physical and economic misery. I can’t think of any scientific reason to suppose there will not be a fourth, fifth and even a sixth such wave.

The rate of viral mutation is roughly proportional to the number of people infected, multiplied by their average viral load and again by the average per-person time to recovery or death. That product will continue to increase, separately for each variant, until the total number of people infected with that variant begins to decline, whether from immunity, mass deaths, or displacement by another, even more contagious variant. We’re probably a long way from such a peak in viral evolution rate even for Delta, let alone Omicron.

So what do we do? The very first thing is to recognize the principal viral vector. It’s airplanes, or more precisely people flying on them. There is no other way that three global pandemics could have become such in less than three months each. Cars, trucks and trains don’t cross the seas, and ships move far more slowly and don’t carry many people between continents en masse anymore. So common sense suggests that air travelers are the principal vectors of our three global pandemics.

With this insight, we can see how ineffective our precautions so far have been. Masks worn on board may prevent air passengers and crew from infecting each other. But they don’t prevent infected passengers and crew from infecting others at their destinations and beyond. As for a vaccine mandate, no airline but Qantas (and then only for long-haul trans-Pacific flights) has yet imposed one on both passengers and crew. Even if all airlines did, that wouldn’t solve the problem: we now know that vaccinated people can carry the disease.

Quarantining all passengers and crew on arrival might work, but doing so would be terribly inefficient. For crew, it would make flight scheduling a nightmare. For both passengers and crew, it would meet with massive political and social resistance. (Some nations have tried this; all have gotten lots of pushback from unhappy travelers.)

So there is only one practical way that we know of now to keep infected people from flying and infecting others at their destinations. We must test all who want to board a plane, before letting them on board.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Not only is there an incubation period before infection produces symptoms; there is also a latency period before infection produces a testable amount of virus. Each of these periods has a range of values, likely a range of several days. But with all the studies of each variant undertaken worldwide so far, we could probably have the necessary latency data on hand within a few weeks—enough time to set up an effective testing regime.

For the sake of analysis, let’s just assume that the latency period varies from one to seven days. For a pre-boarding testing regime to work reliably, we would have to test every person boarding twice: once seven days before boarding and once immediately before.

For crew, this regime would amount to testing before every boarding, except after holidays or leaves longer than a week. Passengers would indeed have to be tested twice. And both crew and passengers would have to provide some sort of assurance of isolation from infection in between. This assurance could come in the form of detailed mandatory exposure questionnaires and/or the type of smartphone-based exposure monitoring now under development in the United States and already in use in several foreign countries.

While not without difficulty, this regime would have several advantages over the quarantines that some governments already have imposed on international air travel. First, a quarantine inconveniences everyone who flies; testing would inconvenience only those who tested positive, or who failed to provide adequate assurance against interim exposure. Second, testing before boarding would leave uninfected passengers free to go about their business or holiday on reaching their destinations, whether away from or at home. Third, once any new viral variant had been identified, tests based on the gold-standard polymerase chain reaction (PCR) could be modified immediately to pick up the new variant. That tactic wouldn’t work with vaccines, which require months of development and clinical testing for each new variant.

Air travel is undoubtedly the principal means by which Covid-19 has produced three waves of global misery so far, with no end in sight. Whether or not you call those waves separate pandemics, they are real. And there is no assurance that Omicron will be the last; what we know about viral evolution suggests the contrary.

So why don’t we try a tactic that no one has tried yet and that promises to work better and to provoke less resistance from both passengers and crew than the masking and (sporadic) quarantining that we use now? Passengers and crew could always voluntarily wear masks as they wished, whether to protect themselves, to reassure others, or both. (I would while flying, but I haven’t flown since the pandemic began because I don’t think it’s safe.)

In the US, our federal government could pick up the tab and do the lion’s share of work. The TSA could impose and carry out a testing regime as part of the boarding-security process. The federal government could provide the onsite tests and testing equipment.

With such a regime, we would have a good chance—our only real chance—of making Omicron the third and last pandemic arising from this single new virus. And the very same testing regime could prevent the global spread of any new viral pandemic as soon as the viral genome had been decoded enough for testing.

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How Profit Kills

Do you ever wonder why the “arsenal of democracy”—which co-invented (with Germany) the astoundingly effective mRNA vaccines—can barely produce enough vaccines for its own people, while viral variants like omicron, with more likely to come, require vaccinating the whole world at “warp speed”? Do you ever wonder why the wealthiest, most powerful nation on Earth can’t produce enough Covid tests for its people after almost two years of pandemic?

Maybe a sports analogy can help us understand. Coaches often point out that the body follows the head. But what’s the head of a whole nation? Is it a leader like one of the Joes, Manchin or Biden? Or is it our moral principles?

If the latter, we have a problem. Some time in the late postwar period, our national moral compass got stuck on private profit. That became our chief national value. Today our compass is still stuck there.

It’s stuck notwithstanding the Business Roundtable’s tentative admission—just before the pandemic struck—that maybe there’s more to life than profit. If you can identify any important practical consequence of that alleged moral epiphany, please let me know.

Of course we never formally proclaimed profit as our moral lodestar. It just happened.

Those who made it so are hardly stupid. They are so smart they got rich. And they dragged their lawyers, lobbyists, PR operatives, and the pols who shill for them, if not to the heights of riches, at least well out of the middle class. They all knew and know the drill.

