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Trump And Biden Both Promise To End The Pandemic. Most Health Experts Believe One More Than The Other.
By
Fred Mogul
Published Oct 19, 2020
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By
Fred Mogul
Published Oct 19, 2020
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This story is part of a WNYC/Gothamist series exploring policy differences between President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden. The stories focus on their positions around housing, infrastructure, coronavirus response, and tax policies—and specifically how those policies will affect the New York City region.
As the coronavirus pandemic surged in March and Governor Andrew Cuomo started demanding more federal support, President Donald Trump pushed back.
Behind the scenes, the momentum was shifting quickly. Olivia Troye, Vice President Michael Pence’s former senior advisor on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, told Gothamist that, initially, Pence was “personally calling governors on both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans, trying to be supportive and do the right thing to make sure, because he’s a former governor.” Then, Troye said, those collaborative efforts gave way to stone-walling and slow-walking by the president’s inner circle.
“We’ve got to stick it to Cuomo,” she recalled one senior team member saying.
“You see the White House start to push back and put the onus on states, and you see the narrative change, so that testing is a state problem, ventilators are a state problem,” Troye said. “Suddenly it becomes, ‘This is your fault, not ours.’”
Troye, a Republican who worked on national security for Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, left the federal government last month and denounced the Trump administration. She is now actively campaigning for Joe Biden.
The White House has denied Troye’s version of events, calling her disgruntled, but her account highlights two intertwined critiques of the president’s coronavirus response: that he shirked a leadership role by shifting responsibility to the states, and that he prioritized politics and ego over science.
With COVID-19 rates climbing dramatically in much of the country—and rising again in New York and New Jersey, after being suppressed in the spring—voters rank controlling the pandemic toward the top of their priority list, along with the economy, education, and healthcare. Sixty-eight percent of New Yorkers disapprove of the president’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a recent Siena College poll.
As the incumbent, the president has to convince voters that his administration so far has robustly contained COVID-19 and prevented the pandemic from being much worse, while also persuading Americans that he will bring about a vaccine and repair the economic devastation more effectively than his challenger.
By contrast, Biden’s main pitch is that the disease has been deadlier and more economically damaging in the United States than in many other industrialized nations, due to lack of strong federal leadership and the elevation of politics over science. He has proposed a vigorous, centralized response that he likens to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.
On the surface, both candidates have plans that look similar. Trump and Biden each say they will do a better job curbing the pandemic than their opponent. They are both vowing to take charge of a vaccine rollout, most likely in 2021; reinforce stockpiles of personal protective gear; expand coronavirus testing; and generally gird Americans to face a potentially hard winter, in which the effects of the virus could be compounded by the annual flu season.
Listen to reporter Fred Mogul's radio story for WNYC:
The Trump campaign has been trying to portray Biden’s proposed approach to fighting COVID-19 as a retread of White House actions to date.
“When you look at the Biden plan, it reads an awful lot like what President Trump and I and our task force have been doing every step of the way," Pence said in last week’s debate.
Avik Roy, the founder of the conservative-leaning Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, said there is significant similarity in how the two candidates would fight COVID-19.
“Biden says we should work hard to develop a vaccine and spend money to support manufacturers of vaccines —the president's actually doing that,” he said. “Joe Biden supports more testing, and so does the president. So, you know, there's not that much difference between them, when you actually get to the brass tacks of what policies Joe Biden advocates for in combating the virus.”
Roy acknowledges that the two men differ on mask wearing, with Biden saying he’s open to a national mandate, if supported by scientists. But Roy believes federal health agencies (like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes for Health, and the FDA) have been working well under Trump—notwithstanding the president's “tweets and temperament.” He said that Biden’s plan, which calls for stronger federal leadership and less reliance on state-level decision-making, is largely a difference in style, and that the idea of Trump politicizing science is “largely overblown.”
“I get that there's rhetorical differences in emphasis,” he said, “but I don't actually see on the ground a meaningful difference.”
But Roy’s assessment is a minority opinion among health policy experts. Many of them, like Troye, believe the pandemic played out worse due to the White House’s unwillingness to centralize activities like oversight of testing and distribution of personal protective equipment and its eagerness to cast doubt on scientific expertise on everything from mask wearing to medical treatments to vaccine development.
