The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

by Lawrence Wright

When he finally, inevitably, contracted the disease, he almost certainly spread it. Every guest at the Barrett reception tested negative for the virus before entering. Most likely, Trump was the superspreader in the Rose Garden. He failed to isolate himself after his close adviser, Hope Hicks, tested positive. Instead, he went to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, for a fundraiser, unmasked. That night, he and the first lady tested positive and the next day Trump was flown to Walter Reed. If he were not president, he might have died. The disease killed many like him, an overweight older man; instead, he was treated aggressively with experimental drugs that few Americans had access to. His recovery was a victory for medical science and a sharp reminder of the disparity in treatment Americans can expect, depending on their race and influence.

He boasted, “If I can get better, anybody can get better.” More than a thousand Americans died that day.

Joe Biden spoke at a drive-in rally in Tampa. “So much pain, so much suffering, so much loss in America,” he said. “More than 225,000 people dead, 225,000. The estimates are, if we’d have acted responsibly, there’d be 160,000 fewer dead than there are today….Donald

“One out of eight hundred Black Americans who were alive in January is now dead,” Ebony told me, as the year came to a close. “There would be another twenty thousand alive if they died at the same rate as Caucasians.”

In Texas, as in many Republican states, there were naked attempts to suppress the vote. Governor Abbott restricted the number of drop-off sites to one per county, including in Harris County, which has over four million people. The attorney general, Ken Paxton, sued to block the enforcement of a mask requirement at the polls, endangering the voters as well as the poll workers, who tend to be older and more vulnerable.

“We believe that we do have an accurate election,” the Georgian said. “No, no you don’t!” Trump said. “Not even close.” He finally got to the bottom line: “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we [need] because we won the state….And I think you have to say that you’re going to reexamine it, and you can reexamine it, but reexamine it with people that want to find answers.” “We have to stand by our numbers,” Raffensperger said.

Finally, Trump entered, and sat down, still wearing an overcoat, and went straight into a conversation with Kushner about Mexico, which took up most of the meeting. At one point, Trump observed, “I am the greatest single negotiator in the world.” Who’s he talking to? Pottinger wondered. Is he talking to me? I’m the only one in the room he doesn’t know. But he’s not looking at me. Is he talking to himself? Pottinger was rattled by Trump’s narcissism and unfocused chatter. The fact this man was going to be president left Pottinger “scared shitless,” as did the prospect of working for him. And yet the country was in grave danger.

The internet was choked with conspiracy threats. “Be ready to fight,” one of the messages said. “Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa [sic] slave soldiers being spilled. Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die.” None of this got into the daily terrorism briefing. It was the most inexcusable intelligence failure since 9/11.

Since the election, the president’s calendar had been largely clear. Except for a few rounds of golf, he had practically no appointments the entire month of November. His wrathful mood suffused the White House; the staff and close advisers kept their distance. He passed his days brooding and tweeting about the “stolen” election.

Trump had been floating the idea that the vice president could single-handedly subvert the results of the presidential election by refusing to accept the electoral votes, although Pence’s actual role in the electoral college was ceremonial. “I hope Mike Pence comes through for us,” Trump said in Georgia. “He’s a great guy. Of course, if he doesn’t come through, I won’t like him as much.” He drew a target on his most loyal officer for the mob he was summoning into action.

The crowd filled the Mall, reaching from the Ellipse all the way to the Washington Monument, recently reopened after years of repairs following an earthquake in 2011. “All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened and radical left Democrats, which is what they’re doing, and stolen by the fake news media,” Trump said when he took the stage, backed by a bank of American flags, and behind that, the majestic White House. “We will never give up. We will never concede….We’re going to have to fight much harder and Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us. And if he doesn’t, that will be a sad day for our country….We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength.”

One could still call them demonstrators or protesters, but a crowd so large is aware of its power; and inside the ranks were some who had trained for this. They wore tactical outfits and carried makeshift weapons and gear—crowbars, bullhorns, Kevlar helmets, flexicuffs, hidden guns—signaling their intent. The cops tried flash bangs and tear gas to contain them, but the mob responded with bear spray, pummeling the police with fists and flagpoles. They chased the officers up the Capitol steps, wrestling polycarbonate riot shields out of their hands and using them to break the windows. One cop was dragged down the steps and beaten with a pole holding an American flag.

At 2:24 p.m., the president tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.” A few minutes later, he added, “Stay peaceful!” but by then the delirious mob was roaming through the halls, past statues of the founders and the heroes of American history.

The riot would prove to be the final superspreader event of the Trump presidency. Dozens of cops would soon test positive. Several Democratic lawmakers did as well, possibly from being confined in an undisclosed location with House Republicans who refused to wear the masks they were offered. Who knows how many cases the rioters took back to their own communities.

