Monthly Archives: August 2020

New device to help war on drugs

Floyd County police use device to detect drugs before they see them.

FLOYD COUNTY, Ga - Floyd County police have a new tool in their battle against the opioid crisis.Investigators saidit's an efficient way to find drugs that are not in plain sight.

"It's called a Viken detection x-ray imager. It sees through surfaces, car panels, walls, in the search for, in our case, illicit contraband," said Floyd County Police Officer Baker Harbin.

Police said it works like a handheld X-ray machine and can detect contraband hidden in a car or building.

Police will use the device to scan a portion of a vehicle, like a door panel or seat, where something illegal might be stashed. During training, the device picked up an image of a large amount of meth hidden in a compartment above the rear tire of an SUV.

The device can pick up drugs, bundles of cash, even guns.

"Most guns have some bit of plastic, like our Glock, so it's going to show," said Harbin.

Officer Harbin saidbecause it is similar to an X-ray, it will not be used on people or cars with people inside.

"Roadside if we were to use this machine, it would be a vehicle we have consent to search or probable cause to search," said Officer Harbin.

Police will also use it while searching a home or building with a search warrant.

The Floyd County Police Department was oneof only fivedepartments across the country to receive a grant for the imaging device.Officers saidthey've been particularly impacted by the opiod crisis.

"In the past twoyears, we've had an exponential growth of opiod deaths. With the number of state highways, corridors that are being used to traffic drugs to Rome, away from Rome or through it.," said Harbin.

Officer Harbin says this will make a tremndous difference when it comes to keeping drugs off the streets.

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Police in Floyd County have new tool to fight the war on drugs - FOX 5 Atlanta

When Maya Shaw first entered the world of recreational cannabis, she found an industry skilled at churning out Instagrammable content but unableor unwillingto confront its own problems.

"It's crazy that no one was really talking about the fact that we were openly profiting off cannabis and making it cute and making it fun and accessible," says the Richmond, Va., founder and namesake of online smoke shop Shaw. "And it's like, OK, that's cool, but can we have a conversation about what's happening behind the scenes? The War on Drugs?"

Shaw is now part of a group aiming to start those hardconversationsand put some money where the discussion is.

The 27-year-old entrepreneur is an inaugural member of the Floret Coalition, a business collective with the mission of bringing together small businesses in the weed space who are eager to become involved in the fight for restorative justice but might not be entirely sure how or where to start.

The Floret Coalition is a division ofBroccoli, a Portland arts and culture magazine centered on cannabis. It operates as a modified giving circle: Small cannabusinesses join the coalition, receive an onboarding packet and commit to a minimum monthly donation. When the group's board announces the charity of the month, all Floret Coalition members direct donations straight to the recipients.

The three-member board vets each charity, and the board changes yearly. For the coalition's first year, Shaw is joined by entrepreneur and podcaster Mennlay Golokeh Aggrey and cannabis advocate Kassia Graham.

Floret emerged as "both a response and a realization that we had some community power that we could activate beyond just what we could do individually," says Anja Charbonneau,Broccoli's editor in chief. "Seeing the way that people were willing to open their wallets during the first wave of this summer's protests really gave us the push to believe that people were ready to rally."

Shaw puts it another way: "It's time to tell your friends to pull up."

WW: Did the idea for the Floret Coalition arise in response to the George Floyd uprising or had it been in the works before then?

Anja Charbonneau:Floret getting started in June was not only a reaction to the recent Black Lives Matters uprisings but also addressing a longer-term need that we've seen in cannabis to find tangible, financial ways to give back.

Maya Shaw:It was pretty seamless. Anja sent a message to the three of us, and she was just like, "Here's what I want to create, and the three of you would be an awesome first team of board members." And I couldn't agree more. We're all pretty like-minded in the sense that we want to do the right thing and we want to make sure that we're making this the best that it can besetting the ground, setting the stakes, and showing up for our community.

What criteria do organizations need to meet in order to qualify to receive donations?

Shaw:We want to make sure that we are really choosing organizations that are going to use the money properly. We're focused on organizations created so that these communities can have the same resources already available within communities that haven't been affected as such by the War on Drugs. Knowing that the Black community, the Latinx community, and Indigenous people overall are affected most, there's so much opportunity there. It's not necessarily just one specific thing. There are so many pockets and different crevices where we can put the money knowing it's going back into communities in need that are affected.

What criteria must businesses meet to join the coalition, aside from being cannabis adjacent and donation consistency?

Charbonneau:That's pretty much it. The funniest example I have is a brand that makes catnip toys shaped like joints. They're like, "Does this count?" Of courseyou're making money off the idea of weed, so why not?

Can you explain the difference between performative allyship and, as Rihanna put it, "pulling up"?

Shaw:Brands just really need to be honest with themselves in terms of the long run. Silence speaks louder than anything.This industry is built on the backs of Black people, Latin people and Indigenous people, and anyone profiting off this industry needs to be finding a way to donate back to the communities that are affected negatively by the injustice in the industry. It's almost, in a sense, reparations, or reworking profit. If you're profiting, you also need to be giving back.

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The Floret Coalition Is Adapting the Giving Circle Model to Help Address the Damage of the War on Drugs - Willamette Week

From A Thousand Cuts (2020), dir. Ramona Diaz (all images courtesy David Magdael & Associates)

On July 10 of this year, the Philippines House of Representatives voted 70-11 against the license renewal for ABS-CBN, the countrys largest media network. Maria Ressa, executive editor of Rappler, another Filipino news outlet, has faced spurious charges of cyber libel and tax evasion. She sees this as retribution for her four-year crusade against the dictatorial President Rodrigo Duterte, as well as his ever-growing army of online supporters who cheer on his sexism, homophobia, and violence.

It is against this bleak political landscape that director Ramona Diaz sets her new documentary A Thousand Cuts, in which Ressa and Rapplers fight against Dutertes war on the press takes center stage. Diaz and Ressa sat down with Hyperallergic for an interview over Zoom. It started with me wanting to make a film on Dutertes war on drugs, Diaz explains. The global audience would probably look at that and think it to be something that was affecting only people in the Philippines. Marias was the loudest voice against Duterte. She was questioning the government-aided dissemination of disinformation and connecting it with Dutertes impunity. The issue of disinformation is very global, and I wanted people all over the world to take note.

It all goes back to Silicon Valley, Ressa adds. A Thousand Cuts follows the Philippines 2019 legislative elections, when for the first time in 80 years, the opposition failed to secure even a single seat. It illuminates the Duterte governments use of propaganda and social media to lie to their citizens, obscuring what many of them know to be the truth. This post-truth reality is one many people are now far too familiar with, even outside the Philippines. When Facebook sells our most vulnerable data to the highest bidder, we no more have facts to hold each other accountable by. Accountability from the tech companies is a prerequisite to claim our democracies back. You do not have democracy if you dont have facts, Ressa asserts. In one scene, Duterte tells a Rappler journalist, You will be allowed to criticize us. But you will go to jail for your crimes. I was immediately reminded of the likes of Gauri Lankesh and Vikram Joshi, journalists back home in India who were murdered for speaking out against the countrys Hindu nationalist government.

Diazs previous film, Motherland (2017), focused on the worlds busiest maternity ward in Manilas Dr. Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital. Its concurrent themes of womens bodies and the states multi-pronged control over them are carried into A Thousand Cuts. Dutertes government directly encourages rape threats and the sexist dehumanization of Ressa and her colleagues, such as reporter Pia Ranada. At the same time, the state uses the hyper-sexualized bodies of women like pop star Mocha Uson to titillate citizens into voting their way. We must never get used to it, Diaz insists. If every time he opens his mouth, something misogynist comes out, it should shock us every time. Ressa sums up the tragic virulence of this scenario when she responds, Which he are you referring to? As much as Dutertes jokes may shock, the women in his crowds hooting in approval deal the heaviest blow. Misogyny is infuriating, but its even worse to see who willingly serves as its foot soldiers.

