The name W. Ian Lipkin, I must confess, only came to my attention less than three weeks ago while reading a piece in The New Yorker.
The 67-year-old (pictured) is among the world’s leading infectious disease epidemiologists and directs the Centre for Infection and Immunity at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in New York. Lipkin visited China in January in the wake of the Covid-19 outbreak and self-quarantined upon his return at the request of his employer.
One section of Nick Paumgarten’s New Yorker piece demanded several re-reads on my behalf given the significance of its content in the context of the unfolding medical emergency in the United States.
It reads: “In 2003, (Lipkin) went to China to help advise the government on its response to SARS, an earlier coronavirus, and since then he has travelled there every year, as part of an effort to share information and cultivate co-operation. He first heard about Covid-19 from a colleague in Guangzhou, a month before the rest of the world became aware of it. ‘He told me, ‘There’s some weird thing going on in Wuhan,’’ Lipkin said. ‘On December 31st, researchers there identified it as a coronavirus but said, ‘It’s not highly transmissible.’ So much for that assessment!’ He went on, ‘It’s going to be difficult to know who knew what when’.”
According to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Research Centre, as of March 26th, the United States of America had 83,836 confirmed Covid-19 cases, more than both China (81,782) and Italy (80,589). There are now over a thousand Covid-19-linked dead in the United States, a figure that will undoubtedly increase, regardless of the nightly diet of lies dished out by President Donald Trump from his White House bully pulpit.
The wilful ignorance and unwillingness to act in the common good demonstrated in recent weeks represents the most shameful inaction of Trump’s term in office.
This abdication of responsibility is likely to contribute to avoidable losses of life on his watch set to number into the high thousands and beyond. Harry Truman famously sported a sign on his Oval Office desk which declared: “The Buck Stops Here.” Everything Trump has done in the past month has bellowed: “Don’t look at me, blame those nasty Governors who weren’t nice to me.”
That the most poorly read and self-involved man to ever occupy his nation’s highest office is failing miserably in safeguarding the safety of patients and their carers alike is of no great surprise.
His nightly ranting from behind the press room podium, in addition to his manbaby diatribes on Twitter have merely underlined just how empty a vessel he is. An emergency of this kind demanded decisive action: on that count, President Trump has proven a consistent failure, a man more interested in the state of the Dow Jones than the welfare of the nation his oath requests him to serve.
And how do we know this: well, consider the words of the incompetent man-child President himself.
On two separate occasions in February, President Trump said: “when we get into April, in the warmer weather - that has a very negative effect on that, and that type of a virus.” Not so. Why? Consider the perspective of the World Health Organisation (WHO) which stated that Covid-19 “can be transmitted in all areas, including areas with hot and humid weather”.
On February 27th, Trump predicted that Covid-19 was “going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle – it will disappear.” Not so.
On March 6th, the President declared: “Anybody that needs a (Covid-19) test, gets a test. We - they're there. They have the tests. And the tests are beautiful.” Is that so, Mr President? A few hours ago, ‘Morning Joe’ host Joe Scarborough tweeted: “Palm Beach County (Florida): 1.4 million people. Tests given: 1,166.”
On March 17th, Trump told the world: “I’ve always known this is a real—this is a pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic…I’ve always viewed it as very serious.” Not so.
Five days prior to that falsehood, the President said: “I wish [China] told us three months sooner that this was a problem,” the president said. “We didn’t know about it, they knew about it, and they should have told us, we could have saved a lot of lives throughout the world.”
But here’s the thing: W. Ian Lipkin knew about Covid-19 last December. Fourteen weeks ago. And in January of last year, page 21 of the US Intelligence Community’s assessment of threats to national security stated: “We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.”
On January 3rd of this year, the United States Centre for Disease Control (CDC) was first made aware of the public health event in the Chinese city of Wuhan. How do we know this? US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said so during a White House briefing on March 20th, stating: “So we were alerted by some discussions that Dr Redfield, the Director of the CDC, had with Chinese colleagues on January 3rd. It’s since been known that there may have been cases in December, not that we were alerted in December.”
Yet Mr Lipkin knew in December, which begs the question: who fell down in their job in the CDC and why wasn’t anyone kicking down an Oval Office door to spell it out, in even the most basic of language to the President, that action was needed there and then?
Lipkin (who has since been diagnosed with Covid-19) described the situation facing the world as “an arms race. The virus is evading you. You want to make sure you keep up with it…things are going to get shut down. And this virus is probably going to be with us for some time to come.” Donald Trump’s lack of knowledge, his complete lack of empathy and his spectacular inability to stand to one side and take his lead from experts who have worked in the infectious disease field for decades, is likely to lead to much unnecessary death and hardship.
Amateur hour at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue could not have come at a worse time for vulnerable Americans and under-resourced clinicians. Donald Trump may finally have fallen into a hole that there’s no re-emerging from – and many will die due to his fecklessness.
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