by
Abby Zimet, Further columnist

Houston's Dr. Joseph Varon comforts an older COVID-19 patient on Thanksgiving. Photo by Go Nakamura/Getty Images

COVID soars. The U.S. now has almost 15 million cases, a rise of roughly 20% in a week; last week saw record levels of both cases - 196,200 - and deaths - 15,000, or about a 9/11 every day, with health officials warning the upcoming holidays could be "the darkest weeks in modern American medical history." Meanwhile, a pathological, through-the-looking-glass government and its GOP death cult, having enabled what scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized state abandonment,” continues to fail in massive, unholy, staggeringly inept ways. Days after Mike Pompeo invited 900 people to packed indoor parties and a COVID-positive Rudy Giuiliani crisscrossed the country to rant about fictional election fraud at hearings in three states that then shut down their legislatures thanks to his "epitome of COVID-19 irresponsbility," news came that Trump and his hapless cronies had inexplicably turned down offers from Pfizer to buy more of their vital vaccine. As first reported by the New York Times, the U.S. earlier agreed to buy 100 million doses of the Pfizer drug, developed with the German company BioNTech, but because the vaccine takes two injections to work, those doses would only protect 50 million people. In late summer, Pfizer reportedly offered multiple times to sell the U.S. more but the U.S. said - WTF - no. Since then, Pfizer has struck deals with multiple other countries, and have told the now-besieged U.S. they will likely not have more until at least June. Ergo, despite all his "America First" nationalist gobbledygook, Trump blew it, bigly, again.

In retrospect, the WaPo notes, those numbers represent an even greater betrayal. Trump originally promised 300 million doses, which means many states, including Maine, will now receive about a tenth of what they need and thought they were getting, with some saying they won't even get enough to cover hospital health care workers. But Trump is still eagerly holding fast to his deadly lies and screw-ups. On Tuesday, citing his much-touted Operation Warp Speed that ultimately did nothing to facilitate any solution, the White House plans a so-called Vaccine Summit wherein "the president looks forward to convening leaders from the federal government, state governments, private sector, military, and scientific community...as the administration prepares to deliver this historic, life-saving vaccine to every zip code in the United States within 24 hours of an FDA approval.” The laughable catch: Both Pfizer and Moderna, the leading COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers, have declined the invite to what's widely viewed as a pointless, fraudulent public relations stunt aimed at enabling Trump to take credit for actions he not only didn't support, but often actively sabotaged. The brutal truth, contained in the reported last words of former GOP Alabama state senator Larry Dixon, who died last week of COVID: "We messed up."

Across the country, bone-weary doctors, nurses and other health workers are strugglling with and chronicling that daily reality. In interviews with CNN, Dr. Joseph Varon, who's worked 256 days straight as chief of staff at Houston's United Memorial Medical Center, describes a harrowing, "never-ending story that is "taking a huge toll," citing nurses who in the middle of the day will start crying in anguish at the flood of patients. At Thanksgiving, Varon appeared in a devastating photo as he hugged a crying, older COVID patient. "It's very difficult," he said. "You are inside a room where people come in in 'spacesuits,' you have no communication with anybody else...You feel that you are alone." Warning of a point when hospitals may have to choose which patients live or die, he again urges basics like masks and distancing: "People are out there (in) bars, restaurants, malls - it's crazy. It’s like we work, work, work, work, work, and people don’t listen, and they end up in my ICU.” Doctors in Boston, home to some of the world's greatest public health experts, echo him; many women and people of color - a renowned, India-born doctor who has a security detail due to racist threats, a black female specialist who works 100 hours a week and was just diagnosed with anxiety disorder - cite our social and political lapses as well. Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiology professor at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, describes a "mind-bending, 'Twilight Zone' experience that makes you ask why the hell we even bother.” “At almost every step of this pandemic, we have failed magnificently as a country,” he charges. "I'm astounded by the dysfunction, the willingness to just stay the course as hundreds of thousands of people die...I’ve realized that when we need to rise up as a country, we have truly no moral capacity to do it."