Our mobilization effort to defeat COVID-19 has often been likened to a war. A Forbes headline from January reads, “How the Biden Administration Can Win the War Against COVID-19.” Biden recently compared the loss of American lives to COVID to those lost in American wars. I think it is fair to say that we have been at war, but not a war we can be proud of or even a war we can claim to have won.
Like Vietnam, this war was predicated on a lie, futile from conception, and corrupt in its implementation. I think you’ll find the parallels are staggering.
Both the escalation of the Vietnam War and the escalation of our war against Covid were predicated on lies. The bombing campaign of strategic Vietnam facilities that began in August 1964 was justified by the supposed unprovoked attack of an American Destroyer by Northern Vietnamese vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin. As we later learned, no such attack occurred. Malfunctioning equipment and eager sonar operators aboard the Maddox mistook the sounds of their own ship’s propellors for incoming torpedo fire.
So too was the escalation of our war against Covid justified by imagination. The now discredited “Imperial College Study” from the UK used computer modeling to project 2.2 million American deaths from COVID. Trump’s March 2020 announcement of strict lockdown and social distancing guidelines — our metaphorical bombing campaign called “15 days to slow the spread” — was predicated on a malfunctioning projection model.
Both the Vietnam War and our COVID war were also futile. But futility in both wars only further emboldened the so-called War Hawks to double down. The greatest hawk in the mid to late 60’s was Robert Strange McNamara, Johnson’s Secretary of Defense. In fact, so influential was McNamara in advising and directing strategy in the failed Vietnam War that the war came to be called “McNamara’s War.”