← History As It Happens
History As It Happens
5 Years After Covid
00:52:17
In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak, months after it originated in China, a global pandemic. It soon infected millions of Americans in all 50 states, upending daily life and revealing deep fissures and...
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- [00:01]
Martin DeCaro
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- [00:28]
John Barry
Vote history as it happens. March 21, 2025. Five years after Covid, China has more.
- [00:38]
Historian
Than 200 confirmed cases of coronavirus, it's called.
- [00:41]
Martin DeCaro
There is now one more confirmed case.
- [00:43]
John Barry
In the US bringing the total to three.
- [00:45]
CDC Representative
CDC confirming all five patients in the.
- [00:48]
Historian
US had traveled to Wuhan.
- [00:50]
Donald Trump
It's going to disappear one day. It's like a miracle. It will disappear.
- [00:53]
Surgeon General
Save the medical mask, the N95s for the health care workers, because the cloth facial coverings.
- [00:59]
Historian
It's fair to say that as the TRA of the outbreak continues, many people in the United States will at some point in time, either this year or next, be exposed to this virus. And there's a good chance they will become sick.
- [01:13]
Donald Trump
Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous. Whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light.
- [01:19]
Senator
Senator, we are here at a committee to look at a virus now that has killed almost 900,000 people. They tell us to vaccinate ourselves endlessly and boost ourselves.
- [01:33]
John Barry
The truth is we don't know the origins of COVID 19 yet for sure. It has been five years since our lives were turned upside down as a mysterious virus began ravaging society, ultimately killing millions worldwide. Our trust in government and in one another was another casualty. The pandemic abated, but the political madness persists. Where will that leave us when the next pandemic strikes? That's next with historian John Barry as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
- [02:03]
Historian
Five years ago today, the World Health Organization declared Covid a pandemic.
- [02:08]
Martin DeCaro
One day it's March 2020, the next it's March 2025. It feels like life has been on fast forward.
- [02:13]
John Barry
All because of the pandemic.
- [02:14]
Donald Trump
One million COVID deaths.
- [02:17]
John Barry
One million empty chairs around the family dinner table.
- [02:20]
Historian
There is a way you can present information, even if you are not certain, which allows you to change your mind. And that is you create sort of an infrastructure where people understand that you are trying to help them with the best information you have at the moment, but that there's a decent possibility that you will Change the advice as you learn more.
- [02:49]
WHO Director General
Two weeks. The number of cases of COVID 19 outside China has increased 13 fold.
- [02:57]
John Barry
March 11, 2020. The World Health Organization officially declares the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic.
- [03:03]
WHO Director General
There are now more than 118,000 cases.
- [03:07]
John Barry
At a news. At a conference in Geneva, WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Gabriesis called for global cooperation to protect life.
- [03:15]
WHO Director General
Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly. It's a word that, if misused, can cause unreasonable fear.
- [03:28]
John Barry
Find, isolate, test and treat every case and trace every contact, he said. Ready your hospitals. Protect and train your healthcare workers.
- [03:36]
WHO Director General
Thousands more are fighting for their lives in hospitals. In the days and weeks ahead, we expect to see the number of cases, the number of deaths, and the number of affected countries climb.
- [03:55]
John Barry
Well, we know that some countries did better than others, protecting their citizens from a pathogen that paid no regard to borders or personal politics. COVID 19 had been spreading for months before the WHO declaration. But it is March 2020 that we remember. That was when our lives were upended. Schools, businesses, sporting events closed. Restaurants and coffee shops went dark. We hid from each other in our homes and doom scrolled on our phones. Some wore masks. Others treated masks like a plague as American society turned on itself. Led by a president who subscribed to conspiracy theories and quack remedies.
- [04:36]
Historian
Right?
- [04:36]
Donald Trump
And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that? By injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because, you see, it gets on the lungs and it does a tremendous number of the lungs. So it'd be interesting to check that so that you're gonna have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds. It sounds interesting to me.
- [05:01]
John Barry
Now, we do have a vaccine, thanks to operation warp Speed. And for most people, life has returned to normal. But we must remember, at least 1.2 million Americans died of COVID 19, according to the CDC, at least 7 million worldwide. The actual numbers will never be known, and many others suffered long Covid serious health complications that lasted for weeks or months, in some cases longer. All of us bear some mental and emotional scars from that period. But the scientific reality is, even though we may not want to think about it, we will deal with another pandemic at some point. In an op ed for the New York Times, historian John Barry writes, what should we learn from the past? Every pandemic we have good information about was unique. That makes information itself the most valuable commodity. We must gather it, analyze it, act upon it and communicate it. John Barry, a scholar at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. He is the author of the bestselling authoritative the Great the Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. John Barry, welcome back to the show.
- [06:11]
Historian
Thank you. Always a pleasure talking to you.