Openly worshiping Mammon would have contradicted almost every organized religion. It certainly would have undermined Christianity, which too many of us want to make our official religion now. So we had to do it subtly, under the aegis of economics.

But look at what we actually do as a nation, rather than what we say. Look at vaccines, for example. Don’t look at development, least of all of the mRNA vaccines, which emerged from decades of government-funded genomic research.

Development isn’t where the really big money is, either in expense or in profit. The big bucks are in rollout and supply, where shots go into arms, pills get distributed, and people’s health and lives get saved.

That’s where profit rules and government is hog-tied.

Don’t take my word for it. Read a recent in-depth study published by the New York Times. For thirty years, the report reveals, our government tried every tack toward boosting production of vaccines. As the report put it, “Three times over the past three decades, presidential administrations explored plans for a vaccine overhaul like the one President Biden is now considering, only to be thwarted by pharmaceutical lobbying, political jockeying and cost concerns[.]”

Our government tried to produce vaccines when private business wouldn’t step in for fear of uncertain markets. It tried to set up partnerships with private businesses. It tried to found non-profit businesses to work with private businesses.

In every case private businesses used their lobbying power, combined with dilatory but ultimately unsuccessful negotiation, to kill the government’s initiatives. They killed plans for production by government directly, fearing the creation of a powerful competitor. They wouldn’t work with government producers or even with non-profits, fearing getting sucked into unprofitable enterprises. As the report summarizes:

“[W]hile the government has tried to enlist major pharmaceutical companies, they have largely been reluctant to divert resources from commercial products. At the same time, they have stood in the way when the government has proposed its own factory, fearing a taxpayer-backed competitor.”

The recent bottlenecks in producing the mRNA vaccines and even conventional vaccines against Covid-19 were just the latest episodes in a dismal story. Earlier debacles involved vaccines against anthrax and botulinum toxins.

As our troops went to war in Gulf I, our intelligence suggested that the Iraqis had both toxins and would use them against our troops. But failed government efforts to mass-produce vaccines for our troops left us with only enough for “troops considered at the highest risk.” Why? “The [pharmaceutical] companies had concerns about legal liability and did not want to invest in switching production lines if the government couldn’t promise large purchases after the crisis.”

In drawing these conclusions, the two reporters reviewed “thousands of pages of records—among them files from presidential and military archives, previously undisclosed government reports, industry correspondence and business plans.” They interviewed over 30 leaders from “five presidential administrations, corporate executives and industry consultants.”

One of the two reporters was Sheryl Gay Stolberg, whom I once roundly criticized on this blog for passing off right-wing name-calling as journalism. Did she have an epiphany? I don’t know. Reporters aren’t supposed to have epiphanies. They’re just supposed to report the news.

But even if Stolberg had an epiphany, it apparently wasn’t total. The report’s headline accuses the government of “30 Years of . . . Culpability,” while the report itself details case after case in which private businesses, in their steadfast pursuit of profit, stymied the government’s reasonable initiatives for producing vaccines in quantity and quickly. That kind of cognitive dissonance between a report’s headline and its substance is worthy of Fox.

Yet what the report’s substance shows is crystal clear. We don’t have enough vaccines to fend off the Covid-19 pandemic worldwide because private businesses didn’t want to do the work without an assurance of profit. And they didn’t want to assist government in doing the work either, for fear of competition in pursuing future profit opportunities.

In other words, Big Pharma played the classic Dog in the Manger—a worthy metaphor at Christmas time! It didn’t want to make the vaccines itself—although it had and has the greatest production expertise—because there wasn’t enough profit in it, or because the profit wasn’t sure enough. But Big Pharma didn’t want the government to make them either, for fear of losing unknown future profits to a strong competitor.

I hope all the people who will suffer for want of vaccines, and the families of those who will die, will remember who and what are responsible. Their suffering and death will surely be wages of the sins of greed and selfishness, as conceived in Christianity and most every other major religion. That’s something worth considering this Christmas, while bemoaning the vanishing gift-supply backlog.

When private business won’t act—for whatever reason—there is only one practical resort: to government’s power and purse. “The people” aren’t capable of producing sophisticated vaccines in backyard or basement laboratories. In his “Great Leap Forward,” Mao tried that with steel making, in improvised furnaces in backyards and on farms. The result was catastrophic failure and widespread famine.

Once upon a time, when we had a more flexible moral compass, we did much better in making big public projects work when private industry wouldn’t or couldn’t. When our enemy had a human (Nazi) face, we took the abstruse theory of nuclear fission from bare demonstration to nuclear weapons in less than two years and eight months. Our government financed and ran the whole project, in wartime secrecy, and private industry contributed what it could.

As a people, we are fully capable of doing something similar in fighting a changeling virus. But we can succeed only if we don’t let a relentless quest for private profit get in the way. If we do, we will be condemning the unvaccinated to suffering and death, at home and abroad, as surely as did the (mostly private) nursing homes that let infected and unvaccinated visitors and care providers inside their doors with few or no restraints. And the virus, which has changed forms multiple times already, won’t wait for our moral epiphany to change again.

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Website Design: Time for Industry Standards?

Am I the only one who notices how much harder it is to get around the Web these days?

I know, I know. I’m an old Geezer pining for the good old days, back in the nineties and the aughts. But bear with me a bit, and see if you agree.

