The public health implications of the election could not be greater
3 November 2024
This post contains excepts from Dr. Leana S. Wen, an emergency physician and professor at George Washington University. At least to me, it shows why those interested in protecting the nation’s public health should support Kamala Harris for President and strongly reject Donald J. Trump:
In October 2020, the pandemic was in full force. More than 220,000 Americans had died from covid. The Food and Drug Administration had yet to authorize vaccines or antiviral therapies. The only tools to keep the virus at bay were masks, tests and isolation.
It was during those tumultuous times that then-President Trump himself fell ill from covid. I had hoped that he would use the opportunity to model best practices to prevent others from contracting this highly infectious novel virus. There was an established protocol that included identifying the period of potential contagiousness, testing those exposed, and masking to reduce the risk of infecting others. People with more severe illness needed hospitalization, which was a call to action for others to treat this virus seriously.
This was not the protocol Trump chose to follow. His White House repeatedly refused to answer basic questions about when he contracted the coronavirus or who could have been exposed, though more than a dozen members of his inner circle ended up testing positive during this period. Trump was ill enough to have unstable oxygen levels. He required steroids and a then-experimental monoclonal antibody therapy, though he insisted on being discharged from the hospital. During his car ride back, he made a show of being maskless, exposing Secret Service agents to a potentially fatal disease.
When he returned to the White House, Trump made another show of taking off his mask. He resumed public events when he was still supposed to be isolating, in direct violation of guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As I wrote at the time, “All of this makes it that much harder for health-care providers to do our jobs. How can we expect patients to follow our guidance when the First Patient won’t?”
Trump did a few things right. He seemed proud of his administration’s role in expediting vaccine development, and he willingly received the vaccine when it became available. Sadly, he has since distanced himself from those stances. Since August, he has been saying he would defund schools that require routine childhood immunizations. And he has appointed notorious anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as honorary co-chair of his transition team, with the understanding that Kennedy will help choose who will run the CDC, the FDA and the National Institutes of Health.
I shudder to imagine how those agencies could be further weakened during a second Trump presidency. Our nation’s public health infrastructure was barely able to hold up during covid. What will happen if another terrible virus starts spreading?
Here are my related posts:
Take It From a Scientist. Facts Matter, and They Don’t Care How You Feel
Medical misinformation is a leading cause of death
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