- [06:14]
John Barry
Well, it's great to have you back because in the past we have spoken on Covid anniversaries. So I did want to have you on to talk about COVID five years later, but I also wanted to discuss a couple of issues that are in the news right now. You actually wrote an op ed about the avian influenza in the New York Times last year, but if you had written it today, all the issues still apply. We're dealing with this avian influenza outbreak. Chickens are dying or they're being culled. Price of eggs is going up. I'm sure you've heard in your piece you talk about the necessity of learning the right lessons from the COVID outbreak that would have to be applied to the next outbreak. What are those?
- [06:52]
Historian
The most important lesson. It's not really a lesson. Don't fight the last war. Every pandemic that we know about has been more than a little different. So the ones that we have pretty decent information on go back to 1889, and you've got 1918, which of course was the big one, you know, then 57, 1957, 1968, 2009, and 2020. They're all different. You have to retain flexibility. And you can't make plans based on Covid. The next pandemic, and we will have another pandemic and another one after that and another one after that. It could be completely different. It could be more like one of the earlier ones. It could be like Covid. We don't know. And one of the examples that I gave in that piece was, well, actually, all the influenza pandemics, which is definitely 1918-1957-1968-2009, possibly 1889, was influenza. It might actually have been a coronavirus. But definitely all the influenza pandemics killed younger people than normal seasonal influenza. The most vulnerable group in 1918 was actually children under the age of 10. And then there was another peak of deaths with people age 28. You know, I feel that the response to Covid would have been dramatically different if children under 10 were the most vulnerable and then again, another peak among otherwise healthy young adults, particularly pregnant women in 1918. If you were pregnant in 1918 and you got influenza, you were at very, very serious risk of death, assuming you Carried a child to term, that kid was at risk for complications. In 1957, 47% of the dead, and that there were roughly 70,000 people, Americans who died. In 1957, the population was roughly half today's. So Double that to 140,000. So 47% of the deaths in 1957 were children under the age of 15. So one of the things that I asked in that piece is something you need to consider. If 47% of the debt are kids under the age of 15. And in fact, as we know, in 1957, schools were central to spread in the community. Are you sure you don't want to close schools? Really?
- [09:27]
John Barry
Well, as you like to say to me, the virus will be in charge. And the next pandemic, whatever the government decides to do and whatever decisions Americans make, 310 million of us in this country, whatever decisions individuals make, they will change those decisions and change their behavior. If the virus is really deadly. Well, maybe they won't, maybe I shouldn't say that, but in 1918 they will. The virus killed people quickly, right? People would die in a day or two.
- [09:53]
Historian
Well, not most of them, but in most deaths, probably most deaths were actually secondary bacterial infections. A majority. My guess, whether it's 40% or 60% or whatever, probably most were bacterial. However, today with ICUs and modern care, the case fatality rate for bacterial pneumonia following influenza is still 8%. So that's extraordinarily high. And if it's antibiotic resistant staph, it's like 35%, which is what it was in 1918. But there were clearly enough deaths. And these would have been not bacterial pneumonia. These were clearly virus caused or really the immune system's reaction to the virus. There were enough deaths in 24 hours, 48 hours. Although we don't have numbers, there are anecdotal reports, but they're from very, very reliable observers. So certainly that happened scary, you know.
- [10:50]
John Barry
During the COVID outbreak, I did know people who weren't very bothered by the fact that it was old people who are dying. Matter of fact, I used to know somebody who said, well, that person was going to die soon anyway. I think that's a terrible attitude to have, but it was there.
- [11:03]
Historian
Well, the lieutenant governor of Texas, basically, Dan, Dan Patrick said, you know, hey, you gotta go, you gotta go.
- [11:10]
John Barry
If it were 5 year olds, 10 year olds, if there were thousands of funerals every week for children, attitudes may have been different. You know, I did not phrase my initial question to you that well. I'll just take from what you wrote in that piece, you said, while much would have to happen for the avian influenza to ignite into a human pandemic, these events, meaning the bird flu outbreak and the killing of all the chickens, provide another reason, as if one were needed for governments and public health authorities to prepare for the next pandemic. He wrote, as they do, they must be cautious about the lessons they might think COVID 19, left behind. We need to be prepared to fight the next war, not the last one. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Who is a dangerous fraud, is somehow in charge of public health in our country. He said that the way to deal with this avian influenza outbreak is to just let it rip. That's how you'll find out if some birds have natural immunity. What do you think of that?
- [12:07]
Historian
Idiotic. I mean, the reality is that virus is extraordinarily lethal among birds. You might get some bird somewhere that has a natural immunity or, you know, the Department of Agriculture pays farmers, people who raise chickens, for killing the birds, and the farmers are very happy to accept that money because all those birds are going to die anyway. Once you get the virus into a flock, is it theoretically possible that there might be, out of a thousand chickens, one or two that might survive? I would guess it would be. You know, just as some people never got Covid, they may have natural immunity. You know, maybe they were infected by other coronaviruses that gave out. All sorts of things happened.
- [12:55]
John Barry
But in the meantime, you know, the.