Take simple tabbed browsing. When tabbed browsing started, it seemed the best thing since sliced bread. Everyone soon jumped on board. All apparently recognized the pleasing analogy to taking the binder clip off a long paper document and spreading the pages you want to study—and only those—out on your desk.

So every Website designer let tabs rip or (more probably) took no programming steps to block them. By the mid aughts, tabbed browsing had captured the entire industry.

Nowadays, some internal links in Web pages open in new tabs, but a lot of others don’t. I haven’t taken a quantitative survey. But I do know that blocked (or non-enabled) tabbing is an increasingly prevalent and increasingly annoying phenomenon.

Popups—those things that distract you, block the rest of the page (or the whole screen), and impede immediate comparison with adjacent data—are increasingly replacing tabs. Their rise seems part of the Devil’s plan of advertisers and propagandists: to distract you from whatever you are trying to do at the moment. Popups threaten to make us all scatterbrains.

Then there’s simple page navigation. As everyone who’s done concentrated Web surfing knows, the keyboard is much more efficient than a mouse or trackpad. To use the mouse or trackpad, you have to use your whole arm, not just your fingers. You also have to bring hand-eye coordination to bear, rather than just your “muscle memory” of where the keys are. Using the mouse or trackpad takes up to five times as much time and effort as striking a key, or even a series of two or three keys.

So why do many Web page authors today disable (or fail to enable) the arrow keys, and/or the Home, End, Page Up and Page Down keys? Why do they literally force you to use the mouse or trackpad to do what you want to do and get where you want to get?

Why can’t you remove the most recent popup and continue what you were doing simply by pressing the Escape key whenever a new popup appears? Why does Google Chrome sometimes leave you no option for navigating a page but searching for its disappearing scroll bar, which appears only when you put the cursor near where it’s supposed to be? IMHO, Chrome’s disappearing scroll bar is the single biggest waste of time and hand-eye coordination ever imposed on innocent Web users.

I think these questions have two answers, one pathetic and one sinister. The pathetic one is that designing and programming Web pages is a tedious business. There’s not much fun or “creativity” in writing Web pages that look and work like everyone else’s, even though doing so would make life much easier for users.

So designers and programmers try to “differentiate” their work by making their pages look different from, and work differently than, others.’ For similar reasons, managers often hire graphic designers and marketers to design Web pages. To judge by the results, these worthies often have little experience in actually using Web pages. As for focus groups and beta testing before “going live,” why bother? Are mere users “artists”? What do they know?

The second reason for this nonsense is more sinister: anticompetitive strategy. If you can design a Website that’s unique in control and function and get enough users to commit to learning it, you can “lock them into” your unique Website. For many users, the “switching costs” of dropping your pages and learning how to use someone else’s will deter their doing so. This is just a special case of “network effects,” increasingly recognized in antitrust and competition law, which give some firms an unfair (non-market) advantage over others.

There is, however, a conundrum. Only the first mover usually gets to enjoy the lock-in effects of switching costs and network effects. This is called the “first mover advantage.”

A prime example is Facebook. It’s original site design, IMHO, was scatterbrained and mostly non-intuitive, especially its original privacy settings. (That’s one small reason, aside from its catastrophic political and social effects, that I deleted my Facebook account forever over three years ago.) Yet because it was the first mover, Facebook managed to capture the lion’s share of social-media traffic and rise to become one of the Big Five.

So why are so many retail sales sites so abysmally non-intuitive and inefficient? Amazon’s is different, but Amazon was the first mover. It has, again IMHO, the most efficient, intuitive and easy-to-use retail site on the Web today.

If I were a retail sales executive wanting to develop a sales Website, I would instruct my staff to copy Amazon’s as closely as possible without infringing Amazon’s copyrights or patents. (Good lawyers and legal assistants don’t cost much more than good programmers.) Then, since almost everyone who uses the Web has bought stuff on Amazon, new customers could use my firm’s Website with little or no learning curve.

Yet that’s not what most retail sites have done. Instead of copying the leader as much as intellectual property (IP) allows, many have gone whole rogue. The result, for most buyers, is like living in a hellish science-fictional Universe where the laws of physics are different on every planet. Welcome to online retailing!

The Websites of the big-box home-improvement retailers Lowe’s and Home Depot are examples. In the abstract, they do have most of Amazon’s features: displays of competing models with photographs and prices, the user’s historical purchase data, and reviews by previous purchasers. But their sites also seem to work differently, and IMHO far less efficiently, than Amazon’s. (Among other things, Lowe’s customer reviews appear in a popup, not a separate tab, making it hard to see other pages simultaneously or to tab separately various star levels of reviews.) Since both developed their online presence late in the game, and at about the same time, there’s not much chance of either gaining a first-mover advantage over the other, or anyone else.

It’s not as if we haven’t seen this sort of thing before. Different gauges of railroad track long hindered the development of a national railroad system. All automobiles must have their brake pedals to the left of their gas pedals. Cars made in Japan and England have to have their steering wheels on the left to be sold publicly here.

Standardization for safety, efficiency and user convenience is as old as industry. So why can’t we have some standardization online?

It needn’t all be mandatory. Some—maybe most—could be recommended only. The recommendations would leave private firms free to decide for themselves whether to adopt the tried and true, or whether to go off on a frolic of their own, knowing that doing so might be more expensive, more time consuming, and possibly harmful to their customers.

