Sins of the Senate, and Other Year-End Souvenirs

As I recall, the first one I did (about a decade ago) was a call for a super-high mileage car, sort of like a soapbox derby racer, that you could drive from Westwood to Downtown on a tenth of a gallon of gas or on a wee bit of electric current. We could double or triple the number of lanes on the Santa Monica Freeway and also save fossil fuel. The motive at the time was that we were running short on oil. The current motive is that the surface of the planet is on fire and we are running out of time to save it. But the proposed remedy is nearly identical. 

The story at the end of 2020  is that we have pissed away another year that could have been used in the critical fight against global warming. We have (quite by accident) seen some reduction in greenhouse gas emissions because we've all been confined due to the pandemic, but our profligate ways will come roaring back in a few months (as the vaccines kick in) unless we get serious. Here's hoping that Joe Biden can enforce the project to limit greenhouse gas emissions. 

In any year-end roundup, it's no longer necessary to put down a lot of words about the outgoing president (so nice to type that phrase) or even to say much about the Covid-19 pandemic. It turns out that the current administration has done a little less well on guaranteeing immediate stocks of vaccines than we had been led to believe even a couple of weeks ago. But overall, getting a vaccine into production in one year is a prodigious accomplishment and is to be applauded. 

But it's worth a paragraph in this year-ender to point out who really deserves the applause. It's not exactly the chief executive, although he deserves this one sentence of credit in the history of the pandemic: He didn't obstruct the process or lie about the validity of vaccines or insist on (as far as we know) making a buck on the action. I think we can define Trump's best attribute in the project as his respect for high ranking military officers. Apparently, Trump turned the logistics part of the plan over to a general, and that's what generals know how to do. We got what seems like a pretty good scheme to distribute boxes of vaccine by airfreight. Of course the US Army and Fedex and UPS had long-since invented the process, but at least airfreight (unlike Amazon) didn't get put on the Trump enemies list. 

The real credit goes to the tens of thousands of people who will have been involved in doing the research, testing prototype vaccines, volunteering as test subjects, and of course managing and building manufacturing facilities. These are the people who did the real work, took the risks, and delivered. I think we should also give a lot of credit to companies that tried and failed, as it was the sum total of attempts that led to some successes among the many failures.But the way the narcissist in chief brags about the vaccine, you'd think he wrote the nucleotide sequence and came up with the composition of the lipid envelope out of sheer brilliance. Obviously he did none of these things. In fact, at the beginning of the year, we had plenty of reason to be worried whether Trump would support a large-scale scientific effort, considering how anti-science he has been throughout his term in office. You have only to remember his rejection of the findings of physics, chemistry, climate science, and even biology to understand how some of us might have been a little skeptical at the beginning. At one time, Trump was even playing with the anti-vaccine groups. Maybe he figured there were a few votes there. 

Well, we seem to have a couple of effective vaccines. Traditionally, it has taken years to develop a vaccine. One reason was that we tended to see infectious disease as one of life's normal events. At least we saw it that way until so many effective vaccines were brought into existence. 

But we had become a bit complacent. We have enjoyed being able to treat our infections with antibiotics and we put up with all those needle sticks in order to avoid lockjaw. And then out of the blue, there was this virus that went from a far-away theoretical risk to something that doubled in our population every two weeks. 

Allow me to type out a partial list of some of the discoveries, scientific advances, and synthetic techniques that I have seen in this lifetime (or happened shortly before it), that contributed to our ability to have the Covid-19 vaccine: 

Discoveries: DNA is the main hereditary chemical in plants and animals, while some viruses use RNA. The central dogma of molecular biology: DNA can be transcribed (copied) into RNA, and RNA can be translated (using the code) to make protein. The central element of that pathway (RNA) is hypothetically useful as a vaccine if you do it right. Viruses invade cells in their own particular way (in this case with that spike protein that you are all sick of seeing in diagrams on the tv new) and produce the molecules that replicate the RNA (it took a while to figure out the details of that one). Technology can solve the DNA sequence, then create artificial DNA and RNA sequences at pretty low cost and actually fairly quickly. (I used to get 20-nucleotide DNA sequences synthesized and shipped to me in one week at a cost of eight dollars.) The technology for making artificial (recombinant) DNA sequences and using them to make, for example, the human version of the protein insulin, has been around for nearly half a century. Finally, the detailed knowledge of the human immune system has grown enormously, although there is still much to learn. 

And out of all of this, and of course much, much more, we have the ability to take a shot at developing a new kind of vaccine and hoping that it will work. 

The other thing to remember is that the world has developed a scientific and medical culture aimed at eradicating major diseases. The great triumph, largely ignored by the lay public and by the mass media, was the end of smallpox as a contagious disease in the human population. The current aim is, of course, to eradicate Covid-19 from the human population. There may be a small recurrent level of the virus in animal populations, but we will be able to live with that. 

Sins of the Senate 

A colleague brought this term to me. She was absolutely irate at Mitch McConnell, because he has pretended to be the grownup by asking his fellow senators not to join in objections to the electoral college vote on January 6. But notice that it took him this long to finally find an excuse good enough to put a stop to the Trump lies about who won the election. McConnell, most all of his fellow Republicans in the senate, and more than a hundred Republican congressmen joined in the near-seditious attempt to overturn the presidential election through the Supreme Court. Some of them merely stood by, while others actively joined the lawsuit. And these are the people who have been accusing the other side of trying to steal the election! 

Meanwhile, the Republicans in the senate have been sitting on their butts, refusing to join in a bill to help out some of the tens of millions of Americans who are hurting financially. 

Take a look at the restaurant owners and workers who are out protesting or just suffering quietly. The federal treasury could be used to help them. At least some of them could manage to ride out the remainder of the pandemic given a few dollars. This is the sort of aid that rebounds through the economy because the rent that the restaurateurs pay helps the landlords, some of whom would otherwise be facing bankruptcy. And it goes to pay the waiters and cooks and bus boys. That's how economic stimulus works. 

Consider that these same Republicans were more than willing to pass multi-trillion dollar aid bills back when Trump needed them for his reelection campaign. Since the November election, we haven't seen much from the same people, in spite of their posturing that Trump was the actual winner. The interlocking levels of hypocrisy cause the mind to boggle. 

The record of local governments 

One issue we will want to revisit at the end of the pandemic is the record of local governments. Here in Los Angeles, the mayor did pretty well for a while, and continues to communicate well through his televised talks. Overall, there has been a failure to adequately convince the populace as a whole that this thing is really dangerous and they have to be strict in their precautions. I blame a lot of that on the Trump administration and a lot of his fellow Republicans (not all though) who continue to make light of the dangers. The current party line is that the disease is less dangerous than we first thought. I think that is partially true, but it is still dangerous enough to have killed close to a third of a million Americans already. And as of this writing, our ICU's are full to bursting and there is hardly any room remaining. 

And the bigger lesson as 2020 recedes, is that the Covid-19 pandemic is a small thing compared to global warming. The Biden administration has its work cut out. 

(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])

-cw