The CDC and COVID-19: Trumpian Politics and Policies

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"Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation." (S. Jonas, August, 2018)

Guess who said these things? Try hard. You'll never guess (ho, ho, ho).

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On Wednesday, August 17, 2022, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Director of the Centers for Disease Control, issued a strong critique of the performance of her own agency, over the past several years. As the introductory paragraph of The Times article of August 18, 2022 said:

"Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on Wednesday delivered a sweeping rebuke of her agency's handling of the coronavirus pandemic, saying it had failed to respond quickly enough and needed to be overhauled.

" 'To be frank, we are responsible for some pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes, from testing to data to communications,' she said in a video distributed to the agency's roughly 11,000 employees.

"Dr. Walensky said the C.D.C.'s future depended on whether it could absorb the lessons of the last few years, during which much of the public lost trust in the agency's ability to handle a pandemic that has killed more than 1 million Americans. 'This is our watershed moment. We must pivot,' she said.

"Her admission of the agency's failings came after she received the findings of an examination she ordered in April amid scathing criticism of the C.D.C.'s performance. The report itself was not released; an agency official said it was not yet finished but would be made public soon.

"Dr. Walensky laid out her basic conclusion from the review in candid terms: The C.D.C. must refocus itself on public health needs, respond much faster to emergencies and outbreaks of disease, and provide information in a way that ordinary people and state and local health authorities can understand and put to use."

As a career public health physician, I will be commenting in some detail in this space when the Report is made available. In the meantime, in terms of politics and the CDC, which Dr. Walensky's critique did not mention, I would like to note the following:

1. Just imagine what it would look like if a statement like this had come from a Trumpite Director of the CDC, covering the period of the performance of his/her predeccessor.

2. What Dr. Walensky did not note, but I am in this commentary (surprise, surprise), by its actions and inactions the Trump Administration has had a very strong negative impact on the functioning of the CDC since that Administration took office in 2017.

3. In her statement, Dr. Walensky was very careful not to refer to any of that reality. One result of this approach is that the Republicans were immediately able to jump all over the CDC in general and Dr. Walensky in particular without even having to make excuses (like "it was all Obama's fault") for what the Trumpists did to the agency, 2017-2021.

4. The anti-vaxxers weighed in with major criticisms as well (although their motivation is different from that of the Republicans).

In this column, I am going to be dealing with elements of the tremendous damage that the Trump and the Republicans did to the CDC, (to which, as noted, Dr. Walensky did not refer [for whatever reason{s}]), in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. I will be so-doing by reproducing sections of the first column that I wrote on the then oncoming pandemic and the Trump Administration's response to it. As it happened, major flaws in that response were becoming very apparent to many observers, both political and public-health, even early on in the spread of COVID-19 across our nation. As noted above, I will be commenting on the official CDC-Review Report when it comes out (including whether or not it refers to those Trumpian-damages specifically; indeed, you can be sure [ho, ho, ho] that I will be). As for now, here is a (somewhat) shortened version of that original column.

"OpEdNews Op Eds 3/13/2020 at 14:51:55

"The COVID-19 Epidemic and the Disastrous Federal Government Response: It Ain't Just Trump;

"URL: click here

"Introduction

"As is very well-known, we as a nation are now standing at a cross-roads in our history, caused of course by the COVID-19 epidemic. If certain estimates of its eventual scope come true (and to be sure, these estimates are at the far right-hand end of the Bell Curve for the count), we are standing on the precipice of as many as 60,000,000 cases. (Sounds like a lot in raw numbers, and it is, but that number is less than 20% of the U.S. population.) This, if the projected death rate is correct, would produce 600,000 deaths. [As of mid-August, 2022, there had been close to 92,000,000 reported cases, resulting in over 1,000,000 deaths.] As is widely agreed to (outside of the Trumpublican © inner sanctum --- see Fox"News" --- of course) the major cause of this horrible potentiality in this country has the been the dreadfully slow response of the Trump Administration to the threat, which has been known since China first announced the outbreak and its then-extent at the end of last year.

"This response, or non-response, has a variety of causes. Not necessarily in the order of importance, they include:

"* Trump's determination to get rid of any governmental element that had Obama's name on it. So the White House office for dealing with potential global pandemics, formulated after the Ebola-virus outbreak of 2014 (which, as it happened, was contained, with no cases being found in the United States) was closed down.

"* Following Trump-principal-policy-adviser-in-the-early-days Steve Bannon's dictum to achieve the "Deconstruction of the administrative state" as one of the top priorities of the Trump Administration, significant chunks of the elements of the Centers for Disease Control were eliminated.