At least an industry group could gather once a year and announce a series of “best practices” for such things as tabbed browsing, page navigation, scroll bars, and activation of the arrow keys, page keys and Escape key to avoid excessive use of mouses and trackbars. If the government needs to enact legislation or regulation to cut through the thicket of IP to permit basic standardization of the Web, so be it. Or maybe just a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” for Websites would be enough.

The Internet is infinitely more complicated than, for example, railroad track gauges or the placement of automobile controls. But the principle is the same. We humans are creatures of habit. The more we can make things interoperable, the better. The more we can transfer routines that we do regularly from our cerebral cortex to our cerebellum, where action is automatic, the more effective use we can make of our brains. And the safer and easier our lives will be. Nothing in standardization of function should constrain the purely pleasurable or whimsical parts of graphics and video clips that are artists’ rightful domain.

[I expect this post to receive more comments than any other post of mine. I encourage readers to air their specific gripes and opinions, but to avoid possible legal liability for defamation by making clear what’s their opinion and what is fact or their demonstrable experience. The more specific gripes we collect here, the greater the chances of provoking industry action.]

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A Manhattan Project for Covid

The emergence and rapid global spread of Omicron poses a practical question. Can our nation—and/or our species—mount an extraordinary collective effort when the enemy isn’t another human tribe?

Science-fiction writers have speculated that only an invasion by space aliens could get our contentious tribes to stop fighting and cooperate for the common good. But something awfully similar is going on right now. A non-human agent called SARS-CoV-2 is attacking our entire human species at once.

We don’t think it came from outer space, but it’s definitely not human. And though it’s not alive in any conventional sense, it is evolving continuously to become an ever-more-potent enemy. Its rapid mutations arise to defeat our defenses almost as if it were intelligent. And it shows no sign of relenting.

To an ex-physicist like me, our collective response so far seems pathetic. My point of comparison is the Manhattan Project, which I studied with interest as a graduate student in physics. Although the Project was nationwide, not species-wide, it may have been the greatest scientific-technical crash project ever undertaken to meet a deadly threat.

Four features distinguished the Manhattan Project. First, it started as a research project, but it eventually became a military project. Legendary Army General Lesley Groves ran it under military discipline, a strict chain of command, and wartime secrecy. Although he often consulted higher authorities in the military and the White House, he ran no messy democracy. There were no committees, no demagoguery, and no endless ideological disputes. Every decision was practical, based on science, technology, and what seemed most workable.

Second, General Groves was an engineer—not a spreadsheet jockey like many of today’s so-called “industrial” leaders. He was a practical man, trained in engineering discipline and steeped in physical—not political—cause and effect. As a military leader, he didn’t have to worry about profit or patents. He was smart enough to ask the right questions of physicists and mathematicians working at and beyond the cutting edge of human knowledge. So he could, and did, direct their efforts into the most productive paths.

Third, because it was wartime, and because the Nazis were also believed to be working on a Bomb, Groves had carte blanche to commandeer the entire nation’s manpower and physical resources. According to the seminal history Lawrence and Oppenheimer, at one time the centrifuges at Oak Ridge, spinning to purify uranium, commandeered 10% of the entire nation’s electrical power. They did so while yet another group, at Hanford, Washington, worked on an entirely different path to a Bomb, using transmuted plutonium.

Both paths led to success. But along both, the entire nation devoted all its resources to reaching a single goal.

Finally, the entire Manhattan Project was conducted in strict secrecy. Most of the nation, let alone the world, had no idea what was going on until the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

Unlike the Project’s first three unique features, secrecy was no boon. It made doing science and engineering like working in a straitjacket. It forced indispensable personnel to relocate to remote places like Los Alamos, and sometimes to leave their families, to work in unfamiliar and often primitive conditions. It encouraged a siloing of expertise and tasks that inhibited discussion and cooperation. Any “Manhattan Project” for Covid should have no such impediments to success because the entire effort to defeat the virus must be open, global and cooperative.

The Manhattan Project’s beneficent features—the first three—produced extraordinary success in an extraordinarily short time. The Project converted bare and highly abstruse scientific theory into reality in less than two years, eight months. On December 2, 1942, an “atomic pile” at the University of Chicago had first demonstrated a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. The first-ever nuclear explosion (“Trinity”) went off at Alamogordo on July, 16, 1945. A month later, the Project had produced enough fissile material for the two bombs that ended human history’s most terrible war.

So how does our human response to SARS-CoV-2 so far compare? On alternative paths to success, pretty well.

We are now about one month shy of two years since the first Covid-19 case in the US was identified. In that time, we have learned how to make extraordinarily effective vaccines with a “software-like” approach. We can clip out part of the viral genome that cannot cause disease. Then we can get our own cells to manufacture it, so that our immune systems make antibodies and mount T-cell defenses against it. (This approach worked so quickly because it had been under general development in research laboratories for a decade before the pandemic.)

Two different firms, Pfizer (with BioNTech) and Moderna, have reached that end. Each took a different path, but both used similar means. As both have announced, their similar methods are capable, on an abbreviated time scale, of producing vaccines against evolutionary variants of the virus like Omicron.