In a scene at a rally, Duterte uses his microphone to demonstrate a vulgar joke about his penis. It inescapably brings to mind a president who was plainly recorded boasting about grabbing women by their private parts. Misogyny, fascism, repression of the press, and fake news go hand in hand, and this is not solely a Filipino problem. They surround people in so many countries so densely that we can become dulled to their effects. A Thousand Cuts is a firm refusal to let unholy intersectional fascism be normalized. During a Rappler holiday party, Ressa tells her colleagues, We cannot become monsters when fighting monsters. A Thousand Cuts is a document of journalistic resistance to monsters and their methods of seducing people into inertness. To finish her toast, Ressa says:And the only thing that keeps us from becoming monsters is love.

A Thousand Cuts opens in virtual cinemas August 7.

Link:

Exposing Rodrigo Duterte's War on the Free Press - Hyperallergic

The red or pink pills usually aren't much larger than the fingernail on your pinky. They also don't cost too much - between two and four euros each. Nevertheless, they are among the most significant problems currently facing Bangladesh. Called Yaba, the drug is currently overwhelming the South Asian country.

Estimates hold that around 7 million of the country's 164 million residents are addicted to drugs. Fully 5 million of them are thought to be hooked on Yaba. A mixture of methamphetamines and caffeine, it makes users feel more confident and energetic. Users tend to forego sleep and eat very little, with many taking the drug to help them work longer hours and earn more money for their families. But others just take it to get high.

The pills are produced in industrial quantities next door in Myanmar before being smuggled into Bangladesh across the southern border. In 2018 alone, security personnel confiscated fully 53 million of the pills.

Officially, alcohol and drugs are prohibited in the Muslim country. Nevertheless, Bangladesh is no small part of the methamphetamine problem in South and East Asia, where confiscations of the synthetic drug rose by a factor of eight in the 10 years between 2007 and 2017 - to fully 82 tons according to the UN's most recent World Drug Report released in 2019. The total represents almost 45 percent of all such seizures around the world.

In an attempt to get the drug problem under control, the government in Dhaka has opted for severity over the last two years in its fight against both drug dealers and users. Violence has been a frequent outcome.

The anti-drug campaign carried out by the Bangladeshi government has been reminiscent of the brutal "War on Drugs" launched by Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte after he rose to power in June 2016. Suspected drug criminals are essentially executed by Duterte's troops and the offensive has already resulted in tens of thousands of deaths.

Amnesty International alleges that the government in Dhaka has been similarly brutal in its treatment of alleged dealers and users. The human rights organization has accused Bangladesh of launching a "wave of extrajudicial killings," claiming that 466 people were killed in 2018 alone as part of the anti-drug campaign. That number, the Amnesty report claims, is three times higher than in 2017 and "the highest in a single year in decades."

In a 2019 report, the organization wrote that the victims were initially apprehended by police or simply disappeared. The authorities, according to the report, consistently tell family members that they have no idea where the suspected drug dealers might be. Later, when their bodies are found, the authorities frequently claim that the victim died in a "gunfight."

French photographer Olivier Jobard and investigative journalist Charles Emptaz have looked into the cases of two men who died in one of these alleged "gunfights" in southern Bangladesh. In the course of their reporting, they uncovered several inconsistencies and give credence to suspicions that the two men were executed by Bangladeshi security personnel.

The following photo gallery is a collection of images taken by Jobard showing the means used by the Bangladeshi authorities in their anti-drug campaign:

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Fighting the Yaba Pill: The Death Toll Mounts in Bangladesh's Drug War - DER SPIEGEL

The Guardia Civil made huge progress in the war against organised crime by taking down five very active drug outlets in Torrevieja.

THE criminal outfits were part of an organisation run by several brothers who had a team of drug dealers operating throughout the city.

In total, five homes were raided as part of this operation, four in Torrevieja and one in San Pedro del Pinatar, with a total of 115 grams of marijuana, 200 grams of a cutting substance, 1 precision scale, 3 doses of a doping substance, and 2 vehicles used to acquire more drugs from the outskirts of Murcia, all being seized. Upon thorough search of the properties, 11,000 in cash was also found.

An investigation began in October 2019 following a complaint from a neighbour about the amount of people moving in and out of a house, which happened at all hours of the day and night.

The extensive investigation eventually resulted in nine people being arrested, all between the ages of 25 and 50, and of Moroccan and Algerian nationalities.

They have all been charged and provisionally released pending trial.

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Guardia Civil execute huge drugs bust in the war on crime in Torrevieja - Euro Weekly News

The plummeting human rights situation in the Philippines got even worse this week as the government began considering bills to reinstate the death penalty. The move by the House Committee on Justice came a week after President Rodrigo Duterte used his State of the Nation Address to call for capital punishment by lethal injection for drug offenders.

For years, the Philippines put people to death, particularly in cases of so-called heinous crimes. But President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, under pressure from the Catholic Church, abolished the death penalty in 2006. Human Rights Watch opposes the death penalty in all circumstances because it is inherently cruel and irreversible.

In 2007, the Philippines ratified the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which requires countries to abolish the death penalty. Countries that are parties to the covenant and the protocol cannot reinstate the death penalty without violating their obligations under international human rights law. Doing so would also likely result in more than just statements of concern from foreign trade partners such as the European Union.

The Duterte governments overwhelming majority in Congress and continuing efforts to promote its campaign against illegal drugs means the justice committee is likely to support death penalty bills. Dutertes war on drugs has resulted in the deaths of more than 6,000 persons at the hands of the Philippine National Police and thousands more by unidentified gunmen. Accountability for these police killings, including those that victimized children, is practically nonexistent.

Adopting the death penalty will mean spilling more blood in the name of Dutertes drug war. It will lead the Philippines to descend further into a rights-violating abyss. And the government will lose credibility and leverage to negotiate on behalf of Filipinos who face execution abroad.

Along with the Philippines withdrawal from the International Criminal Court in March 2019 and its human rights disinformation campaign at the United Nations Human Rights Council, reimposing the death penalty would only serve to further cement the countrys growing reputation as an international human rights pariah.

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Death Penalty Danger in the Philippines - Human Rights Watch

With nearly $32 million available from recreational marijuana taxes, the state expects to award grants next month to help repair damage from the war on drugs, and Springfield hopes to be a player. Mayor Jim Langfelder says the city has applied for a grant that would fund home rehabilitation to help neighborhoods deemed by the state to have been disproportionately impacted by the government's war on drugs. The mayor pegged the request at more than $700,000, which he said was the maximum allowable, and added that the city also has made a smaller request for planning efforts. Both public and private entities are eligible for grants set to be awarded by a state board that includes elected officials and representatives of agencies ranging from the Department of Corrections to the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity. Langfelder says that he's endorsed a grant application submitted by The Outlet, a nonprofit agency that provides mentoring to fatherless kids. Michael Phelon, Outlet founder and chief executive officer, could not be immediately reached for comment.

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WE'RE IN THE MONEY, MAYBE | Cap City - Illinois Times

For all practical intents, the United States is at war with China. This may come as a surprise since no bullets have been fired nor declarations made. Yet there is little question that, for over a decade, the Chinese government has engaged in a sustained campaign of cyber-enabled economic aggression against us and our allies. They have targeted our most productive economic sectors and are currently winning. But as we restart our economy after Covid-19, we have a unique opportunity to shift this fight decisively back in our favor.

At the heart of this conflict is a series of grand economic competitions across key industries, including telecommunications, advanced computing, robotics, energy generation, resource extraction, aerospace, and the medical sciences, to name just a few. We are currently facing off with China on 5G technology, machine learning, quantum computing, nuclear and solar power, satellites, rare earth metals, biotechnology, and pharmaceuticals. Fundamental to the Chinese strategy for winning in each of these areasand many moreis the rampant theft of American intellectual property.

