Politics. The funny thing about disruptive political realignments like the one before us is that, were it not for human nature’s tendency toward comfort, they are entirely avoidable.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lamented the durability of segregation and chastised the somnolence of the people of Alabama, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's greatest stumbling block is ... the white moderate who is more devoted to 'order' than justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice [.]"
The marketing genius behind Close Up toothpaste, Herb Shayne, once referred to Nashville’s suburbs as a “hotbed of social rest” while the civil rights movement played out downtown.
It is, however, a fickle tendency, reversed by events as diverse as capture of hostage of Americans in Iran, the monetary policy that led to the Great Depression and a violent resistance to ending a caste system in the southern United States.
Mistakes if you will; events that direct the somnolent electorate to rethink their choices and direct their priorities elsewhere, not always rationally and often with unexpected results.
It was President Ronald Reagan’s commitment to national defense in response to the Iranian hostage crisis that eventually created a period of relative peace which led to commercial globalization followed by a certain level of international governance, particularly in public health.
Without that cascade of events, the Public Health Emergency of 2020-23 might not have occurred. If it did, it might have looked very different.
Mistakes were made.
Policy. Mistakes are nonpartisan. Recent revelations emerging from the Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic suggest that the fascination with hunting down viruses in remote parts of Asia for the purpose of developing vaccines to combat them originated with the George W. Bush White House.
Worse, documentary evidence indicates that altering the genetic code of these newly discovered viruses to make them more something – we aren’t sure what - was funded by the National Institutes of Health after the Department of Defense rejected such folly.
And everyone tried to lie about it.
Meanwhile, the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party has begun to heed calls from the military to end federal funding of Chinese Communist Party controlled companies involved in genomic research.
The federal government had previously declared Beijing Genomics Inc. as a national security threat. The Select Committee on CCP now makes the same for MGI and Complete Genomics due to the relationship with BGI.
WuXI Apptec was also declared a national security threat due to its relationship with the People’s Liberation Army, funding from the Military-Civil Integration Select Hybrid Securities Investment Fund, among other things.
It would appear that both the United States Government and the People’s Republic of China were and perhaps still are engaged genomic research with less than therapeutic objectives. It is the sort of thing that anyone with a little walking around sense would see as particularly stupid.
Unfortunately, until recently, those people were asleep on the couch.
Power. The pending political realignment is not without its victims. Lost in a very bad week for the White House was the emerging party mutiny against Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
McConnell is a vigorous defender of funding a war in eastern Europe that has rested largely on a 70-year old policy to contain Russia’s imperialist ambitions. As other issues have emerged such as inflation, border security and economic prosperity, a war in Ukraine has slipped from the leader board taking with it an entire wing of the Republican Party.
The general electorate cannot necessarily draw a line from risky biomedical research with little oversight to a public health emergency and raging inflation and a nonsensical regional conflict. They just know this:
Mistakes, big ones, were made.
Have a great rest of your weekend.
Emily Evans
Managing Director – Health Policy
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(Politics, Policy & Power is published in the quiet of Sunday afternoon or holiday Monday and attempts to weave together the disparate forces shaping health care. It makes no attempt to defend or prosecute the views of any established political party or cause. Any conclusions to the contrary rest with the reader alone.)