"* Trump's response to the early news of the developing epidemic in China was the imposition of a travel ban of certain persons coming from China. Now we all know how much Trump loves travel bans, but this one seems to have had little impact on the spread of the disease in the United States (even though he and Hannity, et al continually boast about it). For if it were so successful, how come the number of domestic cases is rising rapidly, travel ban(s) or no? (Of course, Trump has just announced his Europe travel ban --- for Europeans, not U.S.--- except for the UK [and didn't bother to pre-inform the U.S.'s European allies]). Apparently, he is ignorant of the Eurostar train and the cross-channel ferries, and also that the Republic of Ireland, occupying part of an island, is part of the EU, not the UK, but that is another matter.)

"* Trump's focus on the chances for his re-election chances and his wish that the impending epidemic would just go away or preferably never get to the U.S., apparently was a major reason why there was no early emphasis on the development of test kits and why the U.S. refused the offer of them from the World Health Organization. Apparently, Trump, at least at a gut-level, knew how much negative impact the possible high numbers and their many ramifications could have on his re-election chances. And so, came: blaming everything on Obama; the whole "hoax" thing; and how the Democrats of the "fake news" media were using it, and blowing it up, just to get at it him. (Trump's life-long central essence of victim-hood plays into this big-time.)

"* But then, and it is very important to note this, joining this witches brew of failing to deal directly and correctly with the impending disaster of a major epidemic is the long-time, well-established Republican (and note here that I am using the word 'Republican,' not "Trumpublican ©") opposition to anything that smacks of 'big government,' that is government that can make life better in one way or another for the vast majority of U.S. It goes back to the time of Reagan. For Reagan famously said in 1981, after he was elected President: 'Government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem.' "

"* Following Reagan, but pre-dating [Steve] Bannon was Grover Norquist, a driver of economic and tax policy for the G.W. Bush Administration. In the 2000s, being much less ambitious than Bannon , Norquist said: 'My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.'

"The result of all of this is a total lack of advance planning on a variety of matters that could possibly have mitigated the spread of the disease and reduced the massive disruptions of civic life that are already taking place. But, to repeat, it ain't just Trump. It's the totally modern Republican 'government is bad' mantra. (Of course, they don't mean that ALL government is bad. For example, they are well on their way to criminalizing the matter of choice in the outcome of pregnancy. [Emphasis added.] But that is another matter.)

"And so, why these various responses --- ranging from the totally-inadequate to the epidemic-enhancing --- in the face of a potentially overwhelming epidemic, the likes of which have not been seen since the mis-named "Spanish flu" of 1918-19? Part of it is Trumpen-matter. Like the visceral, racist, hatred he has for anything with Obama's name on it. Part of it is Trump's abnormally abysmal state of knowledge about, for example, history, science, and health-disease. (By the way, he knows how limited he is, which is why he is always telling us how smart he is, often related to the achievements of some relative.) Part of it his complete lack of comprehension of how U.S. Constitutional government is supposed to work, based on the written document as well as on well-established norms and customs. And part of it is the fact that in his businesses (many of them failures) he has never been responsible to anyone but himself, his beliefs, and his fantasies.

"BUT, and yes, it is a big but: part of the cause of where we stand now in the face of this potentially overwhelming epidemic the results of which could pitch the nation into a prolonged, completely avoidable recession (Depression[?]) is the history of the modern Republican Party and its road to Reaction. [To trace that, in the original of the column just reposted here in part, I returned to sections of a column on that subject that I originally published on OpEdNews on Dec. 20, 2018. It was entitled 'The Repubs. and the Rightward Imperative: Gets Them to Trump --- And Then?'])."

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And now, back to the present. It is obvious that Trumpian policies towards the pandemic, which encompassed the work of the CDC as well as of a variety of other Federal government agencies, had an enormous impact on its eventual outcomes. It will be fascinating to see if the above-referenced Report refers to any of these policies and their impact. (I described both in great detail subsequently in a whole series of columns published in this space). I will be particularly interested to see if the Republo-Trumpian impact on the structure and function of the CDC, in the context of its overall policy for dealing the pandemic (e.g., use of bleach, no masks, hydrochloroquine, no-national-testing-and-contact-tracing-program, and so-on-and-so-forth) is dealt with in that Report. Of course, there are many other policies-decisions-made-for-and-about-CDC-and-its-role-and-function made over the years, well-before the arrival of COVID-19 to these shores and Trump to the Presidency that need to be considered. As a career public health physician, I will be taking a look at at least some of those as well.

(Article changed on Aug 19, 2022 at 3:41 PM EDT)

(Article changed on Aug 19, 2022 at 5:26 PM EDT)

(Article changed on Aug 20, 2022 at 3:49 PM EDT)