The Chinese playbook is deceptively simple: Why spend trillions of dollars on basic science or advanced research when it can be stolen with almost no penalties? The Chinese government is stunningly good at this theft. Not only do they employ thousands of government operatives to engage in this effort, a new federal indictment charges that they have fostered a criminal hacker class that works for its personal economic gain as well as for the Chinese state.

This brazen theft is not just limited to intellectual property. It also involves the pilfering of massive amounts of datafrom the likes of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Equifax, Marriott, and Anthemthat will fuel intelligence operations and train machine learning algorithms, generating economic and political gain for decades.

Chinese companies also look to acquire American technology through investment, acquisition, litigation, and bankruptcy, turning our own markets and courts against us. They masquerade as American companies while under the control of the Chinese government. Even worse, they take advantage of our companies looking to do business in China by extorting them into creating joint ventures, transferring intellectual property, and providing data to the Chinese Communist Party.

They likewise send students and researchers to our best research universities, all the while pressuring them to steal information for the Chinese state. The recent indictment of a Chinese military officer allegedly masquerading as a researcher at Stanford is but one such example. Chinese intelligence agencies likewise seek to co-opt American academics by providing grant funding for joint research projects and invitations to write for cash.

All of this economic warfare is directed at one key goal: to replace the United States as the global leader. Their agents do this by handing over the spoils of the state-run hacking and extortion campaign to Chinese companies which, in turn, exploit Chinese (and other) workers to make goods at reduced cost, selling them back to us and our allies, making us more reliant upon them.

Weve all now seen the price of this reliance in the difficulty many Americans face in getting medical gear and life-saving drugs. But our reliance is hardly limited to these goods. We also rely on China for all manner of finished goods and key inputs, the loss of which could grind our economy to a virtual halt overnight. Indeed, years ago, the Chinese created a plan to make us reliant on them in a dozen key areas. They now see Covid-19 as an opportunity to surge forward. But it need not be so. We have a chance, in this very moment of economic turmoil, to regain the edge.

First, the U.S. government must stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our private sector to protect and push back. Just as the Chinese back their companies in competition with us, we must do the same for our industry. We should collect and share actionable threat intelligence and actively collaborate with the private sector to protect them through collective defense. We must also push back, using all elements of national power, to end the Chinese campaign of cyber-enabled economic warfare, including through the use of trade measures, sanctions, persistent cyber engagement, and, where necessary, more aggressive actions. We cannot allow trade deals or our desire for cheap Chinese goods to force us to sit on our hands, leaving our private sector alone to fight this war. Doing so means certain defeat.

Second, we must also work with our allies across the globe, including in the Indo-Pacific region, which the administration has identified as the single most consequential region for our future. Indias recent travails at Chinas hands should be a warning to all in the region and we must reject this aggression just as we have in the South China Sea. Likewise, having brought the British back on board on 5G, we must also now convince Germany to join this unified front. America need not stand alone. Making common cause with our longstanding allies is the right approach.

Finally, as we look to restart our economy, we must incentivize Americans to invest their money here and protect our innovation base. We must create tax and regulatory incentives that encourage investment in American companies struggling to survive and protect their intellectual property. These investors should be able to take advantage of low-cost capital to reorganize and reorient companies working on dual-use technologies to accelerate us into recovery and bring manufacturing and jobs back to the United States.

If we are to preserve this nation and remain a global leader, we cannot permit the continued theft of our childrens future right from under our noses. Now is the time to act.

Gen. (Ret) Keith B. Alexander is the former director of the National Security Agency and Founding Commander of United States Cyber Command, and currently serves as chairman, president and co-CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity, a start-up technology company focused on network threat analytics and collective defense and is on the Board of Advisors for the National Security Institute at George Mason Universitys Scalia Law School. Jamil N. Jaffer is the former chief counsel and senior advisor to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and served in senior national security roles in the George W. Bush Justice Department and White House, and currently serves as senior vice president for strategy, partnerships and corporate development at IronNet Cybersecurity and as the founder and executive director of NSI.

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China Is Waging Cyber-Enabled Economic War on the U.S. How to Fight Back. - Barron's

The juvenile justice system was created 120 years ago to reform and rehabilitate wayward youth to ensure they had the opportunity to achieve productive futures. To this end, it was widely accepted that juvenile system involvement should remain confidential and that all records should be sealed or eradicated to ensure youth a clean slate upon reaching adulthood. Juvenile records laws were enacted to protect the privacy of system-involved youth.

Today, however, the privacy protections afforded by juvenile records laws have hollowed out by loopholes and limitations that make confidentiality the exception more than the rule for many juvenile offenders. The broad accessibility permitted by juvenile records laws combined with technological innovation in data storage and mining make juvenile record information more available than ever. This means, more often than not, that the record of offenses children commit can be accessed by law enforcement, employers, landlords, schools and the public.

The consequences of the loss of juvenile system anonymity are far-reaching for youth and include an inability to secure housing, maintain stable employment and pursue post-secondary opportunities. The impact of these collateral consequences is supported by the data: In college admissions, 62.5% of system-involved youth were discouraged from completing college applications because of a records disclosure requirement, while 20% of applicants who disclosed records information were automatically denied admission.

Andrew Keats

Of the over 90% of employers who run background checks on applicants, over 40% reported that they would definitely or probably not hire an applicant with a record for a job not requiring a college degree, while 50% were less likely to call back or extend a job offer. Furthermore, 11% of these employers reported that even an applicant with a minor criminal infraction would not be hired. The existence of a juvenile record may also foreclose a young person and/or their entire family from securing public housing.

Black youth suffer the collateral consequences of juvenile record disclosure most severely. It is widely known that Black youth are subject to disproportionate system involvement. It is less widely recognized, however, that the records of this disproportionate system involvement enable a disproportionate level of racial discrimination long after their actual system involvement is over.

While Black youth represent only 15% of the U.S. population between the ages of 10-17, they represent 26% of all juvenile arrests and 30% of all delinquency referrals. Black youth represent 45% of all preadjudication decisions and 46% of cases transferred to adult criminal court. These records are all searchable by and available to the individuals with power to provide youth opportunities.

So why is a system intended to rehabilitate kids being used to mark them for a lifetime of discrimination?

The answer lies in the changing nature of Americas own unique brand of institutionalized racism over the last century. As a result of sweeping civil rights victories in the 1960s, America increasingly relied on the criminalization of Black people, and especially Black children, to justify continued oppression and inequality.

From the war on drugs to the myth of the child superpredator, racist stereotypes of Black people and particularly Black youth, together with discriminatory policies (like Broken Windows and stop-and-frisk) afforded white America the opportunity to transform skin color into a record of system involvement that could legally justify continued discrimination.

Harsh punishments enacted in the 1990s amplified the stakes of early system involvement mandatory sentencing schemes, youth transfer and new three strikes laws ushered in our modern era of mass incarceration. Under this system of white supremacy, juvenile records laws that afford broad access transform juvenile missteps into life sentences that serve to immobilize and disenfranchise Black communities.

In 2014, Juvenile Law Center published the first-ever comprehensive evaluation of each states juvenile records laws. The results of that study demonstrated that, as measured against best practices, over 50% of states fail to adequately protect juveniles from the consequences of juvenile records. Now, six years later, a new juvenile record scorecard report shows continued and widespread deficiencies in the protections necessary to keep juvenile records secure.

Recognizing that broad access to juvenile records advances inequality and systemic racism and holds kids back from achieving their full potential, it is imperative that every state review its records laws and take all steps necessary to protect our youths right to privacy by mandating automatic sealing and expungement of juvenile records.

Andrew Keats is a staff attorney at the Juvenile Law Center, where his work currently focuses on addressing economic justice and equity and second chances for youth in the juvenile justice system and youth tried as adults in the criminal justice system. Before that he spent a decade as a litigator with a leading global law firm in Los Angeles and New York, where he litigated a broad range of complex commercial disputes plus securities, class action, bankruptcy and real estate matters.

