Pandemic notes 4.0: The Murray Hamilton effect

by David Benjamin

“Life on earth is an endless chain of parasitism which would soon lead to the complete annihilation of all living things unless the incorruptible workers of the vegetable kingdom constantly renewed the supply of suitable nitrogen and carbon compounds which other living things can filch… In the last analysis, man may be defined as a parasite on a vegetable.”

— Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History

MADISON, Wis. —  Since Friday the 13th of March, when Hotlips and I snuck back (circuitously) into the United States from Paris, I’ve been reading “disease books,” starting with The Plague by Albert Camus and reaching, most recently Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century classic Decameron (which, disappointingly, features a lot more canoodling than contagion).

My reading regimen returned me happily to the absolute most entertaining and puckishly digressive disease book of all time, Hans Zinsser’s “biography” of typhus, Rats, Lice and History. Published in 1935, it has never been out of print, partly because of Zinsser’s exhaustive exposition of the impact of  epidemic disease on civilization but largely because Zinsser was having so much fun. Consider, for example, when he writes about the evolution of the louse, a pestilent arthropod whose exclusive habitat is the body of its host.

“The louse,” laments Zinsser, “was not always the dependent, parasitic creature that cannot live away from its host. There were once free and liberty-loving lice, who could look other insects in their multifaceted eyes and bid them smile when they called them ‘louse.’ But this was even longer ago than the Declaration of Independence, for it took the louse many centuries to yield up its individuality.”

At one point in his book, Zinsser casually drops the word, “saprophyte,” and appends a footnote that says, “If the reader does not understand this word, it is too bad.” How can you not love a smartass epidemiologist?

(Okay, a saprophyte is an organism that feeds off dead or decaying matter.)

In the New York Times this month, science writer David Quammen echoed Zinsser’s clinical appreciation of the life-force of infectious organisms. “Viruses,” wrote Quammen, “follow the same simple Darwinian imperatives as do rats or any other creature driven by a genome: to extend themselves as much as possible in abundance, in geographical space and in time. Their primal instinct is to do just what God commanded to his newly created humans in Genesis 1:28: ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it.’” [My italics]

To explain the zoonotic transmission of a deadly agent from one creature to another, Zinsser’s protagonist, is typhus. Quammen’s example, paralleling the migration of SARS-CoV-2 from horseshoe bats to humans by way of a wet market in Wuhan, is HIV: “Chimpanzees were a species in decline, alas, because of habitat loss and killing by humans; humans were a species in ascendance. The SIVcpz virus reversed its own evolutionary prospects by getting into us and adapting well to the new host. It jumped from a sinking lifeboat onto a luxury cruise ship.”

Like Quammen, by the way, Hans Zinsser couldn’t resist a primate reference, even if it was pure digression. Here’s one of my highlighted Zinsser passages (just for fun): “Why, we must ask ourselves, have individuals of unquestionably great powers chosen to play with their minds like captive monkeys with their genitalia?”

Mind you, I didn’t read Zinsser, John M. Barry’s riveting history of the pandemic of 1918, The Great Influenza and other sagas of pestilence, purely for the sake of virtuous enlightenment. I actually like this kind of stuff. I’ve been a fan of “disease movies” since I was a kid watching grainy TV documentaries about tsetse flies and elephantiasis in Africa. While sheltering at home this spring, I conducted a personal retrospective of Hollywood pandemics, including The Satan Bug, Outbreak, The Andromeda Strain, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and — recently and most chillingly — Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. 

Invariably, a disease flick depicts a tragic period of official evasion— what Donald Trump calls “playing it down.” The archetype for this motif is Murray Hamilton, as mayor of Amity Island in Jaws. Despite warnings by scientists and Roy Scheider about a great white shark prowling the shallows, Mayor Vaughn re-opens the beaches and scolds the experts for spreading fear among consumers. Pretty soon, the little Kintner boy is little more than a blood slick on the Atlantic.

Mayor Vaughn has shortsighted forebears in Panic in the Streets (1950). The Black Death is stalking the docks of New Orleans and Richard Widmark is desperately hunting Patient Zero. Meanwhile, officials refuse to mobilize the city’s medical resources and warn the public because, “We don’t want to start a panic.”

So, yes. When Donald Trump, taped by Bob Woodward, invoked “panic” as his alibi for months of denying the peril of the coronavirus, he was inadvertently parroting the cowardly civic boosters in a long string of disaster flicks. 

Trump is also successor to several real-life Murray Hamiltons cited by Barry in The Great Influenza. Foremost is President Woodrow Wilson. Obsessed with World War I and eager to ship 4.7 million doughboys to Europe — from virus-infested army camps via troop ships literally crawling with influenza — Wilson never mentioned the pandemic. Ever. “From neither the White House nor any other senior administration post,” wrote Barry, “would there come any leadership, any attempt to set priorities, any attempt to coordinate activities, any attempt to deliver resources.” Despite World War I’s imminent end, Wilson dispatched troop ships to Europe as late as October, 1918. Because hundreds of young men died of the flu on these overcrowded vessels — and were tossed into the sea — survivors called them “death ships.”

One of the flu’s more hapless Murray Hamiltons was Philadelphia’s public health chief, Dr. Wilmer Krusen. On October 5th, while pandemic was ripping his city apart, he announced 254 deaths and said, “The peak of the influenza epidemic has been reached.” The next-day death total was 289, followed by two days over 300 — which Krusen then called “the high water mark” — after which 428 people immediately died. The daily number continued upward, beyond 800.

The spirit of Mayor Vaughn has reared its myopic head in the campaign, with Trump’s revival of rallies — indoors and outdoors — where thousands (Trump’s boasts top 40,000) of unmasked believers squeeze together, chanting and slobbering while Trump, safely distanced from them on an elevated stage, rattles on. In March, when SARS-CoV-2 forced Trump to suspend to all such events, I sensed that his ego could not long endure such prudence. He would eventually, I thought, revive his beloved bread-and-circus blowouts, drawing a demographic fearsomely vulnerable to a scourge he was loath to acknowledge.

I wrote then that Trumpist rallygoers are “a little older than the average bear. Perhaps more than most folks, they tend toward brown lungs, weak tickers, hypertension, morbid obesity, too much to drink, and piss-poor anger management. Plus, a lot of them think they can pray their way past a deadly disease. Put these risk factors together and you’re looking at the ideal coronavirus host. Then, you pile 50,000 of these potential carriers into a covered stadium with bad ventilation. You get them all screaming and spouting, hugging and kissing, salivating like mad dogs and, I mean, God help us. You’re talking about one gigantic flowering, festering Petri dish!”

In a 1990 study, published in the Journal of Virology, Dutch researchers inadvertently coined a term for this sort of mass Russian roulette. They called it “early death syndrome.”