Why can't we learn?
Turkey's earthquake, the bird flu, and learning from experience
—Gegen die Dummheit kämpfen die Götter selbst vergebens.
The highly pathogenic H5N1 variant of the bird flu is spreading to other mammals. There was a human outbreak in Southern China in 1996-97. The fatality rate, in humans, exceeded 50 percent.
But once again, we’re seeing headlines urging us not to panic:
Transmission between minks has called attention to the potential risks to humans, though experts say not to panic
We’re still living through one major pandemic. We know a great deal, now, about the way the public reacts to pandemics. So why do these experts continue to believe that panic about a deadly pathogen is something they should strive to prevent? The overwhelming evidence of the past several years is that to the contrary, the deadly risk is denial. It’s the failure to take the risk seriously—by the public and by authorities—that they should worry about. And our governments’ failure to prepare for this is panicking me.
Zeynep Tüfekci, as usual a step ahead of other journalists, wrote about this for The New York Times a few days ago: An even deadlier pandemic could soon be here. She pointed out that it is highly alarming that this thing is spreading beyond birds:
Alarmingly, it was recently reported that a mutant H5N1 strain was not only infecting minks at a fur farm in Spain but also most likely spreading among them, unprecedented among mammals. Even worse, the mink’s upper respiratory tract is exceptionally well suited to act as a conduit to humans …
“The world,” she wrote,
needs to act now, before H5N1 has any chance of becoming a devastating pandemic. We have many of the tools that are needed, including vaccines. What’s missing is a sense of urgency and immediate action.
We need panic. Or any emotion that motivates people to take this seriously. “The best defense against a new deadly pathogen is aggressively suppressing early outbreaks,” she writes,
which first requires detecting them quickly. The United States, the World Health Organization and global health officials already have influenza surveillance networks, but many avian influenza experts told me they don’t think the networks are functioning well enough given the threat level. Such surveillance would need to prioritize people in the poultry industry but also expand beyond that.
It’s not enough just to detect it. Suppression requires a major effort and global coordination. We need rapid testing, especially for poultry workers.
We urgently need to fix this problem:
There are 91 public health labs in the United States that can test for H5 influenza. Positive results are sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where further analyses can detect H5N1 within about 48 hours. But plans should be in place to increase the amount of tests and testing facilities in case demand ramps up.
How is it possible that we’ve learned nothing from our calamitous failure to test during the initial outbreak of Covid?
We need to stockpile vaccines, starting now:
The US government has a small H5N1 vaccine stockpile, but it would be nowhere near enough if a serious outbreak occurred. The current plan is to mass-produce them if and when such an outbreak occurs, based on the particular variant involved.
There’s only one problem with this plan, as she notes: It would take six months or more to produce the hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine we would need.
We need to stockpile flu antiviral drugs.
Poultry workers and people likely to come in contact with the virus should be vaccinated now, not when it’s too late.
She concludes:
In 2006, when scientists discovered that H5N1 had not spread easily among humans because it settles deep in their lungs, Kuiken of Erasmus University Medical Center warned that if the virus evolved to bind to receptors in the upper respiratory tract—from which it could become more easily airborne—the risk of a pandemic among humans would rise substantially. The mink outbreak in Spain is a signal that we might be moving along exactly that path. It’s hard to imagine clearer and more alarming warning signs of a potentially horrific pandemic.
The public needs to understand the risk, even if they’re sick of pandemics and apt to respond by shooting the messenger. A bit of panic might spread this message:
We also need to stop the inhumane and highly pathogenic practice of farming poultry in grossly overcrowded conditions. That’s how this strain of avian flu emerged, and clearly that’s how it will spread to us.
Mink farming should be banned, full stop. Experimental and natural evidence has repeatedly shown that minks are particularly susceptible to avian and human influenza viruses and highly likely to be a vehicle for interspecies transmission. Farming them is too dangerous, and it’s pointlessly cruel. They’re darling little mammals, just like the cats we pamper, and we do not need their fur. As the MIT review remarks:
If you’re getting déjà vu, it might be because millions of minks were killed in 2020 after scientists found that a form of the virus that causes covid-19 could spread between them, and to people. You’d hope we’d have learned some kind of lesson between then and now. Sadly not.
