Trump’s promise vilifies science, stokes mistrust

Chennai

“I did the best I could,” President Donald Trump said. Huddled with aides in the West Wing last week, his eyes fixed on Fox News, Trump wasn’t talking about how he had led the nation through the deadliest pandemic in a century. In a conversation overheard by an Associated Press reporter, Trump was describing how he’d just publicly rebuked one of his top scientists — Dr Robert Redfield, a virologist and head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Redfield had angered the president by asserting that a COVID-19 vaccine wouldn’t be widely available until late 2021. So hours later, with no supporting evidence, Trump called a news conference to say Redfield was “confused.” A vaccine, Trump insisted, could be ready before November’s election.

Mission accomplished: Fox was headlining Trump’s latest foray in his administration’s ongoing war against its own scientists. It is a war that continues unabated, even as the nation’s COVID-19 death toll has reached 200,000 — nearly half the number of Americans killed in World War II, a once unfathomable number that the nation’s top doctors just months ago said was avoidable.

Over the past six months, the Trump administration has prioritised politics over science at key moments, refusing to follow expert advice that might have contained the spread of the virus and COVID-19, the disease it causes. Trump and his people have routinely dismissed experts’ assessments of the gravity of the pandemic, and of the measures needed to bring it under control. They have tried to muzzle scientists who dispute the administration’s rosy spin. While there is no indication that Trump’s desperation for a vaccine has affected the science or safety of the process, his insistence that one would be ready before the election is stoking mistrust in the very breakthrough he hopes will help his re-election.

Today, he is pushing hard for a resumption of normal activity and trying to project strength and control to bolster his political position in his campaign against Democrat Joe Biden.

In hindsight, Trump says, there’s nothing he would have done differently, citing his early move to restrict travel from China — a move that data and records show was ineffective. Still, he gives himself high marks on his handling the pandemic — except for bad messaging. “On public relations I give myself a D,” he told Fox this week. “On the job itself we take an A-plus.”

In late January, after the virus had first emerged in Wuhan, China, the CDC launched its emergency operations center. What was needed, epidemiologists said, was an aggressive public education campaign and mobilisation of contact tracing to identify and isolate the first cases before the disease spread out of control. Instead, Trump publicly played down the virus in those crucial first weeks, even though he privately acknowledged the seriousness of the threat. “I wanted to always play it down,” the president told journalist Bob Woodward in March. “I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic.”

But the virus kept coursing through the country, and the world. And with a president bent on minimising the dangers, the US would become ever more polarized, with the simple acts of wearing masks and keeping a distance transformed into political wedge issues. “You have to be calm,“ Trump said on March 6, during a visit to the Atlanta headquarters of the CDC. “It’ll go away.” By mid-March, hospitals in NYC and elsewhere were deluged with patients and storing bodies in refrigerated morgue trucks. And that was just the beginning.

The death chart was the awakening. On March 31, the nation was still grappling to understand the scope of the pandemic. Schools were disrupted, people sheltered at home and professional sports were paused. But the ascending lines of mortality on the chart said things were going to get way worse. Dr Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, and Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, stood next to the president to explain the numbers. The doctors said that models of the escalating pandemic showed that, unless the country adopted masks, practiced distancing and kept businesses closed there would be 100,000 to 240,000 deaths. They stressed that if the US adopted strict measures, the deaths could remain under 100,000. “We would hope that we could keep it under that,” Trump said then. Still, instead of issuing a national mask mandate and other recommended measures, the Trump administration within weeks posted its “Opening Up America Again” plan. The CDC began developing a thick document of guidelines to help local leaders make decisions about when reopening in their corner of the country was safe. But the White House thought the guidelines were too strict. They “ would never see the light of day, ” CDC scientists were told.

The Associated Press would eventually release the 63-page document, which offered science-based recommendations for workplaces, day care centers and restaurants. Meanwhile, the president refused to wear a mask in public, planned political rallies where masks were not required, and downplayed the CDC’s data tracking the disease’s toll. And in May, communities reopened without the CDC’s up-to-date guidance.

The predictable happened: Cases surged as soon as communities reopened. And by the end of May all hope for keeping the death toll under 100,000 vanished. The president’s argument was the toll from remaining closed would be too high — both economically and for people struggling with isolation at home and unable to send their children to school. Unspoken: the potential impact on his own re-election prospects. Eager to find a quick fix that would justify a fast reopening timetable set by the White House, Trump himself championed the use of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, as a “game changer” to treat COVID-19. He persisted despite repeated warnings from the Food and Drug Administration and others that there was no proof that it was effective, and there was reason to believe it could be dangerous.

The administration also touted the use of convalescent plasma as a treatment, though Fauci and others thought the supporting data was weak. Trump and his administration did not take scientific naysaying well. Trump installed a lobbyist, Michael Caputo, to head communications for the US Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees CDC and the FDA. Caputo had worked as a public relations consultant hired by the Russian energy giant Gazprom to improve President Vladimir Putin’s image in the US, and had no public health background.

Caputo hosted a video on Facebook in which he likened government scientists to a “resistance” against Trump, and emails surfaced in which he castigated CDC officials, challenging their scientific pronouncements and trying to muzzle staffers. He would take a leave in September after his actions were revealed. But the CDC’s science-based recommendations continued to be routed through the White House task force for vetting before release. The administration’s meddling and public rebukes has driven CDC morale to an all-time low, according to agency officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were afraid of losing their jobs. The constant battling against the administration’s political forces has made the difficult job of managing a pandemic even harder, and created a high rate of burnout.

Associated Press