- [12:57]
Historian
Other thing, I mean, reason why it's actually dangerous is because, you know, that virus can go from chickens to, you know, some other farm, it can go to some other animals. Particularly dangerous would be pigs. Pigs have receptors for both avian influenza viruses and human influenza viruses. So the concern is that an avian virus infects a pig at the same time that a human virus infects a pig, and then the viruses reassort and come up with a new virus that can infect people. Obviously that happened with swine flu in 2009. It also happened in 57 and 68. We might get really lucky that that virus might be relatively mild as it was in 2009, although the peak age for death in 2009 was actually 38. It was not elderly or, you know, it could turn out to be a deadly virus. There's no way of knowing.
- [14:00]
John Barry
I hardly remember that 09 outbreak for some reason. But no, you're right. It sounds like you're saying that Robert Kennedy doesn't know what he's talking about, and the experts and the scientists were quoted in a New York Times article, would agree with you. They say that chickens and turkeys lack the genes needed to resist the virus. So you'd simply just have the virus spread and kill all these chickens. They die sometimes within a day or two. They die really quickly after getting the virus, sometimes so fast they haven't even had a chance to lay an egg yet. And in the meantime, you'd have millions, millions of dead birds. And the experts in the article said each time the virus spreads, so you'd be giving it 5 million, 6 million, whatever, opportunities for the virus to mutate into something really, as you just alluded to, really dangerous for humans.
- [14:50]
Historian
You said it, you know, not me.
- [14:53]
John Barry
The scientist said it. Yeah, I don't know what I'm talking about, but yeah. I can't believe that this man is in charge of public health. But, you know, this is a very real problem right now. I don't know the first thing about avian influenza. Do you have any idea how long it's going to take to control this?
- [15:08]
Historian
Well, we're not doing anything to control it, or not doing much, I guess. We're still culling chickens. You know, the fact that it went to cows is very disconcerting. Obviously, every time a virus infects a mammal, it's that much closer to humans. Plus humans are dealing with cows milking them all the time. You know, every time it's in a human, it has the possibility of mutating so that it can pass from human to human. So far, there have been no instances that we know of. There may be instances, we may not know of them, where a human infected with that virus infected somebody else. They're actually historically, I mean, that H5N1, the virus we're talking about, has been around since 97, that we've been aware of it. Earlier incarnations of the virus have been very deadly. In fact, up until the recent things, it's been basically a 50 or 60% case fatality rate in humans out of about 850, I think got the exact number of humans who had been infected between, say, 1997 and 2021.
- [16:20]
John Barry
Well, more than half died.
- [16:22]
Historian
There had been a couple of cases where it passed from human to human, but they were very close family relationships, so in constant contact. But again, every opportunity you give it to mutate. You know, the influenza virus actually mutates at roughly three times the rate of COVID three times as fast. And Covid obviously had plenty of changes in the last several years, plenty of iterations that have created quite a few problems for humans.
- [16:51]
John Barry
This is scary. I'm not one to to get into.
- [16:54]
Historian
I mean it's scary that we're not doing more.
- [16:57]
John Barry
I don't want to be hysterical about it. We're talking about public health here with cranks in charge. Another issue I want to talk about that's also been in the news lately and I know this is one of your all time favorites. John Barry the Source of the outbreak in 2020 so there is a popular op ed in the New York Times, or at least it was passed around a lot online by Zhenyep Turfeki, who wrote about the lab leak theory versus natural origin. She wrote the CIA recently updated its assessment of how the COVID pandemic began, judging a lab leak to be the likely origin. This would be in Wuhan, albeit with low confidence. The Department of Energy, which runs sophisticated labs and the FBI came to that conclusion in 2023. But there are certainly more questions for governments and researchers across the world to answer. Why did it take until now, she asks, for the German public to learn that way back in 2020, their federal intelligence Service endorsed a lab leak origin with 80 to 95% probability. What else is still being kept from us about the pandemic that half a decade ago changed all of our lives? To this day, she says there is no strong scientific evidence ruling out a lab leak or proving that the virus arose from human animal contact in that seafood market.
- [18:14]
Historian
Okay, first, I have a lot of respect for her. I like her. I think she's pretty good, you know. Second, the majority of scientists not sure it's a big enough majority quite to call it a consensus which to me would be 80 to 90% but without any question. I think the majority of scientists continue to believe it's not a lab leak, that it's a natural origin. You know, frankly, I'll go with them. The fact that a Trump appointed new CIA director announces that the CIA now believes it was a lab leak with low confidence I might add, is not compelling evidence. The reality is there's a very good chance we will never know where that virus began. I will note that the first SARS, which surfaced in 2003, took us 14 years to figure out the original source of that virus. 14 years.
- [19:11]
John Barry
Scientifically does it matter at this point?
