How Three Egos Killed Millions

The entire world in the last twelve months has been shattered by a deadly pandemic that could have actually been entirely avoided under proper leadership. But this isn’t just the case for what Donald Trump did and did not do, this was a multi-leader lack of effort to eternally harm the world and create an event full of death, illness, and misery.  

These countries had leaders who had all the time in the world to prepare for the worst, to prepare their people, to try to squash the growing threat before it got out of control. These three major countries are Top 10 globally in terms of population and the amount of airplane travelers, which increased their responsibilities in terms of containing a contagious virus. The leaders’ lack of action however, because of the egos getting in the way, is what led to all the disaster we continue to see during a toughest period the world has witnessed in a century.

Time to look at China, Brazil, and of course the United States.

China is currently in the middle of this trade war with the United States while dramatically increasing their presence in the eastern hemisphere and even parts of Africa and South America. Their goal is to overtake the United States as the top global powerhouse, as their territory is growing the most in the current century, and they are making moves to eliminate any United States influence within their continent. On top of that, they have made moves to fully absorb Hong Kong, Taiwan, the northwest Uygur Autonomous Region, among other nearby places into the same party, the same system, the same Chinese-led equilibrium. This has led to their skirmishes against India, the Hong Kong protests, Taiwan’s increased dependence on the United States, verbal spats against the Trump Administration, among other stressful, tense events.

So what does the pandemic have to do with this?

Well, the cult of personality Communist Party cannot look weak at any point while trying to assert themselves around the world. Of course the Winnie the Pooh-hating Xi Jinping can’t look foolish in front of Donald Trump. So when Wuhan’s coronavirus breakout began, scientists and doctors were being silenced, journalists were disappearing, and only little whispers of a potential outbreak was happening around January 2020. Even worse is that the whispers and attempts to calm down the reports of an emerging problem was popping up just as the Chinese population was ready to celebrate the Chinese New Year---which means migrations from all over the world.

This is a pandemic’s perfect opening to spread, increased travel during the holiday season while remaining under the radar.

Of course we all know what happens next.

By the time China finally openly and publicly realized what has transpired, the disease has spread to only God knows how many countries and territories. So they perform the most dramatic action among all the major countries that were wrecked by the coronavirus, they basically cut off all connections to Wuhan for an extended period of time while fully shutting down the country with no exceptions. Full military-style lockdown and transforming Wuhan into a ghost town was their solution to stomp this out before it got any worse.

The idea worked, even if it cost their people almost all their freedom for at least a month, but the damage was done because the Chinese New Year allowed this to spread, their battles against a WHO organization desperately trying to obtain vital information, and forcing the agency to downplay and water down the severity of what China experienced would be part of the massive misinformation campaigns that would plague and frustrate the rest of the world for the rest of 2020. I still have family that believes this virus was an experiment gone wrong, simply because of just how bad things really got during its worst of times. They can’t fathom that all this damage comes from mistreated animals in an illegal market.

To this day, I promise you, the death count from the coronavirus in China is extremely off. Rumors from the Mainland among the Chinese people in the country and beyond unveil that over two million cell phones registered in China suddenly stopped being used. Even if China has been able to basically open up and continue their campaign to be the top dog in the world (as well as continue their concentration camps in northwest territory), there’s zero chance that only 4,900 Chinese people lost their lives (only 1,000 more deaths than the island of Hispaniola? No way). The outbreak, the lies about the amount of cases and deaths, and the horrors we are experiencing today is primarily and mainly because the Chinese government was not allowed to look bad in front of the world its trying to conquering.

Donald Trump was never wrong in pointing out who started the pandemic, unfortunately his delivery of statements is always marred in racist and supremacist rhetoric. But more on him later.

Brazil is being run by a machismo administration that prides itself on this image of Brazilian militaristic masculinity that misses the better days of a country run by a military that shoots first and asks questions later. After the popular Worker’s Party pretty much angered and betrayed a Brazilian population that has seen the good days of the Lula economy hit a brick wall and witness their favorite party get wrapped up in a giant scandal, the Brazilian people decided to take a hard-right, copy the U.S. 2016 election, and elect a no-nonsense, anti-political, anti-sympathy Jair Bolsonaro as president.