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Juvenile Records Laws Must Be Reformed to Prevent Ongoing Racism - Juvenile Justice Information Exchange

Editors Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here.

Image above: A masked worker cleans a New York City subway entrance.

Updated at 1:12 p.m. ET on August 4, 2020.

How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planets most powerful nation. America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness and financial ruin. It has lost its status as a global leader. It has careened between inaction and ineptitude. The breadth and magnitude of its errors are difficult, in the moment, to truly fathom.

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In the first half of 2020, SARSCoV2the new coronavirus behind the disease COVID19infected 10 million people around the world and killed about half a million. But few countries have been as severely hit as the United States, which has just 4 percent of the worlds population but a quarter of its confirmed COVID19 cases and deaths. These numbers are estimates. The actual toll, though undoubtedly higher, is unknown, because the richest country in the world still lacks sufficient testing to accurately count its sick citizens.

Despite ample warning, the U.S. squandered every possible opportunity to control the coronavirus. And despite its considerable advantagesimmense resources, biomedical might, scientific expertiseit floundered. While countries as different as South Korea, Thailand, Iceland, Slovakia, and Australia acted decisively to bend the curve of infections downward, the U.S. achieved merely a plateau in the spring, which changed to an appalling upward slope in the summer. The U.S. fundamentally failed in ways that were worse than I ever could have imagined, Julia Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told me.

Since the pandemic began, I have spoken with more than 100 experts in a variety of fields. Ive learned that almost everything that went wrong with Americas response to the pandemic was predictable and preventable. A sluggish response by a government denuded of expertise allowed the coronavirus to gain a foothold. Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the nations ability to prevent the pathogens spread. A bloated, inefficient health-care system left hospitals ill-prepared for the ensuing wave of sickness. Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Americans especially vulnerable to COVID19. The decades-long process of shredding the nations social safety net forced millions of essential workers in low-paying jobs to risk their life for their livelihood. The same social-media platforms that sowed partisanship and misinformation during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa and the 2016 U.S. election became vectors for conspiracy theories during the 2020 pandemic.

The U.S. has little excuse for its inattention. In recent decades, epidemics of SARS, MERS, Ebola, H1N1 flu, Zika, and monkeypox showed the havoc that new and reemergent pathogens could wreak. Health experts, business leaders, and even middle schoolers ran simulated exercises to game out the spread of new diseases. In 2018, I wrote an article for The Atlantic arguing that the U.S. was not ready for a pandemic, and sounded warnings about the fragility of the nations health-care system and the slow process of creating a vaccine. But the COVID19 debacle has also touchedand implicatednearly every other facet of American society: its shortsighted leadership, its disregard for expertise, its racial inequities, its social-media culture, and its fealty to a dangerous strain of individualism.

SARSCoV2 is something of an anti-Goldilocks virus: just bad enough in every way. Its symptoms can be severe enough to kill millions but are often mild enough to allow infections to move undetected through a population. It spreads quickly enough to overload hospitals, but slowly enough that statistics dont spike until too late. These traits made the virus harder to control, but they also softened the pandemics punch. SARSCoV2 is neither as lethal as some other coronaviruses, such as SARS and MERS, nor as contagious as measles. Deadlier pathogens almost certainly exist. Wild animals harbor an estimated 40,000 unknown viruses, a quarter of which could potentially jump into humans. How will the U.S. fare when we cant even deal with a starter pandemic?, Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina and an Atlantic contributing writer, asked me.

Despite its epochal effects, COVID19 is merely a harbinger of worse plagues to come. The U.S. cannot prepare for these inevitable crises if it returns to normal, as many of its people ache to do. Normal led to this. Normal was a world ever more prone to a pandemic but ever less ready for one. To avert another catastrophe, the U.S. needs to grapple with all the ways normal failed us. It needs a full accounting of every recent misstep and foundational sin, every unattended weakness and unheeded warning, every festering wound and reopened scar.

A pandemic can be prevented in two ways: Stop an infection from ever arising, or stop an infection from becoming thousands more. The first way is likely impossible. There are simply too many viruses and too many animals that harbor them. Bats alone could host thousands of unknown coronaviruses; in some Chinese caves, one out of every 20 bats is infected. Many people live near these caves, shelter in them, or collect guano from them for fertilizer. Thousands of bats also fly over these peoples villages and roost in their homes, creating opportunities for the bats viral stowaways to spill over into human hosts. Based on antibody testing in rural parts of China, Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that studies emerging diseases, estimates that such viruses infect a substantial number of people every year. Most infected people dont know about it, and most of the viruses arent transmissible, Daszak says. But it takes just one transmissible virus to start a pandemic.

Sometime in late 2019, the wrong virus left a bat and ended up, perhaps via an intermediate host, in a humanand another, and another. Eventually it found its way to the Huanan seafood market, and jumped into dozens of new hosts in an explosive super-spreading event. The COVID19 pandemic had begun.

There is no way to get spillover of everything to zero, Colin Carlson, an ecologist at Georgetown University, told me. Many conservationists jump on epidemics as opportunities to ban the wildlife trade or the eating of bush meat, an exoticized term for game, but few diseases have emerged through either route. Carlson said the biggest factors behind spillovers are land-use change and climate change, both of which are hard to control. Our species has relentlessly expanded into previously wild spaces. Through intensive agriculture, habitat destruction, and rising temperatures, we have uprooted the planets animals, forcing them into new and narrower ranges that are on our own doorsteps. Humanity has squeezed the worlds wildlife in a crushing gripand viruses have come bursting out.

Curtailing those viruses after they spill over is more feasible, but requires knowledge, transparency, and decisiveness that were lacking in 2020. Much about coronaviruses is still unknown. There are no surveillance networks for detecting them as there are for influenza. There are no approved treatments or vaccines. Coronaviruses were formerly a niche family, of mainly veterinary importance. Four decades ago, just 60 or so scientists attended the first international meeting on coronaviruses. Their ranks swelled after SARS swept the world in 2003, but quickly dwindled as a spike in funding vanished. The same thing happened after MERS emerged in 2012. This year, the worlds coronavirus expertsand there still arent manyhad to postpone their triennial conference in the Netherlands because SARSCoV2 made flying too risky.

In the age of cheap air travel, an outbreak that begins on one continent can easily reach the others. SARS already demonstrated that in 2003, and more than twice as many people now travel by plane every year. To avert a pandemic, affected nations must alert their neighbors quickly. In 2003, China covered up the early spread of SARS, allowing the new disease to gain a foothold, and in 2020, history repeated itself. The Chinese government downplayed the possibility that SARSCoV2 was spreading among humans, and only confirmed as much on January 20, after millions had traveled around the country for the lunar new year. Doctors who tried to raise the alarm were censured and threatened. One, Li Wenliang, later died of COVID19. The World Health Organization initially parroted Chinas line and did not declare a public-health emergency of international concern until January 30. By then, an estimated 10,000 people in 20 countries had been infected, and the virus was spreading fast.

The United States has correctly castigated China for its duplicity and the WHO for its laxitybut the U.S. has also failed the international community. Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. has withdrawn from several international partnerships and antagonized its allies. It has a seat on the WHOs executive board, but left that position empty for more than two years, only filling it this May, when the pandemic was in full swing. Since 2017, Trump has pulled more than 30 staffers out of the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions office in China, who could have warned about the spreading coronavirus. Last July, he defunded an American epidemiologist embedded within Chinas CDC. America First was America oblivious.

Even after warnings reached the U.S., they fell on the wrong ears. Since before his election, Trump has cavalierly dismissed expertise and evidence. He filled his administration with inexperienced newcomers, while depicting career civil servants as part of a deep state. In 2018, he dismantled an office that had been assembled specifically to prepare for nascent pandemics. American intelligence agencies warned about the coronavirus threat in January, but Trump habitually disregards intelligence briefings. The secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar, offered similar counsel, and was twice ignored.

