Prestigious medical journal says Trump must be voted out due to coronavirus response
A renowned medical journal that has published trusted scientific research since the 1800s suggested Friday Americans should not vote for President Trump this upcoming election.
The Lancet pointed to continued doubt of the nation’s “flagship agency” for public health — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — by the White House Administration, which it says has had an “inconsistent and incoherent national response to the COVID-19 crisis,” according to an editorial posted on the journal’s website.
“There is no doubt that the CDC has made mistakes, especially on testing in the early stages of the pandemic,” the editorial from the British medical journal said. “But punishing the agency by marginalising and hobbling it is not the solution. The Administration is obsessed with magic bullets—vaccines, new medicines, or a hope that the virus will simply disappear.”
“Americans must put a president in the White House come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics.”
The editorial comes as states across the country experience new outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2 — the coronavirus behind the pandemic— after reopening about two months since the pathogen spiraled out of control in the U.S. in early March.
The U.S. continues to surpass the rest of the world as the worst-hit country by the coronavirus pandemic. America has more than 1.4 million confirmed cases and nearly 86,000 deaths as of Friday morning, according to a Johns Hopkins University map.
As early as Feb. 25, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Nancy Messonnier told Americans in a news conference to beware and prepare for major disruptions to movement and everyday life caused by the coronavirus, according to Stat.
Shortly after, Messonnier no longer contributed to the White House briefings on COVID-19, the disease the coronavirus causes, according to the editorial.
Last week, the Trump administration reportedly withheld a document created by the CDC to provide guidance on reopening businesses and public spaces, telling scientists the report would “never see the light of day,” according to an agency official, the AP reported.
The report, designed to be a “touchstone document,” was supposed to be published May 1, according to the AP, which reportedly obtained the guidance from a federal official who was not authorized to release it.
Head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force Dr. Deborah Birx told CNN, “no one stopped those guidelines. We’re still in editing. It was more about simplification,” the AP reported.
Birx recently expressed her doubts on the CDC’s mortality and case count data, stating “there is nothing from the CDC that I can trust,” the Washington Post reported.
The Lancet editorial board said Birx’s statement was “unhelpful” and a “shocking indictment of an agency that was once regarded as the gold standard for global disease detection and control.”
The CDC is usually the first to provide scientific facts and advice to the public during health crises, but the agency has not held a press briefing on the pandemic in nearly two months — a drastic difference from the beginning of the year when the world watched China brace the storm.
“The CDC needs a director who can provide leadership without the threat of being silenced and who has the technical capacity to lead today’s complicated effort,” the editorial said.
Since its origin in 1946, the agency has helped develop tests for viruses it discovered, and has long collaborated with the World Health Organization in fighting diseases around the world like smallpox, the editorial noted.
But those at the Lancet claim the agency has been plagued with the concerns of conservative politics which have “increasingly eroded the agency’s ability to mount effective, evidence-based public health responses.”
The editorial says the Reagan administration resisted appropriate funding for the CDC to fight the HIV and AIDS crisis in the 1980s, while the Trump administration has minimized the CDC’s role in fighting infectious disease when it cut its staff based in China, “leaving an intelligence vacuum when COVID-19 began to emerge.”
A recent poll showed that the majority of Democrats believe the coronavirus death toll is higher than reported, whereas most Republicans think it’s lower, McClatchy News previously reported.
Trump’s criticism of the World Health Organization — including an April 7 tweet calling it “very China centric” — was also condemned by the editorial.
“The W.H.O. really blew it. For some reason, funded largely by the United States, yet very China centric. We will be giving that a good look,” Trump’s tweet read.
“Fortunately I rejected their advice on keeping our borders open to China early on,” the president added. “Why did they give us such a faulty recommendation?”
The Lancet emphasizes the Trump administration’s “further erosion of the CDC,” which the editorial said “will harm global cooperation in science and public health.”
Only with a strong infectious disease agency will the U.S. be better prepared for the “next inevitable pandemic,” the scientific journal said.
The journal has dabbled in political affairs in the past, Slate reported. It published a study in 2006 that claimed about 655,000 Iraqis died in the war, which was an overestimation based on other death tolls at the time.
Later research showed the number really stood around 405,000, according to a 2013 study in the journal PLOS Medicine.
Critics condemned the Lancet study’s overestimation, which experts said was based on an inconsistent methodology, according to Slate.
This story was originally published May 15, 2020 at 10:11 AM with the headline "Prestigious medical journal says Trump must be voted out due to coronavirus response."
