View from America
By M.R. Josse
GAITHERSBURG, MD: America is teetering between hope and despair a little over a month from the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States with Kamala Harris serving as his vice-president.
That in-your-face political bipolarity is hard to miss, though there is admittedly also a considerable area of grey ambiguity buffering the extremes of pessimism and optimism.
HOPE
The base of hope is inextricably linked with the rollout of the much anticipated Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine on Friday, in what Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN called a “moon shot” achievement for medical science.
Thus began, on a war footing, a huge, nation-wide logistics operation of vaccine distribution starting from Pfizer’s enormous manufacturing plant in Michigan.
This followed the earlier approval of emergency use of the vaccine from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hanh, and in the wake of its subsequent endorsement by the Atlanta-based Center for Disease Control (CDC).
As this is being drafted, the very first vaccinations (outside experimental trial) have begun; in the nearby New York state, the first to receive one was a nurse working at a Long Island hospital. According to Gen. Gustave Perna, who heads the Operation Work Speed, the first 3 million doses were to be shipped “across all states” over the weekend.
That, of course, represents just a mere drop in the bucket, as there are an estimated 330 Americans in the country. The important thing, though, is that a start on an extended and crucial journey has finally begun with people around the world acknowledging the remarkable speed at which the vaccine – with a reported success rate of 94 percent or so – has been developed.
GRIM STATISTICS
Most Americans seem very hopeful that they now see ‘the light at the end of the tunnel’ of the frightful pandemic that has now been raging for a year. All do admit, though, that the ‘tunnel’ is going to be a very long one. Many have even resorted to Churchillian rhetoric about ‘the beginning of the end’ or ‘the end of the beginning’ of the Covid-19 pandemic.
That it’s ‘a long, long way to Tipperary’ – to resort to another British Great War idiom and a soldiers’ refrain – is suggested by the conventional view of experts that the stage of reaching ‘herd immunity’ will be when 70 percent or more of the population are vaccinated, a process that most estimate will probably not be crossed before Summer 2021.
It will be apposite, I believe, to note that there are still pockets of resistance defying the very idea of vaccination, especially among members of the black community, and other minority groups, mostly due to their past experience of medical experimentation in the bad old days of the 1930s.
It is believed that they can be slowly brought around by a process of simpatico communication by the authorities – as well as by prominent or national figures – such as Biden and Harris, for example – taking the Covid-19 vaccine on national TV.
Before proceeding any further, it will be salutary to take note that on the very day of triumph – when the Covid-19 vaccine began its historic journey out of the Pfizer manufacturing factory in Michigan – the country witnessed the deadliest day of the pandemic with over 3,300 dead.
Today, as I pen this, the total of Covid-19 cases in the country stands at a horrendous 16.2 million, with a total of Covid-19 related deaths crossing the 300,000 marks. There are, sadly, other key metrics that are worthy of our attention.
They include the fact – as CNN’s Jake Tapper reminded his audience the other day – while the United States has only 4% of the world’s population, it now accounts for over 20% of the world total for Covid-19 infections and fatalities.
Equally telling is that while it took the United States eight and a half months for its Covid-19 infected patients to reach a total of eight million, it has taken a mere two months more for that huge figure to double.
Another fly in the ointment, so to speak, is that the outgoing and delusional president has been doing his utmost to spook the vaccination process, although he attempts at times to take credit for the speedy manufacture of the vaccine.
I am powerfully reminded of a medical expert declaring to a TV audience something along the line that the complex problems of production and distribution of vaccine have been hindered by “a pandemic of misinformation and disinformation” generated by President Trump’s supporters.
In a related development today, he suggested that his White House staff not be vaccinated soon – though one may note that many of his admirers and senior advisers, including a personal lawyer, Rudi Guliani, have been hospitalized with the infection.
