Coronaviruspandemic—the consequences of sidelining science
Having
paved over the science on pandemics, the Trump administration puts up parking
lots. Literally.
It
wasn't enough that President Trump's Rose Garden declaration of a national
coronavirus emergency on Friday disintegrated into a self-congratulatory
monologue.
It
wasn't enough that he trashed reporters who dared ask him if he bore any responsibility
for one of the worst responses to a pandemic by a wealthy country in modern
times, driving the United
States toward a double collapse of human and economic health and the indefinite
shutdown of normal life and movements.
The
finishing touch was that Trump was flanked not by a wall of dedicated
infectious disease experts, epidemiologists, triage managers, and heads of
public university research labs but rather mostly by Fortune 500 CEOs whose
hands he shook as they paraded to the podium—violating a primary public health
directive to blunt the spread of infection.
The
heads of Walmart, Walgreens, Target, and CVS, with a combined 2019 net income
of $20 billion, stepped forward to proclaim that they would each do their part
in this emergency.
But
their pledges were glaringly short of vital particulars such as how they
planned to protect their workers or what kind of extended sick leave they might
offer. Rather, they said they will reserve parts of
parking lots for drive-in virus testing.
To
be clear, glossing over the fact that access to COVID-19 tests remains woefully
limited in the United States, the idea of drive-in testing itself is good.
But
it was hard to watch some of the wealthiest companies in the country boast on
national television as though they were suddenly carrying the torch of Florence
Nightingale, such as when Walgreens' president, Richard Ashworth, said,
"When we have natural disasters, our stores are a beacon in the
community."
It
is a key part of the Trump administration agenda to be the lighthouse keeper
for these corporate beacons, as it dims the laboratory lights of federally
funded climate, pollution, food, and health science. Fifty years ago, Joni
Mitchell sang about the madness of paving over the environment.
In
2020, we have a White House that has disbanded or paved over scientific advisory panels,
disregarded and disparaged its own scientists, and shuttered the
pandemic office in the National Security Council.
The
administration's appointments of industry lobbyists and political ideologues to
top-level positions has driven out thousands of career scientists across
several agencies. As recently reported, the
administration held classified meetings
on the coronavirus during which they essentially cut out input from experts who
could have helped shape a more orderly response.
Brusque
and heartless answers
Beyond
the dearth of hard science and the corporate glad handing, Trump's brusque,
heartless answers to reporters were once again on full display. To one of them
he refused to take any responsibility for the precious time lost to protect
citizens from botched testing.
The
debacle has been marked by the still-mysterious reluctance of the
United States to be among the 60 nations to adopt test kits from the World
Health Organization, the defective early test kits distributed by the Centers
for Disease Prevention and Control, and lack of flexible thinking to greenlight
test kit production at university and state medical centers and private labs.
For all that, Trump blamed, "rules, regulations and specifications from a
different time."
When
Yamiche Alcindor of PBS brought up the elimination of the pandemic office and
whether the administration lost valuable time because of that, Trump snapped that she
had asked a "nasty question."
Trump's
nastiness to Alcindor was flagrant on two levels. One is that Trump once more
attempted to humiliate a black
female journalist as he has done previously by calling their questions nasty,
stupid, or—almost laughably—racist. The other is that he knew that the question
cut to the core of his administration's inexcusable dismissal of science.
Alcindor
was the only reporter to directly interrogate the president on the White
House's 2018 disbanding of the
National Security Council pandemic preparedness office.
By extension, the question brought into stark relief the administration's
relentless dismantling of our overall federal public health science
infrastructure.
Trump
knew if he owned up to that even his most fervent followers would recognize
that his White House was responsible for hampering preparedness and enabling
the spread of the lethal virus in the United States. In an answer to Alcindor
that was either a lie or a bald admission of ignorance and incompetence, Trump
told her, "I don't know anything about it."
In
this life-and-death crisis where we need not just a commander-in-chief, but
also a compassionate national consoler, it is noteworthy that Trump did not
utter a single sentence of condolence to the families of any of the people who
have died so far, nor offer a single best wish or prayer for recovery for the
ill as the number of confirmed cases continues to climb.
Exaggerated
claims
In
a Washington Post guest column that
ran the same day of the Rose Garden fiasco, Beth Cameron, a former director of
the disbanded pandemic preparedness panel—the White House's National Security
Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense—wrote that its
purpose was to "rally the government at the highest levels" to avoid
a six-alarm blaze of viruses that know no borders. She wrote that the absence
of the panel now "is all too evident."
Without
scientific evidence to rally the American people, the White House was reduced
to showcasing corporate cheerleaders. And there was far less substance to this
show of Fortune 500 generosity than even what President Trump proclaimed.
He
said Google had 1,700 engineers working on a website to direct Americans to the
drive-in testing sites. Claiming that the engineers have "made tremendous
progress," Trump promised Americans that the website will be "very
quickly done."
Coronavirus
response coordinator Deborah Birx held up a poster showing how the site would
work to bring quality testing "to the American people at unprecedented
speed."
Google
itself quickly squashed that
promise, saying that a subsidiary with
only 1,000 employees was merely working on a pilot website for the San
Francisco Bay Area, with no timetable for launch. And, so far, none of the
companies have yet offered any concrete information on when, where, or how
drive-in testing will be done.
Richard
Ashworth of Walgreens told those assembled at the Rose Garden
event, "These are extraordinary times that call for extraordinary
measures."
He's
right on that to be sure. But it will surely take more than pledges of
corporate parking lots as a naturally occurring crisis is morphing into a
human-made disaster in the United States because of the Trump administration's
sidelining of science and scientists.
To
borrow again from Joni Mitchell, you don't
know what you've got until the pandemic panel is gone.
Derrick Z. Jackson is
on the advisory board of Environmental
Health Sciences, publisher of Environmental Health News and The
Daily Climate. He's also a Union of Concerned Scientist Fellow in climate and
energy. This post originally ran on The Union of Concerned Scientists
blog and is republished here with permission.