“You ought to think about it as two groups of people trying to make a car," said Dr. Georges Benjamin, head of the American Public Health Association, comparing the two candidates’ coronavirus proposals for Politifact. "They have to have four wheels, probably have to have a bumper, have some doors.” But otherwise, Benjamin said, they differ greatly. Politifact, which is run by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, rated Pence’s claim that Biden plagiarized the administration’s COVID plan “Pants on Fire.”
Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden arrives to speak during a campaign event at Riverside High School in Durham, N.C.
Carolyn Kaster/AP/Shutterstock
Bill Hammond, a center-right health care analyst for the Empire Center and a frequent critic of Cuomo, said the differences between the candidates go well beyond tweets and temperament.
“President Trump's explicit approach has been to delegate a lot of the authority and responsibility for the coronavirus response to the states,” Hammond said, “and this has led to a patchwork of policies and a lot of mixed messages and inconsistencies. And also it left the states and a lot of people at critical moments wondering what to do and competing for supplies.”
Dr. Sherry Glied, a former Obama administration official and dean of NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service, concurred. She noted it was consistent with Republican small-government philosophy.
“We aren't working in concert with other countries around the response to COVID internationally,” she said. “There’s a consensus that individual states should take responsibility for what goes on in their states, that regulation should not get in the way of action, that individuals should not be required to be concerned about their effects on those around them, and that the federal bureaucracy should not be trusted.”
Glied, who has donated to Biden, said the Democratic candidate, of course, so far “hasn’t actually had to do anything.” But having participated in a Biden-Sanders Unity Taskforce on Healthcare, she believes his plan would be a welcome, moderate federal approach to a public health crisis.
“The Biden campaign has talked about coordinating the delivery of protective equipment and vaccines and testing supplies across states in ways that I think would at least rationalize the way things are happening and give states a clearer idea of where the federal government stands,” Glied said.
More standardized testing and reporting, she said, could also lead to a more consistent approach to things like interstate travel and partial closures, as new outbreaks arise.
“Although [New York] may have taken some good steps forward locally, if other states don't, we're in this crazy world where we're quarantining people who come here from Montana,” she said. “That's just a really odd thing in a single country, so one would hope that we could move beyond that.”
(Currently, New York requires people traveling from 36 states and territories, including Montana, to quarantine for 14 days after arriving.)
Budget cuts to public health programs—not just for fighting communicable diseases but also chronic ones, like diabetes and heart disease—preceded President Trump, but have accelerated under him, said Professor Michael Gusmano, a political scientist who specializes in health policy at the Rutgers University Institute of Global Health.
“I think under a Biden administration, you would see an increase in funding for basic epidemiological surveillance, for testing, for contact tracing, and for the other things that most of us in public health think we need to get a handle on the virus,” he said. “I suspect the backslide in funding for the CDC would be reversed if Biden won—but, of course, that would also depend on what happens with congressional elections, because he would have to get the support of Congress for any additional funding.”
Unlike Avik Roy, Gusmano said it’s clear that the Trump administration has undermined its own scientists.
“There has been an unprecedented level of political interference with the CDC and the FDA under the current administration that I can't imagine would take place under a Biden administration,” he said.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has stopped short of actually criticizing the president, but he has made clear that he doesn’t agree with him, either. Last week alone, Fauci called the September 26th White House reception for Trump’s US Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, a “superspreader event”; complained that a Trump campaign ad misrepresented his words about controlling the pandemic; and said Trump was sending mixed signals to the public about how serious COVID-19 is, in light of the president’s ostensible recovery from the illness.
Fauci has been candid about his need to be circumspect about President Trump. But others who have left the administration, like Troye, have offered blistering critiques. Dr. Rick Bright, the former head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority who formally resigned from the federal government last week, told Congress in May that the White House was ignoring, downplaying, and distorting the advice of scientists at the onset of the pandemic.
“I believe Americans need to be told the truth,” Bright said. “And I believe that the best scientific advice and guidance was not being conveyed to the American public.”
The president has dismissed Bright as a “disgruntled” employee.
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COVID-19
joe biden
coronavirus
donald trump
election 2020
Fred Mogul
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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