The experts who warned everyone not to panic about SARS CoV2 even as they failed to prepare for the impending catastrophe couldn’t truly be this incapable of learning from experience, can they? They should be urging a frantic, panicked response to these warning signs. If it proves an overreaction—great. We’ve had a chance to practice our pandemic preparedness skills. But if it doesn’t, what exactly do they imagine will happen to our societies when a second and even more deadly pandemic once again finds us unprepared?
Bird flu infects Colorado mountain lion, black bear and skunk, all now dead. The highly pathogenic avian influenza has killed thousands of wild birds and has now infected more Colorado wildlife.
Pandemic potential: bird flu outbreaks fueling chance of human spillover. “What is clear ... is the role our food system has played in getting us to this point.”
Bird flu keeps spreading beyond birds. “This is an infection that has epidemic and pandemic potential … I don’t know if people recognize how big a deal this is.”
An outbreak of H5N1 in New England seals is the first known population-scale mammalian mortality event associated with the emerging highly pathogenic avian influenza clade 2.3.4.4b.
More than 500 sea lions and 55,000 birds die from bird flu in Peru. Recently, it’s been found in foxes and otters in Britain, a cat in France, and grizzly bears in Montana.
The USDA has detected H5N1 in animals all over the US, including skunks, foxes, raccoons, bears, mountain lions, and dolphins.
Experts warn of “step-change” in avian flu spread as number of cases in mammals continues to grow globally. “[W]e shouldn’t sit idle because obviously we know what happened with Covid.”
The UK Health Security Agency said that a fox had recently tested positive for H5N1. It joined eight foxes and otters with the PB2 mutation, which allows the virus to replicate better in mammalian cells.
The virus is beginning to spill over into mammals—including humans.
The freight train
I’m struggling to understand why whole societies fail to step out of the way even though a freight train is barreling down on them. If you follow me on Twitter, you know that with every minute, my fury about the carnage in Turkey mounts. Perhaps it’s easier to feel anger than pity. If I allowed the anger to subside, my heart would break.
The official death toll is now 25,200. But I’m seeing estimates of 200,000 people missing under the rubble, and that’s a plausible figure. There are 800 buried under one building alone. It’s unlikely that many of those people are still alive.
In 1999, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck northwestern Turkey. If you look it up on Wikipedia, you’ll read that it killed some 17,000 people. But the government counted only the dead whose bodies had been found. Thousands upon thousands were never found. The true death toll, to judge from the number of missing people, was closer to 45,000.
I wrote this in 2009: Turkey must act to avert an earthquake tragedy.
I wrote that in response to a specific incident. I had been aware of the earthquake risk in Istanbul. I’d also been aware the Turkish construction industry was corrupt. But I hadn’t realized how utterly craven and indifferent to human life the industry was until one such company blithely knocked out the lower wall of my building—with me and everyone else still in the building.
They said it was an accident. An accident? How do you accidentally bash in the wall of a building where you’re not supposed to be working in the first place?
Much more likely, it was deliberate. My building shared a wall with a historic Ottoman bathhouse. As everyone in my neighborhood believed, and certainly they had good reason to think so, the company couldn’t get permission to destroy an Ottoman wall, so they destroyed it “by accident.” This was wholly plausible: No matter how incompetent and reckless you are, it’s not easy to destroy that much of a building without effort and forethought.
I had to move immediately. It was no longer remotely safe to live in that building, which might now collapse at any minute.
I’d loved that apartment, with its glorious view of the Bosphorus. I was left in the street with seven cats and no home.
It was obvious, I wrote at the time, that the construction company had committed one of two crimes: Either it was an accident, in which case the company was guilty of negligence and reckless endangerment, or it was deliberate. There was good reason, a priori, to suspect it was deliberate. That company should have been prosecuted, and it should never have been permitted to build anything again.
That’s not what happened.
I sued them. I filed complaints with every local official. I made as much noise about it as I could. I was advised by friends not to do any of that: “They’ll kill you,” they said. They were serious.
Everyone in Turkey knows the construction industry is a mafia, and that it’s intimately entwined with Turkey’s governing party. The AKP runs on construction money. All of Turkey’s political parties do, in fact.
Since 1939, there have been seven earthquakes with a magnitude of more than 7 points, all on the Anatolian fault line, marching westward from eastern Turkey directly toward Istanbul. Each quake moves the point of greatest stress on the fault line further West.