Also didn’t help that Lula was illegally charged, detained, and was prevented from running for the presidency to save Brazil from a far-right military-loving demagogue. Lula for President 2022.

So of course as the pandemic first raged out of control throughout early 2020, we had Bolsonaro and his friends from the very beginning follow Trump’s footsteps and denounce the seriousness of the emerging pandemic altogether. One of the narratives that constantly gets underplayed when discussing the history of the coronavirus was when Bolsonaro and several dozen of his closest allies went to Miami to dine with Trump and party with South Floridian politicians and socialites; which in turn going back to Brazil with the coronavirus and spreading it to others.

Bolsonaro ultimately ended up with the coronavirus, Miami’s mayor ended up being sick, and this was part of Miami’s initial giant wave of cases as the pandemic started claiming lives at torrid paces in March 2020. So you’d think after contacting the illness and potentially facing death, Bolsonaro would change his tune, right?

Nah.

Brazil is now second in the entire world in terms of covid-related deaths (despite being 6th in population and surprisingly 188th in population density), as the Bolsonaro administration refused to take any strong measures to actually battle the pandemic in any shape or form. Brazilian cities and states have had to tackle the coronavirus on their own, and sometimes even defying their own president’s wishes while trying to keep their citizens safe. Bolsonaro continues to spread misinformation about the vaccines, continues complaining about shutting things down to at least contain the number of cases, and he kept comparing the virus to the typical flu, when it clearly was anything but.

Even as the variants emerging from the Amazon region is giving the pandemic an extra bit of life, we’re seeing such little action from the administration that we’ve been seeing weekly demands for him to resign, demands for impeachment, and everything short of asking the military to step in and remove a leader that clearly doesn’t care. Bolsonaro’s playbook on battling the pandemic was a direct copy of Trump, except he didn’t even have the finances or resources to seek vaccines or seek effective treatments to minimize the damage.

This was part of his battle to contain his image and the image of his party and his reign: he believes that the key to a better Brazil is to man up, is to not be sympathetic towards how bad things have gotten, is to ignore all the warnings and focus on the economy instead of an illness that is four times more contagious than the typical flu while also being four times as deadly. Bolsonaro’s ego has cost Brazil tens of thousands of lives, and until the United States, or China, or India starts dishing out additional vaccines their direction, the death toll is only going to continue to rise dramatically even if we literally have multiple vaccine options to negate all this.

Of course, there’s the United States, the most expected disappointment to come from this pandemic specifically because we all knew that the president at the time was going to mishandle everything.

The richest country in the history of the world under the most pro-American administration we’ve seen since Reagan was the key country to diminish the damage after their giant rival China flat-out ignored, avoided, and then downplayed all warnings before silently allowing the disease to spread as the Chinese government closed house for a month. The Trump Administration had been warned about the coronavirus way back in January, as suspicious activity out of China first started. In February there were a few cases, but the only action Trump did was shut travel to China---which didn’t even apply to everybody. In the month of February and leading up to the mass shutdowns mid-March, the Trump Administration basically sat by and let things grow exponentially in California and New York—even though its been proven that they knew how bad this illness was and the severity of not doing anything to combat it.

Under any other administration, even most of the Republicans who could have won in 2016, this would not have happened, not even that political weakling Marco Rubio. Hillary Clinton would have never let this thing spread as badly as it did.

But Donald Trump has built an entire career out of imagery of power, imagery of success, money, prosperity, the American Dream. There was zero chance that Trump was going to do what was necessary to ensure that the pandemic doesn’t spread across the United States. He could have easily brought in the military, tested everyone in the major airport hubs, forced quarantine to everyone entering the country, spent a massive budget on testing and tracing, and easily could have poured money into companies to ensure people get paid while having to remain at home during the shutdown. The United States in all its money, success, power, and resources was the biggest piece of the puzzle in making sure the pandemic didn’t spread out everywhere.

But of course, we’re talking about Donald Trump.

Even after passing a giant relief bill and giving all Americans over $1,000, he immediately turned around his thought process and started politicizing the shutdowns, politicizing the mask-wearing, politicizing what to call the illness specifically, while ignoring pleas to tone down the demeanor and refusing to help any further, instead insisting on opening everything up and pretending like the pandemic was on its way out.