Being prepared means being ready to spring into action, so that when something like this happens, youre moving quickly, Ronald Klain, who coordinated the U.S. response to the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014, told me. By early February, we should have triggered a series of actions, precisely zero of which were taken. Trump could have spent those crucial early weeks mass-producing tests to detect the virus, asking companies to manufacture protective equipment and ventilators, and otherwise steeling the nation for the worst. Instead, he focused on the border. On January 31, Trump announced that the U.S. would bar entry to foreigners who had recently been in China, and urged Americans to avoid going there.

Travel bans make intuitive sense, because travel obviously enables the spread of a virus. But in practice, travel bans are woefully inefficient at restricting either travel or viruses. They prompt people to seek indirect routes via third-party countries, or to deliberately hide their symptoms. They are often porous: Trumps included numerous exceptions, and allowed tens of thousands of people to enter from China. Ironically, they create travel: When Trump later announced a ban on flights from continental Europe, a surge of travelers packed Americas airports in a rush to beat the incoming restrictions. Travel bans may sometimes work for remote island nations, but in general they can only delay the spread of an epidemicnot stop it. And they can create a harmful false confidence, so countries rely on bans to the exclusion of the things they actually need to dotesting, tracing, building up the health system, says Thomas Bollyky, a global-health expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. That sounds an awful lot like what happened in the U.S.

This was predictable. A president who is fixated on an ineffectual border wall, and has portrayed asylum seekers as vectors of disease, was always going to reach for travel bans as a first resort. And Americans who bought into his rhetoric of xenophobia and isolationism were going to be especially susceptible to thinking that simple entry controls were a panacea.

And so the U.S. wasted its best chance of restraining COVID19. Although the disease first arrived in the U.S. in mid-January, genetic evidence shows that the specific viruses that triggered the first big outbreaks, in Washington State, didnt land until mid-February. The country could have used that time to prepare. Instead, Trump, who had spent his entire presidency learning that he could say whatever he wanted without consequence, assured Americans that the coronavirus is very much under control, and like a miracle, it will disappear. With impunity, Trump lied. With impunity, the virus spread.

On February 26, Trump asserted that cases were going to be down to close to zero. Over the next two months, at least 1 million Americans were infected.

As the coronavirus established itself in the U.S., it found a nation through which it could spread easily, without being detected. For years, Pardis Sabeti, a virologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, has been trying to create a surveillance network that would allow hospitals in every major U.S. city to quickly track new viruses through genetic sequencing. Had that network existed, once Chinese scientists published SARSCoV2s genome on January 11, every American hospital would have been able to develop its own diagnostic test in preparation for the viruss arrival. I spent a lot of time trying to convince many funders to fund it, Sabeti told me. I never got anywhere.

The CDC developed and distributed its own diagnostic tests in late January. These proved useless because of a faulty chemical component. Tests were in such short supply, and the criteria for getting them were so laughably stringent, that by the end of February, tens of thousands of Americans had likely been infected but only hundreds had been tested. The official data were so clearly wrong that The Atlantic developed its own volunteer-led initiativethe COVID Tracking Projectto count cases.

Diagnostic tests are easy to make, so the U.S. failing to create one seemed inconceivable. Worse, it had no Plan B. Private labs were strangled by FDA bureaucracy. Meanwhile, Sabetis lab developed a diagnostic test in mid-January and sent it to colleagues in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Senegal. We had working diagnostics in those countries well before we did in any U.S. states, she told me.

Its hard to overstate how thoroughly the testing debacle incapacitated the U.S. People with debilitating symptoms couldnt find out what was wrong with them. Health officials couldnt cut off chains of transmission by identifying people who were sick and asking them to isolate themselves.

Read: How the coronavirus became an American catastrophe

Water running along a pavement will readily seep into every crack; so, too, did the unchecked coronavirus seep into every fault line in the modern world. Consider our buildings. In response to the global energy crisis of the 1970s, architects made structures more energy-efficient by sealing them off from outdoor air, reducing ventilation rates. Pollutants and pathogens built up indoors, ushering in the era of sick buildings, says Joseph Allen, who studies environmental health at Harvards T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Energy efficiency is a pillar of modern climate policy, but there are ways to achieve it without sacrificing well-being. We lost our way over the years and stopped designing buildings for people, Allen says.

The indoor spaces in which Americans spend 87 percent of their time became staging grounds for super-spreading events. One study showed that the odds of catching the virus from an infected person are roughly 19 times higher indoors than in open air. Shielded from the elements and among crowds clustered in prolonged proximity, the coronavirus ran rampant in the conference rooms of a Boston hotel, the cabins of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and a church hall in Washington State where a choir practiced for just a few hours.

The hardest-hit buildings were those that had been jammed with people for decades: prisons. Between harsher punishments doled out in the War on Drugs and a tough-on-crime mindset that prizes retribution over rehabilitation, Americas incarcerated population has swelled sevenfold since the 1970s, to about 2.3 million. The U.S. imprisons five to 18 times more people per capita than other Western democracies. Many American prisons are packed beyond capacity, making social distancing impossible. Soap is often scarce. Inevitably, the coronavirus ran amok. By June, two American prisons each accounted for more cases than all of New Zealand. One, Marion Correctional Institution, in Ohio, had more than 2,000 cases among inmates despite having a capacity of 1,500.

Other densely packed facilities were also besieged. Americas nursing homes and long-term-care facilities house less than 1 percent of its people, but as of mid-June, they accounted for 40 percent of its coronavirus deaths. More than 50,000 residents and staff have died. At least 250,000 more have been infected. These grim figures are a reflection not just of the greater harms that COVID19 inflicts upon elderly physiology, but also of the care the elderly receive. Before the pandemic, three in four nursing homes were understaffed, and four in five had recently been cited for failures in infection control. The Trump administrations policies have exacerbated the problem by reducing the influx of immigrants, who make up a quarter of long-term caregivers.

Read: Another coronavirus nursing-home disaster is coming

Even though a Seattle nursing home was one of the first COVID19 hot spots in the U.S., similar facilities werent provided with tests and protective equipment. Rather than girding these facilities against the pandemic, the Department of Health and Human Services paused nursing-home inspections in March, passing the buck to the states. Some nursing homes avoided the virus because their owners immediately stopped visitations, or paid caregivers to live on-site. But in others, staff stopped working, scared about infecting their charges or becoming infected themselves. In some cases, residents had to be evacuated because no one showed up to care for them.

Americas neglect of nursing homes and prisons, its sick buildings, and its botched deployment of tests are all indicative of its problematic attitude toward health: Get hospitals ready and wait for sick people to show, as Sheila Davis, the CEO of the nonprofit Partners in Health, puts it. Especially in the beginning, we catered our entire [COVID19] response to the 20 percent of people who required hospitalization, rather than preventing transmission in the community. The latter is the job of the public-health system, which prevents sickness in populations instead of merely treating it in individuals. That system pairs uneasily with a national temperament that views health as a matter of personal responsibility rather than a collective good.

At the end of the 20th century, public-health improvements meant that Americans were living an average of 30 years longer than they were at the start of it. Maternal mortality had fallen by 99 percent; infant mortality by 90 percent. Fortified foods all but eliminated rickets and goiters. Vaccines eradicated smallpox and polio, and brought measles, diphtheria, and rubella to heel. These measures, coupled with antibiotics and better sanitation, curbed infectious diseases to such a degree that some scientists predicted they would soon pass into history. But instead, these achievements brought complacency. As public health did its job, it became a target of budget cuts, says Lori Freeman, the CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

Today, the U.S. spends just 2.5 percent of its gigantic health-care budget on public health. Underfunded health departments were already struggling to deal with opioid addiction, climbing obesity rates, contaminated water, and easily preventable diseases. Last year saw the most measles cases since 1992. In 2018, the U.S. had 115,000 cases of syphilis and 580,000 cases of gonorrheanumbers not seen in almost three decades. It has 1.7 million cases of chlamydia, the highest number ever recorded.