Similarly, we have taken two different paths toward treatment once the disease sets in. Regeneron uses conventional monoclonal antibodies for in-hospital blood-infusion therapy. Pfizer has apparently used something similar to its “software like” approach for vaccines: it has developed a pill with molecules that survive human digestion enough to attack a particular part of the viral genome. Each approach can be applied to viral variants like Omicron, at least in theory.

So now we’ve turned bare theory into practice. Continuing the Manhattan-Project analogy, we are somewhere between having run the first atomic “pile” and having demonstrated the first nuclear explosion. But the analogy is incomplete, and always will be, because viral evolution and mutation keep moving the goal posts.

Our main problem now is not science, or even biotech engineering. It’s planning and production. It’s adapting proven science and technology to new viral variants like Omicron.

If nothing else, the last two years should have taught us that our microscopic enemy is global and a changeling. The virus started in China. The Delta variant (we think) originated in India. Omicron came from South Africa. Now Delta and Omicron are expanding exponentially worldwide.

The lessons are simple but profound. Deadly new variants can arise anywhere; so no one is safe until we all are safe, everywhere. New variants that develop in neglected places can spread worldwide, in days or weeks, exploiting airplanes as highly efficient disease vectors.

So we have an almost precise analogy to War of the Worlds and Independence Day, but for one thing. Our enemy doesn’t come from outer space, but from microbial evolution right here on Earth. Science-fiction aficionados will appreciate the irony, as they recalled how microbes saved our human species in War of the Worlds.

Yes, the planning and production task is wider, bigger and harder than producing a couple of new-technology bombs. But if we want to beat this virus, we have to undertake it with the priority, dedication and focus of a Manhattan Project. We have no choice.

Here’s what we need to do, all ASAP:

1. Forget about intellectual property (IP), at least for the time being. Fighting a changeling global pandemic is no task for bean counters. Put the patents into abeyance and keep careful records, but let the crucial work go on unimpeded by lawyers, whether for contracts or for litigation.

Push the work as if to preserve life itself—which is the goal, both literally and economically. Then settle up later. We can argue about the rules for settling up while we save our species.

(I write this as someone who taught IP as a law professor for 28 years, and who proselytized IP and its economic benefits in Asia. Which is more important, life or profits?)

2. Use every means to extend and propagate the four methods that we know now: (a) Pfizer’s means of making vaccines from parts of the viral genome; (b) Moderna’s similar means; (c) Regeneron’s similar method of making monoclonal antibodies; and (d) Pfizer’s similar means of making virus-specific therapeutic pills. All these methods are crucial to beating this virus, as well as likely future viral pandemics. All can be adapted to new variants and perhaps new viruses entirely. Spend generously on research to make all these methods simpler, cheaper, and more quickly adaptable to new variants.

3. Set up gigafactories in every country capable of using, supporting and extending these methods. Set up at least one gigafactory in every highly populated region on every continent. Let each have or produce: (a) genetic sequencing and editing equipment, of the latest and most efficient designs; (b) systems and production lines for sequencing new viral variants and producing vaccines and therapies that target them; (c) any necessary auxiliary equipment, such as containers for shipping chilled Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

4. Let these production facilities begin to work on vaccines and therapies for new variants as soon as they are discovered, even before their precise threat is known. If we had done this with Omicron, we would be weeks into an Omicron-specific vaccine right now. If a new variant turns out to be less dangerous than feared, the interim research will not be wasted: it will help us hone our ability to make vaccines and therapies quickly for future new variants.

5. Recruit and, if necessary, draft the experts needed to get these organizations going ASAP, including scientists, engineers and postdoctoral biotech researchers, especially young and creative ones. Use the old Peace Corps as a model. Without creating a new draft, the project might attract young, idealistic biotech workers and serve as an alternative to military service. Why work unwillingly on biological weapons when you can use your knowledge and skills willingly to save humanity?

6. Vastly increase support for biotech research relating to viruses, especially leading-edge research. Start with the recent discovery, by Koichi Kobayashi and his team, of a SARS-CoV-2 immunosuppressive gene that may underlie the virus’ continuing potency. Make sure every gigafactory has at least few people working on defeating that gene.

“Free markets” won’t do all this organizing on their own. They will impede it. By the time the lawyers and spreadsheet jockeys get through applying for and prosecuting their patents and demanding and negotiating their profits, another two or three delta-like or omicron-like variants will have assailed us.

Patents may fill private firms’ coffers, but they won’t save the day. Prosecuting patents and negotiating licenses under them can be among the slowest processes in modern business.

Two things slow these processes even further. First, in cutting-edge technology, the potential uses and economic values of patents are, in general, unknown. Second, the process of negotiation gets exponentially slower as a biotech solution involves a number of independently discovered genes. So I showed mathematically in one of my last academic publications. If every newly discovered viral gene or its method of use is controlled by a patent, the cost and delay of biotech research, let alone its application, will rise exponentially.

What we need instead is another Manhattan Project. We need practical people like engineers and scientists, and maybe a brilliant autocrat like Lesley Groves, focused like lasers on deciphering new viral variants and adapting cutting-edge science and technology to defeat them as quickly as possible. If we can’t mount this effort using the current Defense Production Act, we should amend it for that purpose.