I understood, in 2009, that this was the biggest problem Turkey faced—not Islamism, not the Kurds, not poverty, but illegal, shoddy construction, motivated by greed and the belief that powerful construction companies are above the law.
You won’t find the article I wrote about what happened anywhere but my website. Sargin sent an email to my publisher (a magazine that’s since gone under) saying that the article was libelous and they would sue.
Every word of it is true. Everything I described was witnessed by hundreds of people. There are police records documenting the event. There are the complaints I filed with the municipality. It was mentioned in a number of local newspapers, mostly because I made such a stink about it. I had photos, I had witness testimony. But all they needed to do to censor the article was send that email. No one wants the cost or the hassle of defending a journalist in court, even when the article is entirely accurate. Smaller publications simply can’t afford it. So the article was taken down.1
When I swore to Sargin I would sue him blind, he chuckled mirthlessly. He was a genuinely evil man. Most people are decent. But he wasn’t. He was indifferent to human life.
Berlinski v. Sargın Construction was in court for years. Rather than explain this, it’s easier to refer you to the story of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in Bleak House. Negligent builders in Turkey don’t fear lawsuits because the Turkish legal system doesn’t work, except when it’s time to put Erdogan’s enemies in jail. Only an American fool would consider trying to sue a criminal construction company. They always win in the end.
Long after I’d left Turkey, the court demanded of me yet another filing fee. I did what I swore I’d never do: I dropped the case. They got away with it. Meanwhile, Sargin sued me for defamation, although the court ruled in my favor.
In 2011, my family survived the earthquake in Port-au-Prince. My sister-in-law wasn’t at the MINUSTAH headquarters that day. It collapsed. I had plane tickets, that week, to visit them there. The hotel where I would have stayed—the Hotel Montana—collapsed. That they survived was just good luck.
After the earthquake in Haiti, I found it hard to go back to Istanbul. I couldn’t believe it could be impossible to protect the city from a calamity that everyone knew was coming. I spoke to my friends there. We decided to organize a campaign to improve the city’s odds of surviving a quake like the one that had just leveled Port-au-Prince.
We tried beginning with the easy things. Most people in Istanbul, despite being aware of the risk and frightened by it, had no idea what steps they could take to protect themselves. “Non-structural seismic risk mitigation” was an unfamiliar concept. They didn’t know what to do if it happened (duck, cover, hold). They didn’t know how important it was to move heavy items away from their beds.
We thought a public education campaign could do some good. We went to local authorities throughout Istanbul to see if they would join us. Most were happy to talk—and talk—but no one seemed to have the authority to do anything. None of them had made a viable emergency plan. They hadn’t thought through problems like where to land a helicopter in their neighborhoods, or where thousands of people who had lost their homes would sleep. No one kept a list of vulnerable people in the area so better to figure out who was missing and who would most urgently need help. No one stockpiled emergency supplies. No one put flyers under people’s doors reminding them to bolt their heavy items to the wall and move them away from their beds. Hospitals should have been a priority for reinforcement. They weren’t.
All of these problems are visible now in the rescue efforts in the south.
It wasn’t that no one had thought about it. Everyone had thought about it. But somehow it never translated into action, as I wrote in this article for City Journal:
Local officials in the municipality of Beşiktaş have elaborate earthquake plans—they showed them to me in a PowerPoint presentation. But they exist only on PowerPoint, where they have existed since 2008 without any progress made toward implementation. This is characteristic of the great majority of earthquake plans drawn up in Turkey since the 1999 quake. No one knows about them—certainly not the public; they look quite thorough, but they do not translate into action. No one seems to have the authority to act on the plans. No one seems to have the authority to release whatever funds would be needed to implement them. No one seems even to know who would have that authority. The funds and grants awarded by various international development agencies for retrofitting and earthquake preparation simply disappear.
Whenever I visited someone’s home in Istanbul, I would scan the room for the best place to duck and cover and suggest to my hosts that they bolt their heavy items to the wall. I’d ask whether they’d prepared an emergency bag. I became known to my friends as the great Earthquake Bore. I was told more than once that my fear of earthquakes was a sign that my faith in God was inadequate.