Since the last recession, in 2009, chronically strapped local health departments have lost 55,000 jobsa quarter of their workforce. When COVID19 arrived, the economic downturn forced overstretched departments to furlough more employees. When states needed battalions of public-health workers to find infected people and trace their contacts, they had to hire and train people from scratch. In May, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan asserted that his state would soon have enough people to trace 10,000 contacts every day. Last year, as Ebola tore through the Democratic Republic of Congoa country with a quarter of Marylands wealth and an active war zonelocal health workers and the WHO traced twice as many people.

Ripping unimpeded through American communities, the coronavirus created thousands of sickly hosts that it then rode into Americas hospitals. It should have found facilities armed with state-of-the-art medical technologies, detailed pandemic plans, and ample supplies of protective equipment and life-saving medicines. Instead, it found a brittle system in danger of collapse.

Compared with the average wealthy nation, America spends nearly twice as much of its national wealth on health care, about a quarter of which is wasted on inefficient care, unnecessary treatments, and administrative chicanery. The U.S. gets little bang for its exorbitant buck. It has the lowest life-expectancy rate of comparable countries, the highest rates of chronic disease, and the fewest doctors per person. This profit-driven system has scant incentive to invest in spare beds, stockpiled supplies, peacetime drills, and layered contingency plansthe essence of pandemic preparedness. Americas hospitals have been pruned and stretched by market forces to run close to full capacity, with little ability to adapt in a crisis.

When hospitals do create pandemic plans, they tend to fight the last war. After 2014, several centers created specialized treatment units designed for Ebolaa highly lethal but not very contagious disease. These units were all but useless against a highly transmissible airborne virus like SARSCoV2. Nor were hospitals ready for an outbreak to drag on for months. Emergency plans assumed that staff could endure a few days of exhausting conditions, that supplies would hold, and that hard-hit centers could be supported by unaffected neighbors. Were designed for discrete disasters like mass shootings, traffic pileups, and hurricanes, says Esther Choo, an emergency physician at Oregon Health and Science University. The COVID19 pandemic is not a discrete disaster. It is a 50-state catastrophe that will likely continue at least until a vaccine is ready.

Wherever the coronavirus arrived, hospitals reeled. Several states asked medical students to graduate early, reenlisted retired doctors, and deployed dermatologists to emergency departments. Doctors and nurses endured grueling shifts, their faces chapped and bloody when they finally doffed their protective equipment. Soon, that equipmentmasks, respirators, gowns, glovesstarted running out.

American hospitals operate on a just-in-time economy. They acquire the goods they need in the moment through labyrinthine supply chains that wrap around the world in tangled lines, from countries with cheap labor to richer nations like the U.S. The lines are invisible until they snap. About half of the worlds face masks, for example, are made in China, some of them in Hubei province. When that region became the pandemic epicenter, the mask supply shriveled just as global demand spiked. The Trump administration turned to a larder of medical supplies called the Strategic National Stockpile, only to find that the 100 million respirators and masks that had been dispersed during the 2009 flu pandemic were never replaced. Just 13 million respirators were left.

In April, four in five frontline nurses said they didnt have enough protective equipment. Some solicited donations from the public, or navigated a morass of back-alley deals and internet scams. Others fashioned their own surgical masks from bandannas and gowns from garbage bags. The supply of nasopharyngeal swabs that are used in every diagnostic test also ran low, because one of the largest manufacturers is based in Lombardy, Italyinitially the COVID19 capital of Europe. About 40 percent of critical-care drugs, including antibiotics and painkillers, became scarce because they depend on manufacturing lines that begin in China and India. Once a vaccine is ready, there might not be enough vials to put it in, because of the long-running global shortage of medical-grade glassliterally, a bottle-neck bottleneck.

The federal government could have mitigated those problems by buying supplies at economies of scale and distributing them according to need. Instead, in March, Trump told Americas governors to try getting it yourselves. As usual, health care was a matter of capitalism and connections. In New York, rich hospitals bought their way out of their protective-equipment shortfall, while neighbors in poorer, more diverse parts of the city rationed their supplies.

While the president prevaricated, Americans acted. Businesses sent their employees home. People practiced social distancing, even before Trump finally declared a national emergency on March 13, and before governors and mayors subsequently issued formal stay-at-home orders, or closed schools, shops, and restaurants. A study showed that the U.S. could have averted 36,000 COVID19 deaths if leaders had enacted social-distancing measures just a week earlier. But better late than never: By collectively reducing the spread of the virus, America flattened the curve. Ventilators didnt run out, as they had in parts of Italy. Hospitals had time to add extra beds.

Social distancing worked. But the indiscriminate lockdown was necessary only because Americas leaders wasted months of prep time. Deploying this blunt policy instrument came at enormous cost. Unemployment rose to 14.7 percent, the highest level since record-keeping began, in 1948. More than 26 million people lost their jobs, a catastrophe in a country thatuniquely and absurdlyties health care to employment. Some COVID19 survivors have been hit with seven-figure medical bills. In the middle of the greatest health and economic crises in generations, millions of Americans have found themselves disconnected from medical care and impoverished. They join the millions who have always lived that way.

The coronavirus found, exploited, and widened every inequity that the U.S. had to offer. Elderly people, already pushed to the fringes of society, were treated as acceptable losses. Women were more likely to lose jobs than men, and also shouldered extra burdens of child care and domestic work, while facing rising rates of domestic violence. In half of the states, people with dementia and intellectual disabilities faced policies that threatened to deny them access to lifesaving ventilators. Thousands of people endured months of COVID19 symptoms that resembled those of chronic postviral illnesses, only to be told that their devastating symptoms were in their head. Latinos were three times as likely to be infected as white people. Asian Americans faced racist abuse. Far from being a great equalizer, the pandemic fell unevenly upon the U.S., taking advantage of injustices that had been brewing throughout the nations history.

Read: COVID-19 can last for several months

Of the 3.1 million Americans who still cannot afford health insurance in states where Medicaid has not been expanded, more than half are people of color, and 30 percent are Black.* This is no accident. In the decades after the Civil War, the white leaders of former slave states deliberately withheld health care from Black Americans, apportioning medicine more according to the logic of Jim Crow than Hippocrates. They built hospitals away from Black communities, segregated Black patients into separate wings, and blocked Black students from medical school. In the 20th century, they helped construct Americas system of private, employer-based insurance, which has kept many Black people from receiving adequate medical treatment. They fought every attempt to improve Black peoples access to health care, from the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in the 60s to the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

A number of former slave states also have among the lowest investments in public health, the lowest quality of medical care, the highest proportions of Black citizens, and the greatest racial divides in health outcomes. As the COVID19 pandemic wore on, they were among the quickest to lift social-distancing restrictions and reexpose their citizens to the coronavirus. The harms of these moves were unduly foisted upon the poor and the Black.

As of early July, one in every 1,450 Black Americans had died from COVID19a rate more than twice that of white Americans. That figure is both tragic and wholly expected given the mountain of medical disadvantages that Black people face. Compared with white people, they die three years younger. Three times as many Black mothers die during pregnancy. Black people have higher rates of chronic illnesses that predispose them to fatal cases of COVID19. When they go to hospitals, theyre less likely to be treated. The care they do receive tends to be poorer. Aware of these biases, Black people are hesitant to seek aid for COVID19 symptoms and then show up at hospitals in sicker states. One of my patients said, I dont want to go to the hospital, because theyre not going to treat me well, says Uch Blackstock, an emergency physician and the founder of Advancing Health Equity, a nonprofit that fights bias and racism in health care. Another whispered to me, Im so relieved youre Black. I just want to make sure Im listened to.