- [19:13]
Historian
Scientifically, that's the most important point. It may matter diplomatically and whether or not people can claim that China has liability so there may be some legal ramifications. In terms of the future, it makes absolutely no difference. One thing we do know is that we have to be a hell of a lot more careful with lab research than we have been. And the second thing we know is that we have to improve our surveillance of animal diseases. Jumping to humans and that possibility, you know, we need to do both. We know that. So whether it was a lab leak or natural origin, it's just a distraction from what we should be focusing on. In fact, there was a. Speaking of op eds, there was another recent op ed by Ralph Barak at the University of North Carolina. Very good virologist and a colleague whose name. I'm sorry, I slipped my mind at the. At the moment. It was probably a week or two ago. Also in the Times talking about some experiments that were going on in a laboratory very recently. There was a scientific paper and that was in BSL2 lab. BSL stands for Biosafety Level 2. And those labs go up to 4. There are only a very few BSL4 labs in the world. I've been in a BSL3. Even in a 3, you have to wear all that paraphernalia that you see in the movies and take showers afterwards. So a four is much more secure than that in terms of ventilation and so forth. Even threes and twos are supposed to do that. But you shouldn't be conducting an experiment such as the one that was conducted and reported in that paper in a BSL2 lab. We need some kind of international agreement on what research should be conducted, under what circumstances.
- [21:10]
John Barry
Is this the gain of function stuff? That was controversial. You remember Senator Rand Paul was grilling Anthony Fauci about this at a hearing.
- [21:19]
Senator
The gain of function research was going on in that lab and NIH funded it. That is not away from it. It meets your definition and you are obfuscating the truth. I'm not obfuscating the truth.
- [21:29]
John Barry
You are the one expired. But I will allow the witness to.
- [21:32]
Senator
Let me just finish. I want everyone to understand that if you look at those viruses, and that's judged by qualified virologists and evolutionary biologists, those viruses are molecularly impossible to result. They are no one's virus caused the pandemic. We're saying they are gain of function viruses because they were animal viruses that became more transmissible in human. And you funded it. And you admit the truth. And you imply.
- [22:00]
John Barry
Paul, your time at expired and I will allow witnesses who come before this committee to respond.
- [22:06]
Senator
And you are implying that what we did was responsible for the deaths of individual. I totally resent that. And if anybody is lying here, Senator, it is you.
- [22:18]
Historian
Yeah, I mean, it was manipulating the genes of this virus. It was another virus from a bat. That's, you know, their immune systems are very unusual. They can tolerate all sorts of viruses without getting sick.
- [22:32]
John Barry
A bat you're talking about?
- [22:34]
Historian
Yeah, they're really a hive full of potential pathogens that could probably do damage to humans. Just when you manipulate the genes of a virus, you need to be careful. There was, I'm trying to remember exactly when it's more than 10 years ago, an effort, a successful effort to recreate the 1918 influenza virus. There were some people who opposed that. They thought that what science would learn from it was not worth the risk of recreating the virus.
- [23:06]
John Barry
I would agree with that. From my non scientific background, it's pretty dangerous. Well, 50 to 100 million people died, as you pointed out in your book and in your recent articles.
- [23:17]
Historian
Anyway, we do need some scientific standards of care. You know, you do learn stuff from this. Number one, that needs to. The research needs to be done very safely. We do know that the Wuhan lab had some breakdowns in safety. You know, regardless of whether the origin was in the lab or whether it was natural. We do know that lab had some safety breakdowns. We do know that the 1977, there, there may or may not. If some people call it a pandemic, some people don't consider it a pandemic. But there was what was apparently an accidental release of an H1N1 influenza virus from Soviet labs that certainly spread around the world. Whether you consider it a pandemic or not, that was not a planned release. To quote a line from a book I wrote about a flood, you know, nature is perfect and humans are not perfect. You make a mistake against nature, it's going to find that mistake and exploit it. So you need to be perfect when you are doing this kind of research in terms of safety.
- [24:20]
John Barry
One of the problems with the lab leak versus natural origin debate, and this is the criticism, I'm not saying I necessarily agree with this, although I think there is some merit to this criticism, is that when people said this could be a lab leak a few years ago, opponents of that view censored them or shut them down or criticized them, said, you're a bunch of crazy people. What are you doing? This is a conspiracy theory. Matter of fact, the reporter for the New York Times who covers this stuff even tweeted that it was a racist idea to suggest that it was a lab leak in Wuhan. I don't know what the truth is. As you say, we're probably Never going to find out because the Chinese, if they know, they haven't revealed that information. But they completely screwed up the origins of the virus when this happened in late 2019, not 2020. I remember working for Bloomberg News and reading headlines about a new virus that popped up in China in late 2019 was the autumn or early winter. But anyway, back to my question. I mean, there is a tension there between the need to control information during a public health emergency so that disinformation doesn't get out and harm the public. But that can easily slide into censorship when no one, even the experts, can't be sure of what's going on.
- [25:31]
Historian
So what's your question?
- [25:33]
John Barry
It was more a comment. John Barry, maybe you can address that tension. Cause you addressed this in your op ed from lunch year. The need to have reliable information. But at the same time, people who are dispensing the reliable information can make mistakes and they can be very heavy handed when there's dissent.
