Who’s Playing Politics With Public Health?
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Here’s something that would once have been surprising but no longer is. To discharge its duty to the public and set clear criteria for granting emergency approval to a Covid-19 vaccine, the Food and Drug Administration found it necessary to outwit the president. Donald Trump called the agency’s guidance on vaccine safety “a political move more than anything else.” In fact, as in many other such cases, he was the one playing politics.
Last month, the FDA said drugmakers would need to provide, among other things, two months of safety data on at least half of their clinical-trial subjects. Trump disagreed and withheld White House approval, calling the guidance an attempt to thwart his promise to deliver a vaccine before Election Day. FDA officials therefore communicated it to pharma companies informally, essentially moving forward without the president’s say-so. Last week, with the guidance a fait accompli, it was formally approved and published.
The FDA’s rules will indeed make it hard for a vaccine to be approved before Nov. 3 — but they’re no political ploy. They’re essential to assure the country that any shot the FDA approves quickly will be safe and effective. It’s disgraceful that, to do its job, the agency was forced to make an end run around the president. That’s hardly the FDA’s fault.
Faced with a boss who often belittles them and refuses their advice without understanding it, what are the experts to do? The government employs scientists to inform and help steer the U.S. response to every sort of challenge, from agriculture to space exploration, climate change to pandemics. These public servants are accustomed to working outside the realm of politics. Yet, for political purposes, Trump routinely scorns or distorts their guidance.
In the infamous Sharpiegate episode last year, he got officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to rebuke national weather forecasters for contradicting his foolish assertion that Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama. Trump persists in ignoring climate science and evidence of the damage that environmental pollution causes to water, land and wildlife. His disrespect for scientific expertise has only worsened since the arrival of Covid-19. He long ago sidelined his top Covid-19 expert, Anthony Fauci, an immunologist who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. At his recent debate with Joe Biden, Trump castigated Fauci for changing his mind on mask-wearing. Fauci revised his earlier advice once the evidence showed that face coverings would help limit the spread of the coronavirus. (That’s how science works.)
Trump’s administration has handled the pandemic so poorly overall, the New England Journal of Medicine, for the first time in two centuries of publishing, has called on American voters to bring about a change of leadership in Washington.
Now Trump has chosen not to invite contact tracers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to sort out how the coronavirus may have been transmitted at a Sept. 26 Rose Garden event. Such work could reveal not only the source of the outbreak but also the conditions under which the virus moved from person to person. This opportunity will be lost because the president is, you guessed it, playing politics. There’s also reason to suspect that, in dealing with own case of Covid-19, he’s manipulating his doctors. He has repeatedly said that he’s perfectly healthy — and his doctors have backed him up, omitting or clouding details of Trump’s condition and treatment in their public reports. Again, the president puts politics above the national interest.
Trump seems determined to make it harder for government scientists to do their jobs. They deserve sympathy on that account. But they need to understand that they work for the American people, and should insist on being allowed to.
Editorials are written by the Bloomberg Opinion editorial board.
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