As I read the news, all these memories are coming back to me. I can’t describe the frustration I feel. It was so clear this was coming. It was so clear what needed to be done.
CNN: “Erdogan defended his government’s response, admitting to ‘shortcomings,’ before stressing that it’s ‘not possible to be prepared for such a disaster.’”
I would be very gratified now to learn that someone in Turkey listened to us and prepared a First Aid kit, or moved a projectile-in-waiting away from a bed, or thought twice about living in an unreinforced building. I would love to know that what we did saved someone’s life. But I suspect, despite all the effort, we didn’t make any difference at all.
And when I left Istanbul, the group fell apart.
The suffering in Turkey now is beyond all imagination. No one’s family, it seems, has been spared.
My anger was already white hot, but when the AKP jammed Twitter to prevent its own citizens from seeing the extent of the carnage and speaking poorly of the rescue efforts, I nearly exploded. I wasn’t the only one. Twitter is useful in ordinary circumstances but life-saving in an emergency.
After the earthquake in Port-au-Prince, people organized themselves spontaneously on Twitter. It was the first time I’d ever used Twitter. Using the USHAHAIDI platform, we began a logging the cellphone messages people were sending the emergency number—4636—onto one, centralized map, so they could be located by rescue teams. I know we managed to save a few people that way.
I was impressed by the utility of Twitter in an emergency, and when I returned to Istanbul, I thought about the ways it could be used to prepare in advance. I worked with my little group to create a prototype of an emergency system. These are my meeting notes:
It’s essential that there be a well-publicized SMS shortcode that everyone in Turkey knows to use in an emergency. It does a lot less good to publicize this number afterwards than before. People also need to know how important it is, when using this number, to be very specific about where they are and what they need. This was one of the key lessons of Mission 4636 in Haiti. Far too many heartbreaking SMS messages didn’t include the information rescuers needed to help the people who sent them.
The platform will be used to two ways: First, to direct emergency local and international rescuers after a quake, in what we know will be a highly chaotic situation.
Second, it will be used to map hazards prior to the quake and give people practical information about how to prepare. The SMS shortcode will allow people to phone in issues of concern: (eg, “I’m worried about the school my kids are in, what should I do?”) and will direct them, via an automated message system, to practical advice and resources. This will give us a better picture of which areas are really problematic—one independent of government estimates.
Using this data, we can predict where emergency assistance will be needed (and obviously shorten the time required to get it there.) It will also be a way to let people know about the practical steps they can take prior to an earthquake to increase their chances of surviving it. This information is right now not well-understood here at all.
We organized a test of the system, you can read about that in our meeting notes, too:
Here’s what's going to happen. At 10:00 am Istanbul time, we’re going to pretend that there’s been a massive earthquake in Istanbul. For the sake of the exercise, we’re going to assume that phones are down, but some people have access to Twitter. (This is not fanciful: It’s exactly what happened in Haiti.) People participating in the exercise—that’s you—will Tweet about it. Use your imaginations. Report collapsed buildings, fires, injuries. Do it just the way you would if it had really happened and you were really panicking, emotional, and not thinking straight, EXCEPT WE MUST MAKE SURE THESE TWEETS DO NOT PANIC PEOPLE. So, we’re going to use code. …
After the earthquake in Haiti, cellphone networks went down. But sometimes people were able briefly to access the Internet and send a message to their families by email or on social media. It’s a genuinely indescribable relief to see the message that your family is still alive. When I read that the Turkish government was throttling Twitter even as people were desperately trying to find their missing relatives, I lost my mind. I know exactly what it’s like to be a relative of someone who’s missing after an earthquake.
That’s the most evil thing the AKP has ever done.
If you’re tempted to think yourself superior to Turks who failed to plan for this earthquake, in some ways, you’re right. Turkey is anomalously corrupt and anomalously fatalistic. These are qualities, in a society, that should be judged harshly.
But don’t be too tempted. Think about how well we prepare for pandemics.