- [25:51]
Historian
There is a way you can present information even if you are not certain, which allows you to change your mind. And that is you create sort of an infrastructure where people understand that you are trying to help them with the best information you have at the moment, but that there's a decent possibility that you will change the advice as you learn more. But you've got to say that at the beginning. You start out saying, we're giving you the best possible advice that we have right now. As we learn more, that advice may change this information. Some of it actually came from foreign countries that were actively trying to sow dissension in the United States. I mean, this is a statement of fact. For example, if you remember the Canadian truck protests, there was a tremendous amount of social media commentary about that. And then Russia got ready to invade Ukraine and that commentary disappeared. And the reason it disappeared was because it was coming from Russia and they were busy trying to prepare for the Ukrainian invasion. They had a different priority. It actually came from Russia trying to sow dissension in the United States. And there were plenty of domestic actors who were simply misguided or in many cases making a lot of money. We're talking about serious money from exploiting people's fears.
- [27:27]
John Barry
Anyone could have a podcast saying, try this treatment. Remember the hydroxychloroquine and all the other things.
- [27:35]
Historian
By the same token, a lot of the public health authorities shot themselves not in the foot, but in the kneecap and maybe higher up sometimes.
- [27:43]
John Barry
Well, the masks. Right, the masks. I know we're bouncing around a little bit here. But this is something I want to bring up with you. We know that masks do work, but in the very early stages. And again, the government. I'm not even talking to Donald Trump. People in the cdc, whoever it was, fda, I'm not sure which agency it was. Actually, it was the surgeon General. I have a quote from him.
- [28:05]
Surgeon General
Well, it's important for people to understand that once upon a time, we prescribed cigarettes for asthmatics and leeches and cocaine and heroin for people as medical treatments. When we learn better, we do better.
- [28:16]
CDC Representative
And the w. Are you saying at that time you did not know because the CDC in February was looking at asymptomatic transmission of the virus.
- [28:26]
Surgeon General
We were looking at that. But the cdc, the who and even in May, there was a New England Journal of Medicine article that still disputed whether or not masks were effective. We've learned more about asymptomatic spread. Up to 50% of people who can spread this disease spread it without having symptoms. And that's why the American people need to know that science is about giving the best recommendations. You can in the. You learn more, you change those recommendations. Our recommendations have changed. Now, people of America, important to know you should wear a face covering.
- [28:55]
CDC Representative
And we certainly do. We certainly do take that advice. But I think you have to acknowledge that this mixed messaging has created confusion and it has drawn into question some of the credibility of the administration. Are you certain?
- [29:11]
Surgeon General
Well, trying to correct it of a shortage.
- [29:14]
CDC Representative
Well, I'd like you to clarify it. Were you saying that then because there just wasn't enough equipment?
- [29:20]
Surgeon General
I was saying that then because everything we knew about coronaviruses before that point told us that people were not likely to spread when they were asymptomatic.
- [29:30]
John Barry
Wear a mask, don't wear a mask.
- [29:32]
Historian
You know, it's a pretty good example of the shooting yourself in the kneecap that. And initially when CDC said if you were vaccinated, you weren't going to spread the disease, you weren't going to get reinfected, and so forth and so on. You know, actually at the beginning of the pandemic, I also recommended against masks for the general public. I changed myself. I had some 1918 data that I was going on. In fact, as early as 1917. I had very good scientists back then. Is certainly as smart as anybody doing research today. They obviously didn't have the same tools. But there was a measles outbreak in army camps in 1917, and they ran some tests and discovered that if you put a mask on someone who is sick, that would actually be very Productive in protecting people who are well. They knew this as a fact in 1917. In fact, the experiments were so dramatic, they cut them short and ordered in every army camp. And the doctors in the army were probably the best doctors in the country. The Rockefeller University was incorporated lock, stock and barrel into the army anyway. They ordered any but respiratory diseases in an army base. You're going to get a mask on to protect other people. But they found later that for the general public during the pandemic, the masks were not worth the effort. People weren't wearing them properly. Also, the masks were nowhere near as good quality as the masks we have today. They didn't have anything like an N95 or a KN95 or for that matter, a surgical mask. Surgical masks today are better than any mask they had in 1918. So based on that information, at the beginning of the pandemic was also significant. Recommending if anybody asked me, a few people actually did not to wear a mask for the general public. Although by the same token, if you were sick, I knew a mask would help protect people around you, you know.
- [31:38]
John Barry
But after those first few weeks and.
- [31:40]
Historian
I changed, I reversed myself after those.
- [31:43]
John Barry
First few weeks or months when, yes, there was now a consensus, public health officials, experts were saying, please wear a mask. People didn't want to for any number of reasons, or they wore it incorrectly. I still see people wearing masks incorrectly when I go to supermarkets and all.
- [32:00]
Historian
It's really ridiculous. You see below their Nose.
- [32:02]
John Barry
Talk about 1918. I remember our very first conversation, which was in 2021, when you told me about the 1918 pandemic and how when Woodrow Wilson was told that American soldiers doughboys being stuffed on transports to take him across the Atlantic Ocean to fight in Europe, when he was told that they were dying of the flu because they were packed in on each other, he just said, well, oh, well, they're gonna die either from bullets or the flu. That's amazing.
