For more than six months now, Americans have languished under the dark shadow of pandemic. Around 200,000 people in the United States have died. Millions remain out of work. Even more are facing excruciating uncertainty. Life has gone on, yes, but in a kind of anxious fugue. And, with the White House throwing up its hands on mitigation efforts, about the only hope of escaping this purgatory has come to rest with a vaccine.
That, however, has increasingly become tainted by partisan politics, thanks to Donald Trump, who has conspicuously linked the vaccine race to his reelection efforts. “We’ll have the vaccine soon,” Trump said in one recent press conference. “Maybe before a special date.” That’s as grotesque as it is dangerous, serving only to undermine Americans’ confidence in the safety of future vaccines and therapeutics. But the ugliness has only gotten worse.
On Wednesday, Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the Senate that widespread inoculation likely won’t happen until at least the middle of next year—an assessment that comports with most other credible scientists and health professionals, but that contradicts the Trump administration’s wildly bullish timeline in which a vaccine will be ready and widely distributed this fall. Moreover, Redfield testified before the Senate, initial vaccines may not even be as effective against the coronavirus as masks, which the president steadfastly refuses to wear and continues to question their efficacy.
Taking the podium for a press conference later in the day, Trump disputed Redfield’s testimony and impugned the CDC director’s judgment. A vaccine is on the way, he said, and it’ll be more effective than wearing a mask, which “have problems” anyway. The public health official only said otherwise, Trump suggested, because he’s an idiot. “I think maybe he misunderstood [the question],” Trump said of Redfield. “I mean, you know, you have two questions; maybe he misunderstood both of them.” How did Redfield respond to this? Did he stand by his disheartening but realistic analysis? Did he say, “No, I didn’t misunderstand the question, you mendacious ghoul?” Nope. Within minutes of the president dressing him down on television, Redfield groveled on Twitter.
That Trump has undercut experts at every turn of the public health crisis has been disastrous enough. But the fact that he has actually managed to bend apolitical scientific institutions like the CDC to his will at times is even worse. Four years into his presidency, most Americans have grown accustomed to Trump’s self-serving lies. But there was at least an expectation that some institutions—like, say, the organizations in charge of signing off on a vaccine for Americans to have injected into their bodies—would not be corrupted by him. And yet, here is the Food and Drug Administration, under pressure from Trump, to approve blood plasma as a COVID therapy ahead of the Republican National Convention, giving him the go-ahead to announce its wider use as a therapeutic on the eve of his re-coronation bash. Here are Trump officials meddling with CDC reports amid concern from political appointees that the agency’s sober appraisals of the pandemic contradict the president’s fanciful messaging. Here’s that agency’s director with his tail between his legs as the president castigates him before the press.