My friend Esin—whom I call my adopted Turkish daughter—lived for years in Gazientep. She sent me this email:
I don’t even know where to begin. There’s the scale of human death, there’s the scale of human suffering, both in Turkey and in Syria (one wonders what the poor few million in Idlib ever did to be so cursed by God), there’s the fact that the whole southeast is basically wiped out and destroyed. On top of the human aspect I’m mourning the near-total destruction of my favorite part of Turkey. It’s diversity, history, architecture, beauty, food, music. But it’s changed forever. I’m grateful for the time I got to spend there. I’m grateful I got to know it and live in it and roam it before this happened. Big disasters have happened through history and towns and cities recover, but I do wonder if it’s going to be in my lifetime, when I’m going to get to go to Antakya and have its delicious food again, and what the permanent consequences will be.
I’ve completely dedicated myself to raising donations. Luckily it’s actually a relatively uncomplicated problem—not political, not complicated, just get as many blankets and as much food there as quickly as you can. We can discuss the politicization and centralization of the aid by the government and the insistence on the centralization, but I guess we can at least say most of the aid is largely going where it needs to go and we need more. I was able to get permission to post in our intranet at work some organizations in Turkey and north Syria who are trustworthy to donate to and the organization generously even said that they would match all employee donations. I posted a list on LinkedIn that went viral (at least by my standards). Work contacts have been reaching out and putting me in touch with pharmaceutical companies and their corporate foundations who want to help and I’ve been able to inform them about the situation and direct their aid. And we’re launching a crowdfunding campaign to support a temporary shelter that’s been set up in north Syria.
So at least I don’t feel completely useless. I’m focusing on keeping momentum because if I stop I’m going to be overcome by the overwhelming reality and freeze. Everyone I know is alive, though miserable, obviously. But alive. Guess this is what we have to be thankful for. And at least that Mardin seems to have been spared.
How are you? Did you know anyone in the area? Everyone okay?
When we launch the crowdfunding thing (hopefully later today) can I send you the link and you circulate it in your network for people who want to donate but don’t know who to give to? The difference between this and donating to Kızılay or Support to Life for example is that this is a relatively small project and we know exactly where the money is going (as opposed to the larger organizations) so this might give people a bit more sense of having helped. It’s a specific shelter. In Sheikh Bahar. And God knows the Syrians were already miserable, are at the mercy of the Syrian regime and Turkey, therefore largely cut off from the world and receiving aid. My friend’s foundation has been active in the area for ten years working on protection and humanitarian aid to displaced people on both sides of the border, so there’s no one who knows what they’re doing in this type of situation more than him.
If you’d like to contribute in a meaningful way, to people who will make sure every penny goes where it’s meant to go, here’s the link.
I’ll add something about the extraordinary cultural richness of this region. I never explored it properly, and I so regret that now. Esin sent me this photo so I could show you what Antakya looked like—I’ve never been there. It’s near the Syrian border. It’s is the Liwan Hotel. It belonged, once, to the first president of Syria. “No idea what condition it’s in,” she wrote.
Looking at it, I suspected it was okay. It’s a well-built building.
I was right: I just found out the staircase collapsed, but the building is still standing.
Further reading:
After Turkey’s earthquake comes the reckoning. “Why are we unprepared?” President Erdogan, who consolidated control over disaster-response institutions, faces rising anger ahead of national elections
🧵 This is an excellent thread about Turkey’s capacity to manage crises and why its domestic capacity in particular is so weak. Key reasons: Loyalty over merit, internecine strife, and above all, centralization.
Erdogan has undermined Turkey’s earthquake response Paranoid policies against NGOs have weakened the institutions the country now needs.
How corruption and misrule made Turkey’s earthquake deadlier.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hollowed out state institutions, placed loyalists in key positions, and enriched his cronies—paving the way for this tragedy.
After Turkey’s quake, some people left homeless say they haven’t eaten in days.
United Nations aid chief Martin Griffiths described the earthquake in southern Turkey and northwestern Syria as the “worst event in 100 years” to hit the regions. Rescue work could take two to three years to complete in Turkey, but five to ten years to just get underway in Syria, according to Caroline Holt, director of disasters, climate and crises at the International Federation of the Red Cross.