- [32:28]
Historian
You know, once the pandemic passed through an army base, people did have immunity. So if they simply shipped soldiers after the influenza pandemic had passed through that base and reordered, how they sent people over, that would not have happened. You know, one of the more disturbing things, a lot of disturbing things for those who know Wilson well. But that's personally one of the things that kind of struck me.
- [32:51]
John Barry
Yeah, I'm working on an episode about the crackdown on dissent during the First World War. That'll be coming out soon. Wilson and the Palmer raids. As far as I know, Woodrow Wilson did not recommend Shooting people with ultraviolet rays or injecting disinfectants in their body.
- [33:06]
Donald Trump
And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, you can. Which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said, you're going to test that, too. Sounds interesting, right? And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see, it gets on the lungs and. And it does a tremendous number along. So it'd be interesting to check that so that you're gonna have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds interesting to me.
- [33:43]
John Barry
Maybe we'll get to Donald Trump in a little bit. John Barry, do you remember where you were or what you were doing when it happened? Meaning when you knew in 2020? Yes, March 2020.
- [33:55]
Historian
I was in the Providence, Rhode island airport, and I was waiting for a flight. You know, I'd gone up there for my mother's birthday. This is the middle of January, I guess it was in Thailand, I heard, and I said, wait a second. This cannot. This virus is not going to be contained. And I actually sat in the airport. And normally I write very, very slowly. And I wrote an op ed whose working title was this Virus Cannot be Contained, submitted it, and it ran on January 30. There was already some talk about asymptomatic spread when I titled that. And then I was checking with some sources who said, well, we're not certain it spreads asymptomatically. So I wimped out and changed the title of the piece to can this Virus Be Contained? And I said, probably not and said, if it's asymptomatic and so forth in the op Ed. Obviously I was right the first time on that. And the people said they weren't certain it was asymptomatic or mistaken. You know, it was pretty clear by the middle of January to me, and I think, and really to most people who knew anything about pandemics, that this thing was not going to be contained. It was not SARS one which was contained. It was different. It was much more communicable.
- [35:13]
John Barry
Yeah. In January. I don't know how seriously I was taking it. I know I was reading about it on the air for Bloomberg Radio. I think in February, everyone started to. Well, I shouldn't say everybody, every sane person or reasonable person was probably getting a little bit worried about what was happening for me. March. And I think that's for most people, it was in March. I remember having dinner out with friends on a Thursday night. I think it was a Thursday night. We were asking ourselves, should we really be doing this? I think then it was the next day they announced they would close the office, but I would have to go in. I was considered an essential personnel. And I think I was sitting there maybe the day before this happened. Again, human memories, notoriously unreliable. But I remember was the day that the NBA announced they would cancel the rest of the season. Okay, this is not going away anytime soon, but, you know, but looking back on those year or two or three before, you know, normality set back in around here, at least in D.C. seems like a blur. But at the same time, man, was life tedious and was life slow and was it scary. Especially those first few months when the deaths were piling up in New York. Maybe we don't want to remember what that felt like because to have to go through it again would be so painful. But I do try to remind myself of that, the urgency of what was happening at the time where every day you turn on the tv it was Cuomo doing his daily news conference.
- [36:40]
Donald Trump
Somebody asked the question once, can you ever get numb to these, seeing these numbers? Unfortunately, no.
- [36:51]
Historian
758 people lost their lives in a 24 hour period.
- [36:57]
John Barry
The hospital's overrun. Dozens of people dying, hundreds of people dying, then thousands of people dying. Do you agree that a lot of Americans simply just want to memory hole this because it's just too painful to think about that happening again?
- [37:10]
Historian
Well, they've certainly forgotten it. I think in 2022, I was predicting that public health would be well funded for maybe five years and that after that I wasn't so sure. Obviously I was way overly optimistic. Public health has been defunded even, you know, before the Trump administration, many states have passed laws limiting the authority of public health figures to order. Anything really. You know, the politicization of, of what happened was extraordinary. It's not extraordinary that there was criticism of CDC and so forth or decisions that were made, but the fact that it became partisan. That I think certainly I didn't expect that.
- [38:00]
John Barry
Neither did I. That's what I remember. In addition to the death and changes in daily life, having to wear a mask and social distance and everything was shut down. It's the political madness. You know, I did want to ask you about the closures. Maybe we'll wrap up with the closures. We'll stick with the political stuff. This is why I think we're screwed if another pandemic happens anytime soon. I know in your op ed you said that we need to come together and that there are reasonable health adjustments or changes. If public officials communicate properly that you're confident, maybe Americans will listen and will adjust their behavior accordingly. I don't know. I think we're in a lot of trouble.
- [38:38]
Historian
Maybe I'm gonna say I was confident, maybe not. It's possible.
- [38:42]
John Barry
Possible. That's okay. There's a difference between confident and possible. I don't want to misquote your own op ed here in front of me, but yeah, I think we're in a lot of trouble.