TRIUMPHANT NO LONGER
For President Trump, and the United States more generally, today, Monday, 14 December 2020, is more than ordinarily significant: apart from the initiation of the long-hoped-for-vaccination programme, it is the day that the Electoral College, composed of 538 electors, from the 50 states and the District of Columbia have gathered to formally cast their votes for president.
At the time of writing, more than half the ballots are in; the remainder will gradually be cast by states in the west, with it being widely speculated that by 6:00 PM, California’s 55 votes will put Biden’s score well past the 270 magic figure mark for victory. Thus far, the voting in the eastern and the mid-western states has gone on smoothly with there being no hiccups: that the winner with be Biden is not in doubt. The ultimate result, as projected a month ago, is this: 306 for Biden; 232 for Trump.
While some analysts have described this as the ‘final nail’ on Trump’s political coffin, most commentators believe that Trump’s illusions about convincing the world about a ‘stolen’ election were effectively shattered when the Supreme Court recently rejected a Texas lawsuit against four battleground states – supported by 118 craven Republican lawmakers – in effect torpedoing his much-publicized attempt to overturn the results. It may be recalled that Trump’s allies have also lost dozens of times in lower courts.
So, what, then, is the general prognosis for Trump after he exits the White House? One possibility is that he will try to set up some sort of ‘shadow’ presidency after his current term ends; the funds that he and his allies have raked in by their fraudulent claims of electoral fraud by the Democrats will doubtless come in very handy.
Of course, as stated in past columns, it is by no means a surety that other Republicans harbouring presidential ambitions will meekly be ordered about by a Trump who decisively lost the 2020 election. If, as the saying here goes, a week is a long time in politics, a four-year span of time would be an eternity – when reams of unimagined consequences or outcomes might well surface.
On the other hand, as New York Times’ well-known writer and columnist, Tom Friedman, predicted on TV the other day, the situation is ripe for a fracture of the Republican Party – one segment constituting its ‘lunatic fringe’ and the other solidifying as a ‘principled conservative Republican Party.’
While we will know, by and by, how the future unfolds for Trump and the Republican Party, I believe he may take a ‘lesson’ from President Grover Cleveland, as suggested in a recent Washington Post write-up. Cleveland is the only U.S. President to serve non-consecutive terms in the White House.
Cleveland, who was mayor of Buffalo and Governor of New York, won, then lost, and then won the presidency, between 1884 and 1892. Thus, in 1888, he lost to Ohio’s Benjamin Harrison and in 1892 he won the election against Harrison.
For the present, it can be asserted that Trump is the first Republican president to have lost an election after one term, a la George H.W. Bush in 1992 to Bill Clinton.
INDIA CHRONICLES
Allow me now to conclude by drawing your attention to a news story by Abid Hussain and Shruti Menon of BBC’s Urdu and Reality Check, published on 10 December 2020. Its gist is something like this:
“A dead professor and numerous defunct organizations were resurrected and used alongside at least 750 fake news media outlets in a vast 15-year global disinformation campaign to serve Indian interests, a new investigation has revealed.
The man whose identity was stolen was regarded as one of the founders of international human rights law, who died aged 92 in 2006…”
“It is the largest network we have exposed,” said Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of EU DisinforLab, which undertook the investigation and published an exclusive report on Wednesday (9 December 2020).
“The network was designed primarily to ‘discredit Pakistan internationally’ at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHCR) and European Parliament, EU DisinforLab said.”
“There is no evidence that the network is linked to India’s government but it relies heavily on amplifying content produced by fake media outlets with the help of Asian News International (ANI), India’s largest wire service” a key focus of the investigation.
“The BBC approached the Indian government for comment but had received no response by the time of publication…One of the most important findings of the open-source investigation was establishing direct links between the Srivastava Group (SG) and at least 10 UN-accredited media outlets, along with several others, which were used to promote Indian interests and criticize Pakistan internationally.”
I don’t believe it necessary to comment too much on such shenanigans. In Nepal, one has long been aware of such activities by Indian, and other, news organization, including in maligning the Nepalese monarchy and subverting Nepal’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Login to add a comment