The US may be in decline, both as an economic power and as a democracy. But our biotech research and development remain fields of global supremacy. And if you include our long-ago enemies, Germany and Japan, biotech research in this triad of democracies has clear global dominance. (Kobayashi’s path-breaking research was a collaboration between his own Texas A&M University College of Medicine and Hokkaido University in Japan. Pfizer’s development of its vaccine involved cooperation between its American and German divisions and the German firm BioNTech.)

It’s time for all nations, and especially these three, to apply their collective scientific and productive leadership to saving our species, now and against future pandemics. Doing so will require a global all-hands-on-deck approach, analogous to the Manhattan Project, that patent and profit pusillanimity can never achieve.

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The Second Troll War

The Internet is now a shadowland of smoke and phantoms, where nothing is quite what it seems. The Age of Innocence is gone, and with it hope for the “healing power” of universal communication. Much of what remains is a moonscape of conflicting memes—“a darkling plain, Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.” (words of poet Matthew Arnold).

Unbeknownst to many, we are already knee deep in the Second Troll War. The first was barely acknowledged. America lost. Putin won.

We may never know how for sure, although evidence may still exist in “backup” recordings of Internet traffic and other, more random records. But we do know two decisive things: (1) Putin established huge troll farms to push the Demagogue’s 2016 candidacy on the Internet, and (2) the Demagogue won.

That may have been the first time in human history that one major power’s surreptitious propaganda in another’s domestic democratic election achieved its desired result. The newness and darkness of the Internet and social media hid most of the process from view.

The Mueller Report and the failed first impeachment entirely missed the point. It didn’t and doesn’t matter whether malign forces are working in tandem—in “concert,” “communication,” “collusion” or “conspiracy” according to legal parlance. If they use the same means toward the same end, and if they achieve that end, the result is their joint doing. Although now in desuetude, American antitrust law recognizes this simple truth, condemning “parallel” but unconcerted action among members of an oligopoly.

So it was in the 2016 election. Russian trolls, Fox and other private American propaganda firms all worked to defeat Hillary Clinton and elect the Demagogue. And they won. Although they couldn’t have known and perhaps (except for Russia) never so intended, that result has put American democracy in its greatest peril since our Civil War, perhaps ever.

You can see what happened in old newsclips of Putin and the Demagogue together. Turn the sound off, and you can see it in their body language and their facial expressions. There is absolutely no question who is the alpha dog, and who has (or doesn’t have) the other’s respect. Hint: it’s not the big guy.

Again, internal motivations don’t matter. The Demagogue may have been in Putin’s pocket. Putin the master spook may have had (and may still have) something on him. Putin may have dangled vague promises of property loans from Moscow or Russian oligarchs. The Demagogue may simply have been in awe of Putin’s ability to preside over a nationwide Mafia-like kleptocratic oligarchy like the one the Demagogue seems eager to build here. Or, most likely of all, the Demagogue may have been grateful for help in his surprise electoral victory and eager for the help to continue. But whatever the reason, the power relationship between the two men is obvious to anyone with eyes to see.

Putin’s current motives are far from hidden. He would like, once again, to have a man in the White House who admires him unconditionally, who thinks like him, and for whom constraining Putin or Russia in any way is far down the list of priorities. Secondly, Putin is happy for the Demagogue’s ongoing efforts to divide and distract American voters and so weaken America. In that respect, the Demagogue, Putin and his trolls are on the very same page.

The whole scene is just a throwback to the imperial age, with one autocrat supporting a loyal and like-minded pretender to power in another land. The division, distraction and weakness that the pretender sows today is just a pleasing bonus. But today’s method is completely different: instead of influencing and corrupting members of the royal family or key apparatchiks, the troll wars act directly on ordinary people, in their capacity as voters.

This direct “operative-to-people” influence is something new in human history. Only the Internet made it possible. Specifically, the Internet made possible direct “many to many” communications, in which malign forces and propaganda organs can hide under the pseudonyms of thousands of faux individuals and faux companies.

And so we find ourselves in the midst of the Second Troll War. You needn’t focus on Facebook (now Meta Platforms) and its “jolt the amygdala” algorithms to see evidence. Just peruse readers’ comments to relevant pieces in national online news media, like this one or this one in the Washington Post. There you will see evidence of intense polarization among our people and among American Democrats.

If you look more closely, you will also see evidence of troll activity, ranging from the crudest and most outrageous to the smoothest and most clever. The tipoffs range from the absence of any new facts or reasoning, through deliberate and repeated pressing of emotional buttons, to revealing nonuse and misuse of English articles (“a” “an” and “the”.) (Russian, like Chinese and Japanese, has no articles. English and most European languages have them.)

Incessant repetition of conflicting memes and themes is another tell-tale. When you get to the point where virtually all commenters appear, like those “ignorant armies,” not to have read any previous comments, the lot begins to look like the product of a troll farm.

Promoting the Demagogue’s second term is just one of the enemy’s aims. So is advancing division and distraction among our people. Others include advancing vaccine resistance, getting people to take their masks offs as omicron rears its head, and promoting extremism, white supremacy (and violent counter trends), and other political violence. No doubt careful investigators will find Putin’s fingerprints, as well as the Demagogue’s and his enablers’, on propaganda leading up to the January 6 Insurrection, as well as to ongoing efforts to encourage its repetition, or its entrenchment in voting laws.