This led to a civil war within the country between those trying to be responsible and those who just didn’t care anymore---and as expected, this was also falling on demographic lines. White Americans for the most part was conceding and being more and more open to letting the pandemic consume, kill, and move on, especially those supporting Trump. Soon the MAGAts were treating mask-wearing and shutdowns as anti-Trump actions, especially as the election was coming up and it was clear that Joe Biden was going to be the person running against him.

Another negative aspect from the polarizing results of the pandemic outlook and response was the severe increase in hate crimes against Asian-Americans, even coming from other minority groups that had already been victimized by the current administration. We were turning on each other in the midst of all the rage, fears, and frustrations. Everything in America throughout 2020 got politicized severely, even protesting an obvious murder that happened on camera from a cop that didn’t care about the deadliness of his actions---in the middle of a pandemic that was already severely hurting Latinos and Black Americans.

Donald Trump couldn’t help but turn everything into an us vs. them moment, and during the ongoing pandemic transformed every single aspect of battling a deadly illness into an attack on his character, an attack on his political party, and an attack on American values. Disinformation spread like sheer chaos, with Facebook being the primary suspect of the MAGAts’ spreading of lies and half-truths concerning every aspect of the coronavirus epidemic.

We’ve seen pandemics emerge around the world and even make its way here in recent years and decades, as even the Obama administration had a pandemic to battle. But Obama wasted no time, discovered the source, and silently was moving all the necessary pieces to ensure quick erasure and quick recovery. One day in covid deaths in America matched the entire death toll from the swine flu pandemic back in 2009—and the swine flu originated on OUR continent.

This far superior response to a harsher version of the flu was because battling a disease was never politicized, was never splitting public opinions, and was not being fought 50 different ways within 50 different states. Donald Trump left it up to states while refusing to risk any sort of further economic hits in order to keep his image intact, and in order to remain looking good in front of his rival China.

The richest country in the history of the world with a population being 177th in population density (far better than most developed nations) ended up with the highest death count as it approaches being a MILLION people gone from this devastating illness. This is because of a president that refused to sacrifice HIS supposed economy, HIS image, and HIS fanbase’s desires to continue as if nothing bad is happening. China started the pandemic, and allowed the pandemic to spread. But it was the complete inaction of the United States that allowed the pandemic to truly go off the rails and reach nearly every single country in the planet, even making it as far as Antarctica.

Ego is what allowed this pandemic to spread to the numbers that we see today. Ego is what allowed the pandemic to silently make its way around the world in the middle of a popular holiday season. Ego is what allowed the central traveling hub of the entire planet to be fully unaware of the pandemic and allow it to reach every corner of the globe----before half-heartedly fighting it and giving up a quarter of the way because of a white supremacist demon trying to protect his image in front of his political rival and the rival country he had been sparring with for years now.

Ego is what allowed the pandemic to strike the lungs of the planet and bring death in unfathomable numbers to a beautiful but broken South American country that just couldn’t afford another such tragedy while having to survive their corrupt and inept leader. Ridiculous male leaders and their ridiculous egos were the primary causes for a pandemic to spread and shut the world down for over a year and counting. A more unified and less-competitive world could have emerged from this with a quarter of the damage that ultimately occurred. A less-egotistical crew of leaders would have banded together and defeated this coronavirus variant by the time 2020 ended.

There are many lessons to study once this finally ends, but it should begin with the way we elect our leaders, what we should see in leadership, and the effect it has when the world needs said strong leadership the most. Of course China famously has remained a one-party system for generations, but perhaps it requires better leadership from the other side of the world to prevent such rule from becoming a nuisance and a global threat. Imagine how different the pandemic would have been if we had New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern as United States president, or South Korea’s Moon-Jae In running as president of Brazil.

One thing is certain though, it was foolish egotistical competitive pride from leadership in the most important countries (also shoutout to the U.K. for their idiot) that would ultimately doom the planet above everything else from beginning, to the eventual end. Hopefully when the next pandemic emerges, the world will be better-equipped with good leaders with good ideas to ensure we don’t have a widespread tragedy of this proportion.

But it does start with who we vote to give power to.