Julian Roup – Do I have the virus? I find myself understanding Trump. Ep32

In Episode 32 of his new book, author Julian Roup hears Boris’s regrets and begins to understand Trump’s Covid-19 approach.

In case you missed Episode 31, click here.

Life in a Time of Plague

Sussex, 6th may 2020

By Julian Roup 

I wake up at 6am as usual and hear the impassioned singing of my mystery bird in the hedge next to my bedroom. His music comes through my window at high decibels and I have a light-bulb moment. I get out of bed, gingerly as ever, hold my laptop out the window on ‘record’, and capture 30 seconds of song. I will send it to my sister Jay and ask her to send it on to ornithologist, Tim Dee, author of Four Fields and Greenery among others, to see if he can identify the canary-like trilling song for me. It would be so nice to know the name of this songster who lives cheek by jowl with me and whose song is better than any alarm clock.

The day feels like Sunday, and I have to think a bit to work out that it is in fact Wednesday. I remind myself that I have a Skype call booked for 9am with the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa, a client of mine through Chapel & York. I wonder how they are managing in lockdown.

The 6am BBC news is led by an item on President Trump. He will shortly disband his Covid-19 Advisory Committee, even as deaths top 70,000 in the US, and replace it with an Economic Advisory Committee. He is signalling a political change of emphasis from trying to save lives to saving jobs. He says that he accepts that this policy will mean that he has to put out ‘embers and even small fires’ of Covid-19 infections, but that is what he will do.

Not for the first time in my life, I wonder if I have got it wrong politically with my liberal beliefs, and that Trump, for all his seeming craziness, is in fact, in this instance at least, crazy like a fox. In this life and death struggle that is in some ways like a game of chess, we have to accept the need to sacrifice pawns to save a Queen or King. Maybe America will be more accepting of a few thousand more deaths than the death of thousands of job-creating businesses and industries? I don’t know, but I do know that the American voters knew what they were getting in Trump and voted for him anyway, and that he understands their mindset far better than me.

The Jewish culture I grew up in believes that if you ‘save one life you save the world’ so for me the emphasis would always have to be life over money. But I also know that money means life to millions and its loss will mean death for too many. I would not make much of a general. I recognise that an effective warrior is prepared to sacrifice his soldiers to win a war.

I have been politically wrong so often in my life that I now distrust my own political judgment. I believed that the coming of democracy in South Africa in 1994 would be an unalloyed good and when it delivered Nelson Mandela I felt vindicated in my beliefs, but then we got President Zuma, who robbed the country blind and nobody touched him.

In Britain, during the Brexit campaign I voted to Remain in the EU, assuming blithely that most British voters would agree with me, seeing economic and security self-interest as being the way to go, to remain part of one of the most powerful political forces for good in the world. I got that wrong, didn’t I? It was close, but my side lost.

And America voted for Trump, although Hilary Clinton got the greater number of individual votes. So my political antennae are suspect, and I no longer trust my own gut instinct on what people will do. So maybe, just maybe, Trump is right in this political judgment. Much as I despise him and all he stands for, I recognise that in the long run, in the greater scheme of things, he may be doing America a favour by sacrificing the lives of voters to fix the economy. Whereas, if I was President, I would beggar my neighbours by trying to save their lives.

But amid all the mayhem, there is suddenly, miraculously, very good news. I almost don’t want to believe it. But it’s all over the press; Reuters news agency breaks the story and everyone from the New York Times to the Jewish Chronicle, to the Times of India is reporting it.

Israeli researchers have successfully completed the development phase of a Covid-19 antibody, in a significant step towards developing a viable vaccine for the virus. And if that is not good news, what is?

The findings at the Israeli Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) were announced in a statement by the Israeli Defence Ministry on Monday.

Israeli Defence Minister Naftali Bennett, who visited the Institute on Monday, said in statement that the step was a “significant breakthrough in finding an antidote for the coronavirus”.

He said: “I am proud of the Biological Institute staff, who have made a major breakthrough. Jewish creativity and ingenuity brought about this amazing development.”

Mr Bennett’s statement noted that the Institute was patenting the antibody formula and that an international manufacturer would be sought to mass-produce it.

Apparently the antibody is derived from a single cell recovered from the blood of a patient who has recovered from Covid-19. These sources are seen as particularly promising in vaccine development.  The Institute, which is based at Ness Ziona in central Israel, has been among the laboratories leading Israel’s fight against coronavirus.

A second Israeli research team at MigVax, an affiliate of MIGAL Galilee Research Institute, is also reportedly close to completing the first phase of development on a vaccine and recently received an injection of $12 million to accelerate research.

Israel’s coronavirus picture has been gradually improving over the past few days. On Monday, the Israeli Health Ministry reported just 23 new cases of the virus over the previous 24 hours – the lowest daily rise in six weeks, while the number of patients on ventilators has also dropped to 76. Israel’s death toll from the virus stands at 235.

Here in Britain, one of the scientific experts advising the Government on managing the virus, Professor Neil Ferguson, known as ‘Professor Lockdown’, has just resigned after breaking the rules to meet his married lover.

Professor Ferguson, the epidemiologist whose modelling helped shape Britain’s coronavirus lockdown strategy, has quit as a government adviser after flouting the rules by receiving visits from his lover at his home.

Ferguson ran the group of scientists at Imperial College London, whose projections helped persuade ministers of the need to impose stringent physical distancing rules, or risk the NHS being overwhelmed.

In a statement on Tuesday, he said he was resigning his post on the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), over an ‘error of judgment’.

His lover, Antonia Staats, had crossed London from her family home to visit ‘Professor Lockdown’ on at least two occasions since the stay-at-home measures were imposed. Friends told the newspaper that Staats did not believe their actions to be hypocritical because she considered the households to be one.

So, one rule for us and another for our masters. Same old, same old. I can only wonder if after this excitement the two households are still one.

In Prime Minister’s Question Time at Westminster today Boris said: “I bitterly regret the care home epidemic.” I bet he does, for all of the two seconds it took to say that. And he also said that from Monday May 11, the lockdown would start to be lifted. So Britain’s time in lockdown is coming to an end. For how long nobody is sure; we may have to scurry back inside if a second wave of infection strikes. But one thing is certain, as we start coming out of our homes, we will be emerging into a world which is dramatically changed in many ways and which will take years to fix.

Will we remember how we were let down at every level by this incompetent apology of a government, or will we shrug it off and move on, complacent in the face of our unhappy dead and their grieving families, and our hurt and bewildered communities?

Click here for Episode 33.

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