Black people were both more worried about the pandemic and more likely to be infected by it. The dismantling of Americas social safety net left Black people with less income and higher unemployment. They make up a disproportionate share of the low-paid essential workers who were expected to staff grocery stores and warehouses, clean buildings, and deliver mail while the pandemic raged around them. Earning hourly wages without paid sick leave, they couldnt afford to miss shifts even when symptomatic. They faced risky commutes on crowded public transportation while more privileged people teleworked from the safety of isolation. Theres nothing about Blackness that makes you more prone to COVID, says Nicolette Louissaint, the executive director of Healthcare Ready, a nonprofit that works to strengthen medical supply chains. Instead, existing inequities stack the odds in favor of the virus.

Native Americans were similarly vulnerable. A third of the people in the Navajo Nation cant easily wash their hands, because theyve been embroiled in long-running negotiations over the rights to the water on their own lands. Those with water must contend with runoff from uranium mines. Most live in cramped multigenerational homes, far from the few hospitals that service a 17-million-acre reservation. As of mid-May, the Navajo Nation had higher rates of COVID19 infections than any U.S. state.

Americans often misperceive historical inequities as personal failures. Stephen Huffman, a Republican state senator and doctor in Ohio, suggested that Black Americans might be more prone to COVID19 because they dont wash their hands enough, a remark for which he later apologized. Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, also a physician, noted that Black people have higher rates of chronic disease, as if this were an answer in itself, and not a pattern that demanded further explanation.

Clear distribution of accurate information is among the most important defenses against an epidemics spread. And yet the largely unregulated, social-media-based communications infrastructure of the 21st century almost ensures that misinformation will proliferate fast. In every outbreak throughout the existence of social media, from Zika to Ebola, conspiratorial communities immediately spread their content about how its all caused by some government or pharmaceutical company or Bill Gates, says Rene DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory, who studies the flow of online information. When COVID19 arrived, there was no doubt in my mind that it was coming.

Read: The great 5G conspiracy

Sure enough, existing conspiracy theoriesGeorge Soros! 5G! Bioweapons!were repurposed for the pandemic. An infodemic of falsehoods spread alongside the actual virus. Rumors coursed through online platforms that are designed to keep users engaged, even if that means feeding them content that is polarizing or untrue. In a national crisis, when people need to act in concert, this is calamitous. The social internet as a system is broken, DiResta told me, and its faults are readily abused.

Beginning on April 16, DiRestas team noticed growing online chatter about Judy Mikovits, a discredited researcher turned anti-vaccination champion. Posts and videos cast Mikovits as a whistleblower who claimed that the new coronavirus was made in a lab and described Anthony Fauci of the White Houses coronavirus task force as her nemesis. Ironically, this conspiracy theory was nested inside a larger conspiracypart of an orchestrated PR campaign by an anti-vaxxer and QAnon fan with the explicit goal to take down Anthony Fauci. It culminated in a slickly produced video called Plandemic, which was released on May 4. More than 8 million people watched it in a week.

Doctors and journalists tried to debunk Plandemics many misleading claims, but these efforts spread less successfully than the video itself. Like pandemics, infodemics quickly become uncontrollable unless caught early. But while health organizations recognize the need to surveil for emerging diseases, they are woefully unprepared to do the same for emerging conspiracies. In 2016, when DiResta spoke with a CDC team about the threat of misinformation, their response was: Thats interesting, but thats just stuff that happens on the internet.

From the June 2020 issue: Adrienne LaFrance on how QAnon is more important than you think

Rather than countering misinformation during the pandemics early stages, trusted sources often made things worse. Many health experts and government officials downplayed the threat of the virus in January and February, assuring the public that it posed a low risk to the U.S. and drawing comparisons to the ostensibly greater threat of the flu. The WHO, the CDC, and the U.S. surgeon general urged people not to wear masks, hoping to preserve the limited stocks for health-care workers. These messages were offered without nuance or acknowledgement of uncertainty, so when they were reversedthe virus is worse than the flu; wear masksthe changes seemed like befuddling flip-flops.

The media added to the confusion. Drawn to novelty, journalists gave oxygen to fringe anti-lockdown protests while most Americans quietly stayed home. They wrote up every incremental scientific claim, even those that hadnt been verified or peer-reviewed.

There were many such claims to choose from. By tying career advancement to the publishing of papers, academia already creates incentives for scientists to do attention-grabbing but irreproducible work. The pandemic strengthened those incentives by prompting a rush of panicked research and promising ambitious scientists global attention.

In March, a small and severely flawed French study suggested that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID19. Published in a minor journal, it likely would have been ignored a decade ago. But in 2020, it wended its way to Donald Trump via a chain of credulity that included Fox News, Elon Musk, and Dr. Oz. Trump spent months touting the drug as a miracle cure despite mounting evidence to the contrary, causing shortages for people who actually needed it to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. The hydroxychloroquine story was muddied even further by a study published in a top medical journal, The Lancet, that claimed the drug was not effective and was potentially harmful. The paper relied on suspect data from a small analytics company called Surgisphere, and was retracted in June.**

Science famously self-corrects. But during the pandemic, the same urgent pace that has produced valuable knowledge at record speed has also sent sloppy claims around the world before anyone could even raise a skeptical eyebrow. The ensuing confusion, and the many genuine unknowns about the virus, has created a vortex of fear and uncertainty, which grifters have sought to exploit. Snake-oil merchants have peddled ineffectual silver bullets (including actual silver). Armchair experts with scant or absent qualifications have found regular slots on the nightly news. And at the center of that confusion is Donald Trump.

During a pandemic, leaders must rally the public, tell the truth, and speak clearly and consistently. Instead, Trump repeatedly contradicted public-health experts, his scientific advisers, and himself. He said that nobody ever thought a thing like [the pandemic] could happen and also that he felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic. Both statements cannot be true at the same time, and in fact neither is true.

A month before his inauguration, I wrote that the question isnt whether [Trump will] face a deadly outbreak during his presidency, but when. Based on his actions as a media personality during the 2014 Ebola outbreak and as a candidate in the 2016 election, I suggested that he would fail at diplomacy, close borders, tweet rashly, spread conspiracy theories, ignore experts, and exhibit reckless self-confidence. And so he did.

No one should be shocked that a liar who has made almost 20,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency would lie about whether the U.S. had the pandemic under control; that a racist who gave birth to birtherism would do little to stop a virus that was disproportionately killing Black people; that a xenophobe who presided over the creation of new immigrant-detention centers would order meatpacking plants with a substantial immigrant workforce to remain open; that a cruel man devoid of empathy would fail to calm fearful citizens; that a narcissist who cannot stand to be upstaged would refuse to tap the deep well of experts at his disposal; that a scion of nepotism would hand control of a shadow coronavirus task force to his unqualified son-in-law; that an armchair polymath would claim to have a natural ability at medicine and display it by wondering out loud about the curative potential of injecting disinfectant; that an egotist incapable of admitting failure would try to distract from his greatest one by blaming China, defunding the WHO, and promoting miracle drugs; or that a president who has been shielded by his party from any shred of accountability would say, when asked about the lack of testing, I dont take any responsibility at all.

Trump is a comorbidity of the COVID19 pandemic. He isnt solely responsible for Americas fiasco, but he is central to it. A pandemic demands the coordinated efforts of dozens of agencies. In the best circumstances, its hard to make the bureaucracy move quickly, Ron Klain said. It moves if the president stands on a table and says, Move quickly. But it really doesnt move if hes sitting at his desk saying its not a big deal.

In the early days of Trumps presidency, many believed that Americas institutions would check his excesses. They have, in part, but Trump has also corrupted them. The CDC is but his latest victim. On February 25, the agencys respiratory-disease chief, Nancy Messonnier, shocked people by raising the possibility of school closures and saying that disruption to everyday life might be severe. Trump was reportedly enraged. In response, he seems to have benched the entire agency. The CDC led the way in every recent domestic disease outbreak and has been the inspiration and template for public-health agencies around the world. But during the three months when some 2 million Americans contracted COVID19 and the death toll topped 100,000, the agency didnt hold a single press conference. Its detailed guidelines on reopening the country were shelved for a month while the White House released its own uselessly vague plan.