Although individual trolls may not seem clever—and some seem designed to project stupidity, perhaps as cover for the cleverer ones—make no mistake about it. Vladimir Putin is an highly intelligent master spy and brilliant manipulator. He plays the long game, and he works in mysterious ways.

One of the ways that I suspect right now has to do with Ukraine. If Putin, as he claims, is concerned about the West placing strategic weapons in Ukraine, why is he not pressing that wholly reasonable concern privately in Ukraine, NATO and the EU? Why is he ostentatiously putting this international geopolitical issue on President Biden’s plate? And why are the military vehicles that he has assembled near the Ukrainian border all painted in light colors, not camouflage, and assembled in neat rows that are easily captured on satellite and reconnaissance photos?

The “invasion threat” may be a manufactured “crisis” designed to undermine Biden’s presidency and re-election prospects. No matter what Biden does in response, he will lose supporters. If he risks war, his progressives will accuse him of squandering money and his chances for transformational domestic change. If he doesn’t risk war in an attempt to make the Russian Bear back down, conservatives will, as is their wont, tar him as “weak.” Either way, Biden will lose support, and Putin’s preferred candidate will get a step closer to a second term. And whatever the outcome re Ukraine, focusing on what may be a bogus invasion threat will distract the President from what he must do so save our democracy: fight the pandemic, get more people vaccinated, pass his key legislation, protect voting rights, address global warming, and curtail inflation.

So what can we do? We can’t shut down the Internet. It’s far too deeply embedded in our national and global commerce, wealth, and innovation. We can’t control it and censor it as do Russia, China and Iran. That would be unconstitutional. We probably can’t even shut down the most egregious social media, such as Facebook, although a legislative feint in that direction might facilitate less drastic fixes.

Perhaps the best we can do is improve the education of our youth, in both high school and college. Maybe we can even teach seniors a new trick.

In my 1960-1961 high-school course on “social studies,” we had a two-week unit on propaganda and totalitarianism. This was long before the Internet and even a bit before Xerox machines. So copying from mass media was difficult to impossible.

But my teacher was a pack rat. He and/or his family had accumulated stacks of the great picture magazines of that era, including issues of Life and Look. His stash went all the way back to World War I. So he was able to pass around a photographic feature published some time during WWI.

The feature showed a “patriotic” poster, with a normal American civilian’s head on top, and a Prussian soldier’s head, in a Kaiser Wilhelm helmet, below. Both were in profile. Like most people’s, the American head had a bulge protruding well back beyond the neck. The German soldier’s, with his ramrod-straight posture, did not. The upper picture had an arrow pointing into the bulge, showing where the “soul” is. A similar arrow for the German soldier pointed into empty air. The conclusion: the Kaiser’s soldiers were soulless demons.

Crude? You bet! But so are a lot of things you’ll read today on social media, especially in reader comments. Effective? Probably much more so then than it would be now. Among other things, the “no soul” meme fed off a then-popular pseudoscience called “phrenology,” which held that the shape of and bulges on people’s heads reveal their personalities.

This lesson from sixty years ago left me with two lifelong impressions. First, propaganda can appear in any medium, no matter how respected. Second, we do it, too. It’s not just our enemies, the dictators and other “bad guys.”

Today, our educators could give our youth (and senoirs!) much-needed troll-spotting practice. They could do worse than have students look over and analyze reader comments on the two WaPo pieces linked above. Even apart from troll spotting, that exercise would sharpen critical-thinking skills all by itself.

If our voters can learn these two lessons in time, we just might survive, if not win, the Second Troll War. Otherwise, the Internet, which we invented, and whose software protocols we gave the whole world for free, might become the suicide gun of our democracy.


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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The Wages of Undoing Roe

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

“Be careful what you wish for.” — Modern political proverb.

An old joke about a successful family of lawyers goes like this: One day, the hotshot and headstrong son arrives home triumphant. “Father, father!” he cries. “Remember the Jones case, which our family has defended for so long? I settled it, and for a reasonable sum.” His father stares at him with horror. “You fool!” the father shouts. “You have cut down the tree that has nurtured this family for three generations.”

And so it will be with Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court appears poised to cut it back, if not cut it down entirely. Women will no longer have a constitutional “right” to an abortion. Or the states will be free to cut the right back so far in duration that a woman who fails to notice one or two missed periods will lose it. Of course the poor and marginalized will hurt the worst; they won’t be able to travel far to get the medical services they need.

Like the prodigal son of our joke, he “right-to-life” right will be exultant. But the Republican Party will lose a twisted issue that has sustained it for nearly half a century.

What, if anything, does the Republican Party stand for? It doesn’t like government. It doesn’t like taxes. It doesn’t like regulation. It doesn’t believe in science, especially when science proves that lucrative private businesses like tobacco, fossil fuels and social media are harmful to humanity’s health.

It doesn’t much like masks, testing or vaccines, even in the middle of a pandemic. At least it doesn’t like pushing “free people” into these things, even if it will save their own lives and others’. It doesn’t like health insurance for people who have trouble affording it. At least it tried, ultimately unsuccessfully, to repeal Obamacare many times, with nary a concrete or credible plan to replace it.

So what does the so-called “Grand Old Party” actually like? War, maybe.

At least it seemed to love the two utterly gratuitous “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, which its own prodigal son, Dubya, started. And it seems to want to come as close to war as possible with China and Iran. Every time budgets come up, the only department’s that the GOP reliably pushes to increase is the military’s. Even our woefully dilapidated physical infrastructure only got a few renegade Republican votes.

