This is an opinion piece
President Trump found his name splashed across headlines around the world earlier this month when he confirmed over Twitter that he had tested positive for Coronavirus. Trump’s coronavirus calamity ended quite quickly, with the president making a rapid recovery and leaving the hospital where he was being treated within a few days. In case you missed the updates on the president’s COVID journey (or purposefully turned a blind eye because it was just too much to process, in which case I sympathize completely), Trump announced October 1 that he and the First Lady had tested positive for the virus.
That same day, Trump was taken to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and started treatment, which included experimental medications along with different supplements, including zinc and vitamin D.
Trump’s health while in the hospital remained somewhat of a mystery, with different reports telling different stories of the overall outlook for the president’s recovery. Trump’s primary physician, Dr. Sean Conley, asserted that he and his team were “cautiously optimistic” about Trump’s status, while the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, painted a different picture, claiming that the president’s vitals were concerning and that the president was “still not on a clear path to recovery”.
Nevertheless, the president returned to the White House on October 5, only four days since he’d begun treatment at the hospital. Trump’s return home was ceremonial; the president was helicoptered the short distance back to the White House in Marine One over a sea of supporters who wove flags and waved enthusiastically from the ground.
Once back at the White House, Trump immediately removed his medical mask and posed for pictures outside. Later, he posted videos to social media telling his 87.3 million followers “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”
Throughout his diagnosis and treatment, the Trump administration projected a primarily rosy message of the president’s swift recovery, with Trump’s physician acknowledging that he had withheld some truth during a debriefing on the president’s health to “reflect the upbeat attitude” of the White House. Alyssa Farah, the White House strategic communications director, asserted that this was in an effort to keep the president’s spirits high as he completed treatment, saying “When you’re treating a patient, you want to project confidence, you want to lift their spirits, and that was the intent.”
In the weeks since his diagnosis and stay at Walter Reed, Trump has heralded his treatment and has gone as far to say that his coming down with the illness was a “Blessing from God”. He also claimed that Regeneron – an ‘antibody cocktail’ that claims to be an “effective” treatment for hospitalized COVID-19 patients with no prior immune response (no natural immunity) to the illness – was his “cure”. On camera, Trump joked that he was now immune to the disease in a confusing statement where he alleged that health professionals’ advice on the immunity window had changed once he’d caught the virus.
Trump has crafted his recovery as something exemplary, positioning himself as the hero figure and attempting to portray himself as bigger and badder than COVID-19.
Here’s the problem with that approach – no one is bigger than this illness. Not Trump, nor Biden, nor the thousands of young Americans still partying sans-mask.
COVID-19 has killed over 220,000 people in the United States alone and over a million people worldwide. Though it has a low mortality rate (around 7%), there’s really not much to go off of in terms of who’s most likely to die from contraction and who won’t, and thus the disease is incredibly dangerous and very much well within the epidemic status.
Trump’s downplaying of the severity of the virus has been met with global criticism from medical professionals and rival Joe Biden, who responded to Trump’s upbeat messaging by reasserting that “there’s a lot to be concerned about” and that he hopes that the president, after experiencing the virus himself, “would communicate the right lesson to the American people.”
Trump has a history of painting a (primarily untrue) optimistic picture of the virus as a whole.Starting in early spring, Trump began a practice of making several empty promises crafted to downplay the true gravity of this crisis, telling the American public that the disease would “disappear”. He’s made claims such as “We have it under control” (January 20), “It will go away” (February 26), “We have prevailed” (May 11) and “I’ll be right eventually” (July 19). Objectively speaking, Trump has been wrong in his statements. Coronavirus has not disappeared, it’s currently the most out of control it’s ever been, and a death toll totaling in the 200,000s is nowhere near a victory.
Trump’s claim that the virus is nothing to be worried about is misleading at best and dangerous at worst.COVID-19 is lethal and it’s killed scores of people around the world with hundreds of thousands of those deaths being his own constituents. The general population doesn’t have access to the same treatments that were offered to the president; specialized, experimental treatments for coronavirus aren’t the norm for the usual fight against the sickness and would be much less attainable (if not inaccessible) and more expensive for the average American. The millions of people who listened to Trump’s misleading messages earnestly were fed a slew of mistruths that could potentially cost them their life.
Within days of Trump’s diagnosis, the New England Journal of Medicine published an editorial unanimously signed by each contributing editor that urged voters to elect the Trump administration out of office. This was the first time in the journal’s two-century long history that it took a definitive stance on a US presidential election.
The editors cited the Trump administration’s continuous downplaying of the virus as a failure in leadership, claiming the administration has “taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy” and that “our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent.”
The piece was titled “Dying in a Leadership Vacuum” and argued that “we should not abet them [the Trump administration] and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs” and that “instead of relying on expertise, the administration has turned to uniformed ‘opinion leaders’ and charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies.” The piece also details lack of accountability, recklessness, and politically-motivated misinformation campaigns directed by the administration as further proof of the administration’s “failure”, and asserts that “we have failed at almost every step”.
This is the third venerable journal to denounce the Trump administration, with Scientific American officially endorsing the Biden-Harris campaign last month, breaking 175 years of non-political tradition.
It’s not political or anti-Trump to admit that America has not done a good job of handling the virus. For a country that boasts some of the best biomedical resources and talent in the world, there is no excuse for the massive, widespread failure we’ve seen thus far in the management of the pandemic.
The issue only becomes political when you consider its possible resolution: a change in leadership and new plan to replace the current one that is evidently and objectively not working. If we look at history and listen to what the top scientists are shouting every chance they can get, we can understand better what is needed to reconcile the damage that has already been done: trust science, accept responsibility and be accountable for your actions, and act decisively, using the plethora of resources America has at its disposal.
Politically motivated lies and ignorance are killing America. The time to act was over half a year ago, but it’s not too late to change our course and steer America onto a better, less lethal path.
Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18