Again, everyday Americans did more than the White House. By voluntarily agreeing to months of social distancing, they bought the country time, at substantial cost to their financial and mental well-being. Their sacrifice came with an implicit social contractthat the government would use the valuable time to mobilize an extraordinary, energetic effort to suppress the virus, as did the likes of Germany and Singapore. But the government did not, to the bafflement of health experts. There are instances in history where humanity has really moved mountains to defeat infectious diseases, says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Its appalling that we in the U.S. have not summoned that energy around COVID19.

Instead, the U.S. sleepwalked into the worst possible scenario: People suffered all the debilitating effects of a lockdown with few of the benefits. Most states felt compelled to reopen without accruing enough tests or contact tracers. In April and May, the nation was stuck on a terrible plateau, averaging 20,000 to 30,000 new cases every day. In June, the plateau again became an upward slope, soaring to record-breaking heights.

Read: Ed Yong on living in a patchwork pandemic

Trump never rallied the country. Despite declaring himself a wartime president, he merely presided over a culture war, turning public health into yet another politicized cage match. Abetted by supporters in the conservative media, he framed measures that protect against the virus, from masks to social distancing, as liberal and anti-American. Armed anti-lockdown protesters demonstrated at government buildings while Trump egged them on, urging them to LIBERATE Minnesota, Michigan, and Virginia. Several public-health officials left their jobs over harassment and threats.

It is no coincidence that other powerful nations that elected populist leadersBrazil, Russia, India, and the United Kingdomalso fumbled their response to COVID19. When you have people elected based on undermining trust in the government, what happens when trust is what you need the most? says Sarah Dalglish of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who studies the political determinants of health.

Trump is president, she says. How could it go well?

The countries that fared better against COVID19 didnt follow a universal playbook. Many used masks widely; New Zealand didnt. Many tested extensively; Japan didnt. Many had science-minded leaders who acted early; Hong Kong didntinstead, a grassroots movement compensated for a lax government. Many were small islands; not large and continental Germany. Each nation succeeded because it did enough things right.

Read: What really doomed Americas coronavirus response

Meanwhile, the United States underperformed across the board, and its errors compounded. The dearth of tests allowed unconfirmed cases to create still more cases, which flooded the hospitals, which ran out of masks, which are necessary to limit the viruss spread. Twitter amplified Trumps misleading messages, which raised fear and anxiety among people, which led them to spend more time scouring for information on Twitter. Even seasoned health experts underestimated these compounded risks. Yes, having Trump at the helm during a pandemic was worrying, but it was tempting to think that national wealth and technological superiority would save America. We are a rich country, and we think we can stop any infectious disease because of that, says Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. But dollar bills alone are no match against a virus.

Public-health experts talk wearily about the panic-neglect cycle, in which outbreaks trigger waves of attention and funding that quickly dissipate once the diseases recede. This time around, the U.S. is already flirting with neglect, before the panic phase is over. The virus was never beaten in the spring, but many people, including Trump, pretended that it was. Every state reopened to varying degrees, and many subsequently saw record numbers of cases. After Arizonas cases started climbing sharply at the end of May, Cara Christ, the director of the states health-services department, said, We are not going to be able to stop the spread. And so we cant stop living as well. The virus may beg to differ.

At times, Americans have seemed to collectively surrender to COVID19. The White Houses coronavirus task force wound down. Trump resumed holding rallies, and called for less testing, so that official numbers would be rosier. The country behaved like a horror-movie character who believes the danger is over, even though the monster is still at large. The long wait for a vaccine will likely culminate in a predictable way: Many Americans will refuse to get it, and among those who want it, the most vulnerable will be last in line.

Still, there is some reason for hope. Many of the people I interviewed tentatively suggested that the upheaval wrought by COVID19 might be so large as to permanently change the nations disposition. Experience, after all, sharpens the mind. East Asian states that had lived through the SARS and MERS epidemics reacted quickly when threatened by SARSCoV2, spurred by a cultural memory of what a fast-moving coronavirus can do. But the U.S. had barely been touched by the major epidemics of past decades (with the exception of the H1N1 flu). In 2019, more Americans were concerned about terrorists and cyberattacks than about outbreaks of exotic diseases. Perhaps they will emerge from this pandemic with immunity both cellular and cultural.

There are also a few signs that Americans are learning important lessons. A June survey showed that 60 to 75 percent of Americans were still practicing social distancing. A partisan gap exists, but it has narrowed. In public-opinion polling in the U.S., high-60s agreement on anything is an amazing accomplishment, says Beth Redbird, a sociologist at Northwestern University, who led the survey. Polls in May also showed that most Democrats and Republicans supported mask wearing, and felt it should be mandatory in at least some indoor spaces. It is almost unheard-of for a public-health measure to go from zero to majority acceptance in less than half a year. But pandemics are rare situations when people are desperate for guidelines and rules, says Zo McLaren, a health-policy professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. The closest analogy is pregnancy, she says, which is a time when womens lives are changing, and they can absorb a ton of information. A pandemic is similar: People are actually paying attention, and learning.

Redbirds survey suggests that Americans indeed sought out new sources of informationand that consumers of news from conservative outlets, in particular, expanded their media diet. People of all political bents became more dissatisfied with the Trump administration. As the economy nose-dived, the health-care system ailed, and the government fumbled, belief in American exceptionalism declined. Times of big social disruption call into question things we thought were normal and standard, Redbird told me. If our institutions fail us here, in what ways are they failing elsewhere? And whom are they failing the most?

Americans were in the mood for systemic change. Then, on May 25, George Floyd, who had survived COVID19s assault on his airway, asphyxiated under the crushing pressure of a police officers knee. The excruciating video of his killing circulated through communities that were still reeling from the deaths of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, and disproportionate casualties from COVID19. Americas simmering outrage came to a boil and spilled into its streets.

Defiant and largely cloaked in masks, protesters turned out in more than 2,000 cities and towns. Support for Black Lives Matter soared: For the first time since its founding in 2013, the movement had majority approval across racial groups. These protests were not about the pandemic, but individual protesters had been primed by months of shocking governmental missteps. Even people who might once have ignored evidence of police brutality recognized yet another broken institution. They could no longer look away.

It is hard to stare directly at the biggest problems of our age. Pandemics, climate change, the sixth extinction of wildlife, food and water shortagestheir scope is planetary, and their stakes are overwhelming. We have no choice, though, but to grapple with them. It is now abundantly clear what happens when global disasters collide with historical negligence.

COVID19 is an assault on Americas body, and a referendum on the ideas that animate its culture. Recovery is possible, but it demands radical introspection. America would be wise to help reverse the ruination of the natural world, a process that continues to shunt animal diseases into human bodies. It should strive to prevent sickness instead of profiting from it. It should build a health-care system that prizes resilience over brittle efficiency, and an information system that favors light over heat. It should rebuild its international alliances, its social safety net, and its trust in empiricism. It should address the health inequities that flow from its history. Not least, it should elect leaders with sound judgment, high character, and respect for science, logic, and reason.

The pandemic has been both tragedy and teacher. Its very etymology offers a clue about what is at stake in the greatest challenges of the future, and what is needed to address them. Pandemic. Pan and demos. All people.

* This article has been updated to clarify why 3.1 million Americans still cannot afford health insurance.

** This article originally mischaracterized similarities between two studies that were retracted in June, one in The Lancet and one in the New England Journal of Medicine. It has been updated to reflect that the latter study was not specifically about hydroxychloroquine.

This article appears in the September 2020 print edition with the headline Anatomy of an American Failure.

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How the Pandemic Defeated America - The Atlantic