Syria’s earthquake victims are trapped by Assad. A natural disaster like this could not have hit a more vulnerable population:
Syrians in the northwest are dying by the minute, trapped under rubble. Thousands more are now homeless, with nowhere to go and no shelter to seek. The international community has pledged substantial assistance to Turkey, and rightly so—but as per usual, Syrians appear to be an afterthought. … Prior to the earthquake, Syria was staring into an abyss of economic collapse, humanitarian suffering, and intractable political, ethnic, and sectarian instability. The root cause of all of this—the regime—shows no sign of openness to compromise. In 2022, illegal migration of Syrians into Europe rocketed by 100 percent. With the effects of this earthquake as cataclysmic as they are, those numbers will markedly rise once spring arrives. For too many years, the international community has chosen to take half-measures when it comes to Syria policy, to ignore its root causes, or to ignore it altogether. That must now end.
Two German aid organizations suspended rescue operations owing to “clashes between groups of people and gunfire.” Operations Manager Steven Bayer said this was typical in such circumstances, “partly due to the fact that food is now running out, water supply is running out, and then people are out searching for food and water. A second thing is that the hope that people had is now increasingly fading, and that hope can then also turn into anger.”
If you’d like to understand the problem in Turkey in depth, this article, published in 2005 in the British Journal of Criminality, is superb:
Disaster by Design: Corruption, Construction and Catastrophe:
An underlying assumption of this paper is that many “natural” disasters are the direct outcome of “deviant” political and economic decisions and actions by states. While focusing on three recent major earthquakes in Turkey, the paper explores the dynamic relationship between state power, corruption, corporate power and, to a limited extent, organized crime in the context of examining responsibility for earthquake-precipitated catastrophe. It documents the “network of responsibilities, opportunities and pressures” which combine as state crime to create earthquake disasters involving mass human rights violations. The paper argues for a reinterpretation of natural disasters in terms of human rights violations, while developing themes around state culpability which first emerged in an Economic and Social Research Council-funded study undertaken by the author on the 1999 Marmara earthquake in Turkey.
These themes were later identified in Green and Ward (2004), where we developed a criminological rationale for understanding the impact of many natural disasters as state crime. Employing the theoretical criteria derived by Green and Ward (2000; 2004) to determine ‘organizational state deviance’ with Olson et al.’s notion of the politics of “life safety” (Olsen et al. 1999), this paper argues that the Turkish earthquake disasters of 1999 and 2003 were less the products of violent seismic events and much more the result of corrupt political decisions and negligent government. Sixty-six per cent of the Turkish population lives in high-risk earthquake-prone regions (Gulkan and Ergünay 1999) and Istanbul’s 12 million citizens face a 65 per cent chance of a major earthquake shattering their city in the next three decades (Parsons et al. 2000). Understanding the fundamental causes of the catastrophes which follow earthquakes and the political allocation apportioned by states to life-safety therefore matters a great deal.
I recommend reading it. It’s the best overview of the problem I’ve read.
Will Turkey do what’s needed to protect another quarter of a million people from perishing in the next earthquake? It’s coming, sure as night follows day. It’s not just Turkey: Bogotá, Cairo, Caracas, Dhaka, Islamabad, Istanbul, Jakarta, Karachi, Katmandu, Lima, Manila, Mexico City, New Delhi, Quito, Tehran—it will be one of them. It isn’t too late to save them. But it requires honestly confronting the threat. As I wrote in 2011:
A quarter of a million people were killed in Haiti, and God knows how many more were maimed, physically and emotionally, by collapsing buildings. This will happen again and again, in larger and larger numbers, with ever-weepier celebrity telethons to accompany the carnage. But you’ll see no calls to save the world from corrupt building practices on your grocery bags at Whole Foods. Nobody will suggest that the American government enter into seismic risk reduction treaties with other nations.
Isn’t it time?
The next pandemic is coming, too. It may even have already arrived. Will we do any better? It’s not too late to prepare. But that, too, requires honestly confronting the threat.
“Don’t panic” is not sound advice. Human beings feel fear for a damned good reason.
This happened to me more than once in Turkey. A lot of news from Turkey, I assume, is never reported in the West for this reason.
Michele Wucker’s book “The Gray Rhino” describes large obvious threats that we neglect until disaster strikes. Apparently it’s a bestseller in China. I thought it was a good read.
After reading it I mostly went on doing the same things I had been doing...
While I sympathize with what you're saying regarding panic, I don't think it's the right response.
Panic: sudden uncontrollable fear or anxiety, often causing wildly unthinking behavior.
That's exactly the opposite of what is needed. Fear can be a powerful and useful motivation, but if you want to accomplish anything useful, panic isn't the way to go.