Sees lack of leadership on local and national levels
Lowndes County Supervisor Harry Sanders has done it again, attending last Monday’s Board of Supervisors meeting despite knowingly being exposed to Covid-19. Sanders had lunched last week with fellow supervisor, John Holliman, who’d tested positive the next day but “did not think he posed a danger to others.” Putting Sanders’ previous poor judgment aside, I still don’t think I’d find his personal opinion sufficient here.
Later last week, LCSD Board president, Robert Barksdale, and LCSD attorney, Jeff Smith, both declined to wear masks at a public board meeting. Barksdale said he took his mask off so that he could be understood while leading the meeting. Sorry – I have yet to encounter anyone who I could not understand because they were wearing a mask.
So much for leadership.
But why should we be surprised by this when we see similar examples in leaders at the state and federal level? To be sure, this includes both Republicans and Democrats alike, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom perhaps the best-known example of the latter. The most glaring and dangerous examples have continually come since Nov. 3, however. Most recently, the poorly conceived suit launched by the Texas attorney general was swatted away by the Supreme Court – but not before the Republican AG’s of 17 other states and 126 Republican House members reached for their chance to bask in presidential favor by publicly signing on. As the saying goes, ‘the fish rots from the head down’.
Now the President wants credit for the development of the vaccines – which he claims, based again on absolutely no evidence whatsoever, would have taken 5 more years with any other president. He is hoping that voters are unaware of the National Institute for Health (NIH), which has been funding basic research on corona viruses in bat populations, specifically, and pandemics in general, for the past decade. That’s right, the past decade. Bats are unusually resistant to a variety of viruses including COVID and SARS, and, as a group, play host to a huge diversity of them, so are a smart choice for studies of this type.
What else, besides Operation Warp Speed, which I have supported here already, has the Trump administration done to accelerate vaccine development? Oh, that’s right, they cut off all funding for the bat project back in late April. Now there’s some forward thinking for you.
NIH funding and a decade of very directed scientific investigation set the stage for the current vaccine roll-out, not the President.
Much of the President’s key contributions to our response to pandemics, both social and medical, have been to slow them down.
Paul Mack
Columbus
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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