Pottinger phoned O’Brien and told him he was resigning. O’Brien was also considering leaving, but they worried that, if both left, the national security council could collapse in the midst of an attempted coup. The danger of a foreign adversary taking advantage of the chaos was on their minds. O’Brien decided to stay on.

Had they not been saved by the Capitol Police, some lawmakers would probably be dead, others captured and handcuffed by the zip ties rioters carried for that purpose, and yet 8 Republican senators and 139 Republican House members voted against accepting the results of the election.

The CDC issued guidelines on December 3, 2020, proposing that the first doses should go to healthcare workers and residents of long-term care facilities; that was termed Phase 1a. Next in line would be essential workers, such as firefighters, police, corrections officers, food and agricultural workers, teachers and daycare workers, postal workers, and bus drivers. In that same category were people aged seventy-five and older. Phase 1c would include people over sixty-five and those with underlying health conditions. The FDA granted emergency use for the Pfizer vaccine on December 11. The first problem was the scarcity of the vaccine. The Trump administration had promised 300 million doses by the end of the year. The chief scientific officer of Operation Warp Speed, Moncef Slaoui, reduced that to 35 to 40 million. That would be enough for up to 20 million people to receive the two shots recommended to achieve immunity. Some vaccine candidates were slow to emerge from trials; there were manufacturing problems; some of the raw materials were hard to obtain. In any case, by the end of the year, only about 2 million Americans had actually been vaccinated.

The current hypothesis was that the Kent variant, now called B.1.1.7, had a mutation that switched an amino acid in the spike protein, allowing it to bind more tightly to the body’s ACE2 receptors. “That means it takes less virus to infect you,” Brooks said. “That tighter binding also means that it can replicate more efficiently.” Once infected with the new variant, a person will be shedding more virus than someone infected with another variant. “It’s a wicked cycle,” Brooks observed. B.1.1.7 quickly spread to dozens of countries. Historically, novel viruses have declined in mortality as they spread more successfully, but the U.K. variant turned out to be significantly deadlier.

A month after the new strain was uncovered in England, a similar lineage emerged in South Africa, called B.1.351, quickly becoming the dominant variant in that country and setting off on its own tour of the world. It had the same mutation as B.1.1.7 that allowed it to adhere more tightly to the ACE2 receptors, but it also carried an additional mutation that is far more concerning. The mutation is denominated E484K, meaning that a single amino acid, glutamic acid (code letter E) has been replaced by another, lysine (code letter K), at position 484 of the genetic sequence of the spike protein. In a lab experiment, the E484K mutation caused more than a tenfold drop in the efficacy of the vaccine. Scientists began calling it the Eek mutation.

Yet another dangerous mutation turned up in Brazil, called P.1. A forty-five-year-old healthcare worker in the northeastern part of the country, who had no comorbidities, got Covid in May 2020. She was sick for a week with diarrhea, headaches, and exhaustion, but she fully recovered. Then, in October, 153 days later, she fell ill again with Covid-19, and this time the disease was more severe. “This made the hair on my neck stand up,” Brooks said. Like the South African variant, the Brazilian one had the mutation that makes it more infectious, as well as the Eek mutation, which raised the unsettling possibility that the coronavirus was evolving into a deadlier version of the flu or the common cold, which are constantly changing, dodging the body’s immune system.

“So how do we fight these mutants?” Brooks asked. “The best way is to suppress replication, and that means stopping infections.” The more replications that occur, the greater the number of mutations. Occasionally, a slight error in replicating the genetic code creates a variant that spreads more successfully, and when that happens, evolution takes over. Stopping transmission blocks the opportunity for viral mutation; it’s the only thing that does. And the only means we have of standing in the way of the virus is vaccination. “It’s a race,” Brooks said. “We’ve got to get people vaccinated before more of these mutations occur.”

The WHO says that herd immunity is reached when 60 to 70 percent of the population have had the disease or have been vaccinated, although Dr. Fauci has upped the figure incrementally, saying that a more reliable figure may be between 85 and 90 percent. The increased transmissibility of the mutant variants makes the higher figures more likely.

the South African variant, B.1.351, showed that it can escape the antibodies in the blood of previously infected persons. That suggested that therapies using monoclonal antibodies—the treatment President Trump received—could fail. The authors of the study underscored the implications for the effectiveness of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines: “These data highlight the prospect of reinfection with antigenically distinct variants and may foreshadow reduced efficacy of current spike-based vaccines.” Indeed, the Novavax vaccine, while robustly effective in trials, was significantly less so when tested against the South African variant. The same was true for Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot Covid vaccine.

Scientists in Barney Graham’s lab working with Moderna found that their vaccine blocked both the U.K. and South African variants, although it was somewhat less effective against the latter.

Imagine a foreign adversary invaded America and killed half a million people. How would the country respond? No doubt the most powerful military in the history of the world would annihilate the invader.