Originally Posted by
Ggallagher
I just happened to listen to a podcast last week comparing the country's response to the two pandemics. They pointed out that President Wilson provided ZERO leadership with respect to the pandemic. He in fact never spoke about it publicly. His sole focus was the war. They said it was something of a mystery that other than his nearly sole focus on the war, he still did not bother to address the flu which killed more people than the war.
They did mention that just like now we had leaders at other levels of government and society who preached the "Move on, nothing to see here" approach telling the public to ignore all the hyped up warnings.
And sorry, I'm too lazy to go back and read all Wilson's speeches to fact check the podcast, but it's not like there was any political bent to the podcast so I'm going to assume they were being reasonably accurate about Wilson.
That might have been John Barry, on On The Media. Barry wrote a great book on the 1918 flu. Here's the segment I heard, which focused on how the media ignored the flu in 1918. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts...layed-1918-flu
Barry also was on Fresh Air, and you can listen or read the transcript here: https://www.npr.org/2020/05/14/85598...ovid-19-crisis
When asked what mistakes we are repeating from 1918, he says:
Well, first, for very different reasons, the outbreak was trivialized for a long time. And if these public health measures - social distancing and so forth - are going to be successful, people have to comply with the recommendations. So by trivializing the threat for a period of months, that sort of encourages people to ignore recommendations, gets it implanted in people's minds that this is not a real threat and that it's being overblown by the media. You know, that's No. 1. No. 2, the testing debacle, which continues, unfortunately, is just a huge, huge problem. When places come out of lockdown, they really should have the testing and the contact tracing in place.
These things work. They have been demonstrated to be highly successful in saving lives and also allowing the economy to function in many countries around the world. I won't say we're dead last. We're not dead last. There are other - plenty of other countries worse off than we are on a policy and execution basis. But for a country that should be the best in the world, to be where we are in these areas is almost beyond belief.