So for nearly fifty years, Roe filled a huge gap in the Republicans’ platform—if you can call relentless naysaying a “platform” at all. (Recently, the party gave up rationalizing entirely and all but declared the Demagogue its platform.)

Roe let Republicans’ say they stand for something positive: babies’ lives. Their slogan should have been “we stand foursquare for unwanted fetuses.” But “pro-life” sounds so much better. Who can be against life?

Of course Republicans’ position was really a negative: criminalizing abortion. But they spun their position as “pro-life,” and, for many voters, it stuck. It stuck big time. Theirs may have been the most successful campaign of political propaganda in human history.

The “pro-life” ploy succeeded so miraculously because it seemed something supremely simple in a complex world. It had visceral emotional appeal, particularly among families that had had trouble having children, or that had lost them.

Who besides experts understands what’s causing the current burst of inflation, or whether it will last? Who can parse the long agony of our “forever wars” and say, for certain, where mistakes were made and how foolish it was to start them at all? Who can produce statistics to say whether our undocumented workers—our modern serfs—actually make our lives easier or are rapists and murderers as the Demagogue claimed? Being for letting babies come to term and be born was so much simpler and clearer than any of this.

So abortion was demagoguery’s gift from God. How can our law let nine old unelected lawyers allow women to kill their own babies? I’ve known distinguished and highly educated people who voted for a Republican president based on this single issue.

But once Roe is gone or defanged, the issue will go with it. At least its supposed clarity and simplicity will decline.

The “battle over babies” will shift from the federal courts to the state legislatures. There will be more live, unwanted babies to put up for adoption, or to be warehoused. So the issue of “killing babies” will shift to who will support or pay for all those unwanted children that couldn’t be aborted.

In other words, the reality of feeding children with no parents will supersede the false issue of “baby killers.” As in all cases of practical care for people who can’t care for themselves, voters will have to fight this battle on Democrats’ grounds. As long as the Democrats are smart enough never to mention the word “socialism,” even in denial, they will win. At the end of the day, Americans will not let hungry people starve in the streets.

The geographic political arena will shift, too. The most incongruous thing about the entire fifty-year-long abortion battle is how little it reflected political reality.

The President of the United States, as such, has virtually nothing directly to do with abortion. It’s almost entirely an issue of state criminal and civil law. Yet for almost half a century, the GOP has dragged the issue into every presidential campaign.

The reductio ad absurdum came in 2016, when millions of voters elected the Demagogue, and thousands of political underlings thereafter supported him, just in the hope that he would appoint new Supreme Court Justices to overturn Roe v. Wade. Once Roe is gone, what justification remains for supporting such a vile, lawless, selfish and incompetent man?

Once that mission is accomplished, there will be no other issue—at least none on the horizon— with such visceral impact. Nothing else could so completely distract voters from all the things that any president can and should do. Voters then may pay attention to appointing smart economists to manage the economy, supporting labor in its struggle against oppression by artificial intelligence, and making sure workers and the public are safe from pandemics and harmful products like tobacco and toxic chemicals.

Voters will have to think again, or they will have to elect representatives who can think for them. Real issues will emerge from the muck of “gut feelings” and demagoguery.

The final shift that Roe’s undoing will promote is from the national to the local level. For half a century, the horror of alleged “baby killing” kept many voters who wouldn’t otherwise care interested in national politics. Who were these voters? Large numbers were people from rural areas and small towns.

They live where they do and as they do because they mostly want to be left alone. They get motivated to “go national” only when it appears that external disorder is coming to their peaceful provinces, or when they perceive the horror of something like “baby killing” is occurring on a grand scale. Once they think that “baby killing” has stopped and that their homes can remain peaceful, they will go back to sleep.

Elsewhere, in the cities and suburbs, women will arise. They will see the assaults on their freedom and autonomy clearly. They will take a greater interest in voting locally. So will poor women whose autonomy is denied and whose lives are complicated by having no family-planning clinics within a reasonable radius.

Once Roe is gone and they want to improve their lives, voters everywhere will understand O’Neill’s Law: that all politics is local. Together with wealthier migrants from blue states, they will turn out to vote in greater numbers. They will turn our red and purple states permanently blue, beginning with Georgia, Virginia and even Texas.

This will be Stacey Abrams’ time. That’s why she just announced her second run for governor of Georgia. That’s why she earlier called Joe Manchin’s bluff, agreeing to voter ID in exchange for a watered-down voting rights law.

Abrams knows that scoundrels can go only so far in suppressing other people’s votes. She knows that millions like me, nationwide, will support her efforts with money and labor. If suppressed voters require voter ID, we will help them get the ID cards and pay for them. If suppressors put polling places far away, we will drive voters to the polls or pay for buses to take them. If suppressors concoct long lines and criminalize providing water to those waiting in line, we will buy them backpacks full of water bottles and folding chairs to sit on while waiting.

Democracy delayed is democracy denied. A century and a half since the Civil War is quite enough delay. So we, together with migrants from the north and west, will bring democracy to the hinterlands. We will do so while the poor, deluded folk—those who worry only about “killing babies” because they can’t understand how the oligarchs are quite legally stealing everything—are lulled to sleep. The undoing of Roe will be their lullaby.

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