- [38:50]
Historian
There's no question we're in a worse situation than we were in 2019. You know, in terms of the ability of public health officials to convince the public to cooperate, to adhere to recommendations. I think we had every opportunity to do it right and we blew it. There was a study of roughly 150, a little over 150 countries, that found the system of government didn't really matter whether it was a communist government like Vietnam or a democratic government like the United States. The countries that did comparatively well in the pandemic were places where people trusted the institution and trusted their fellow citizens. And the places that did poorly in the pandemic were where citizens did not trust each other and did not trust their institutions. So the United States had about as bad a performance as any country in the world. And we had, you know, before the pandemic, there was the Global Health Security Organization rated countries preparedness, and the United States came out at the top of the list because of our resources. Because basically every state, not basically every state, had done played pandemic war games. They all had plans, the federal government had plans, and we had the resources.
- [40:20]
John Barry
Yeah, there was something called a playbook from the Obama administration. Yeah, you're right. I just scanned your op ed again. You never said that you were confident people would do this. You did say people should want to protect themselves from COVID You say trust matters. A pre Covid analysis of the pandemic readiness of countries around the world rated the United States first because of its resources, as you just repeated here on the show. Yet America had the second worst rate of infections of any high income country. A pandemic analysis of 100, 177 countries published in 2022 found that resources did not correlate with infections. Trust in government and fellow citizens did. And that is the lesson you say, John Barry, we really need to remember for the next time. Why is it impossible to know with Any precision, how many people died in our country and across the world? The estimate here is 1.2 million Americans worldwide. Total is like 1 million? No, no, 7 million. At least 7 million.
- [41:16]
Historian
Well, world Health Organization, before it counts a COVID death, you had to have a positive COVID test. And certainly in a lot of the world, you weren't getting Covid tests. I think the general consensus view among epidemiologists is that roughly 20 million people died worldwide and then United States. You get arguments whether people died of COVID or with COVID whether something else killed them and they happened to be sick. With COVID you've got that argument. Going back to the trust issue, I wrote five afterwards for my first book, which. Not first book, for the book on pandemic, which came out in 2004.
- [41:58]
John Barry
About 1918.
- [41:59]
Historian
Right, 2004, when the book came out a year later, because bird flu surfaced again after the 2009 pandemic, on the 100th anniversary, and then another one for Covid. So five afterwards, they all ended the same way. The body of the afterward is radically different, but they all ended the same way that, you know, you looked at what happened in 1918, you can see back then because of lies that were told by government for very different reasons than this time. Society certainly frayed and in some places, almost disintegrated. Normally, in a disaster, people come together. You know, I live in New Orleans. After Katrina, this was one of the sweetest places you could be. Well, you know, the traffic lights didn't work for months, and nobody was trying to run through that. Everybody was incredibly courteous. It was really nice letting each other go at a traffic light and taking turns. Obviously, during the disaster itself, people were really trying to help each other. That did not happen in 1918. People felt alienated and were terrified. And when they're alienated, it's everybody out for themselves. When you trust each other, I mean, society at bottom depends upon trust. And without trust, it's going to disintegrate eventually. That really is the crucial thing. By the same token, somebody in authority needs to deserve trust. You know, if they start telling you false things that they know are false, people are going to figure that out possibly sooner rather than later, and then there's no hope.
- [43:39]
John Barry
Donald Trump bears a great deal, not all of it, but a great deal of responsibility for setting our country down this terrible path in early 2020.
- [43:48]
Donald Trump
Now, the virus that we're talking about having to do, you know, a lot of people think that goes away, away in April with the heat as the heat comes in, when you have 15 people and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done. It's going to disappear one day. It's like a miracle. It will disappear.
- [44:08]
John Barry
Maybe he meant April 20, 30, 15 days to slow the spread. What do you say? Liberate Michigan or Free Michigan? When people were protesting that state's Covid restrictions. Well, we don't have to go through all that again, but I do remember that it was, I mean, it was almost impossible to believe. He kneecapped his own country's response because he just didn't want to deal with it. He just didn't care. But about fear. You ever read Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace?
- [44:37]
Historian
No.
- [44:37]
John Barry
About the Algerian revolt against French colonialism. There's a sentence in that book that I never forgotten. Not a sentence, a paragraph, if you will, from the prefect of Algiers. He talked about how the French were torturing Algerians. And he said, if you scratch the varnish of this so called human civilization we have, scratch the surface, he said, underneath you find fear. This thing we called civilization is held together by a thread. It is not as stable as it appears. Scratch underneath the polish and you see the ugliness come out. Sorry I try to get so philosophical with you here, John, but last thing, important lesson to apply to the next pandemic, and that is closures. Schools, businesses, offices, sporting events. The big one that really rankled people. Because in this pandemic, as you said at the beginning of our conversation here, what was it, eight hours ago already, that most of the time young people are the victims. For Covid, that was not the case. So therefore closing schools was wrong, or keeping them closed for as long as they were closed was bad. How do we untangle this? Because this is a really touchy issue.
- [45:49]
Historian
Well, it's not so much a question of untangling as it is, you know, look at the data that's coming in. I'm not so sure that closing the schools in 2020 was the wrong thing to do. Actually, in 2020, I was a member of several ad hoc committee advisory groups. I'd been involved in the pandemic preparedness effort for, at that point, I guess, 16 years. But I actually advised against closing schools in 2020 to those few people who asked me. I don't know that anybody paid any attention to what I said, but that was my position. Right now I'm not so sure that I was right. It's Clear that kids in general are not very vulnerable to that virus, although there are 16 or 1800 kids who died. But closing schools was productive in slowing the spread. Now, how long you want to do that, what other measures you want to take, it's not clear. But the most important thing is look at the data. Do not fight the last war. Do not assume that closing schools is the wrong thing to do. One of the things that disturbs me is how little real analysis has come out of the last few years. For example, we don't really know if very targeted interventions, what kind of impact they would have on the spread. You clearly don't want to shut down an entire economy if you can avoid it. Even if you do do that, you can't sustain it for an indefinite period of time. Going back to 1918, this data was, you know, pretty telling to me. There were 120 army camps training soldiers in the United States. 99 of them tried to do, impose some kind of intervention that to limit spread, you know, quarantines and so forth. 21 did nothing. There was no statistical difference between the 99 camps that did something and the 21 camps that did nothing. But the epidemiologist who did this study also did a qualitative study, not just statistical, and he looked at what camps actually did, and he discovered that only a tiny handful of camps were able to sustain the intervention for more than a few weeks. And for those camps that did that, there was benefit. So my sense was, if you can't sustain an intervention in an army base during a war, what can you do in a civilian community during peacetime? It really has to be targeted. It really has to be. Well, I hate to use the word sold, but you do have to sell that.
- [48:47]
John Barry
You have to convince people to cooperate, set expectations, right? Realistic expectations.
- [48:52]
Historian
You have to set expectations. You have to recognize and say at the beginning, we may impose these, lift them, and then reimpose them. That you can expect that when things pick up again. There was a lot of publicity during COVID about resistance to masks in 1918. People talk about San Francisco and what happened in San Francisco. They did impose masks. There was plenty of cooperation and adherence to that initially, but they then lifted that. The pandemic surged again, and they reimposed it. The opposition surfaced when they reimposed it because people had felt they were free, they were out of jail. And then you're saying, no, no, no, you're going back in the camp. That's when the opposition surfaced. You know, there was, by and large in 1918, real cooperation with efforts to contain, with all the public health measures, even to the extent, you know, people love their pets. In Katrina, the coast guard had to change their rules about rescuing people because people were refusing to leave their pets. In 1918, in Phoenix, when there were rumors that dogs spread influenza, people were killing their pets, murdering their pets. You know, the paper said Phoenix could soon be dogless. So that's how much fear there was that people were killing their pets. That's almost unimaginable.
- [50:19]
John Barry
Regardless what the government says, people may act the way they feel they need to, so they may defy the government orders, or they may not even need to hear the government to tell them to stay home. Home if a pandemic is bad enough. I think you brought this up with me one of our past conversations, that in certain places in the United States, the government, local government, whoever it was, was telling people, don't worry. There's nothing to worry about here. But people saw their neighbors dying, so they stayed home. Even now, there are people today, five years after Covid, still treating it like we're in the middle of 2021, and there's no vaccine available. And I'm not criticizing these people. I choose not to live my life that way. I did wear a mask recently on an airplane. But, yeah, there are still people who are very, very afraid of catching COVID 19.
- [51:05]
Historian
Well, I had my second case about three weeks ago.
- [51:09]
John Barry
So how was it?
- [51:10]
Historian
It was about as mild as you can get without being asymptomatic.
- [51:14]
John Barry
That's good. Well, people are still dying.
- [51:16]
Historian
And strangely enough, my wife didn't get it. I was happy not to share.
- [51:21]
John Barry
We thank John Barry for sharing his knowledge with us. And as I was wrapping up this episode, I caught an article at the New York Times website about long Covid. Five years and hundreds of millions of cases after the World Health Organization declared the pandemic. The article states scientists are getting a clear picture of how the virus can affect the body long after an infection seems to pass. Some of these effects, such as chronic fatigue and brain fog, are considered long Covid, defined as symptoms from an infection that persist for at least three months. By some estimates, 400 million people worldwide have been diagnosed with some form of long Covid. But an infection can also lead to other issues, including lung and heart damage and microbiome changes in the gut. They may not always be recognized as long Covid, but can still have a lasting effect on your health. On the next episode of history. As it happens, Richard Nixon had an enemies list. He had two lists, actually, but he tried to keep them secret. Donald Trump declares his enemies out in the open. What can the Nixon drama teach us about what's happening in our country today? That is next, as we report history as it happens. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday. My newsletter every Friday. Sign up@historyasithappens.com or just go to Substack and search for history as it Happens.