DC’S SUPER-ELITE SUPERSPREADER EVENT. You may remember that during the first months of the COVID pandemic, which coincided with the 2020 presidential campaign, many news accounts sought to characterize then-President Donald Trump’s rallies as superspreader events. The New Yorker published an article titled, “Donald Trump’s 2020 Superspreader Campaign.” CNN labeled Trump’s frantic last weeks of campaigning as a “potential superspreader sprint.” One columnist in the Chicago Sun-Times wrote a piece headlined, “Trump superspreader events are immoral and criminal.” A group of Stanford University economists — yes, economists, not epidemiologists — did a study declaring the Trump events superspreaders, which they published a few days before the election.
In the final month of the campaign, a number of press reports also labeled the White House celebration of the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett a superspreader event. Those reports were supported by the nation’s top virologist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who said, “Well, I think the data speak for themselves. We had a superspreader event in the White House.” USA Today even did a somewhat strange investigation in which it published a photo of the event with a numerical key to all 213 people in the photo with the request, “Help us ID them all.”
This reporting and commentary was part of a larger strain of analysis, some of it with a certain undertone of satisfaction, that COVID was hitting Republican states and counties hard. The liberal think tank Brookings Institution published an article headlined, “As Election Day nears, Covid-19 spreads further into red America.” A professor at Marshall University in West Virginia was disciplined for telling students, referring to Trump supporters, “I’ve become the type of person where I hope they all get it and die. … I said to somebody yesterday, I hope they all die before the election.”
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Now, there has been another superspreader event, but the reporting of it seems a bit less partisan than in times past. On April 2, Washington’s Gridiron Club, the oldest journalistic organization in the nation’s capital, held its annual dinner. At the event, top politicians and journalists stage comedy routines that are supposed to be self-deprecating and “singe, not burn,” their targets. Sometimes that happens, and sometimes it doesn’t. This year’s newsmaking routine was from New Hampshire Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, who made headlines by declaring Trump “f***ing crazy.”
But in retrospect, the bigger news from the Gridiron Dinner was COVID. As of today, 72 people who attended the dinner have tested positive for the virus. They include three members of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet: Attorney General Merrick Garland, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. Some members of Congress, including Reps. Adam Schiff and Joaquin Castro and Sen. Susan Collins, have also tested positive. Also testing positive were Jamal Simmons, who is Vice President Kamala Harris’s communications chief, Michael LaRosa, who is first lady Jill Biden’s press secretary, and Valerie Biden Owens, who is the president’s sister. The president himself did not attend the event. New York City Mayor Eric Adams, another attendee, also tested positive.
The Washington Post reported that “about a half-dozen journalists as well as members of the White House and National Security Council staffs said they tested positive after the event.” The Washington Post said it would not publish their names because they had not publicly disclosed their status.
In the days since, a number of other members of the House have tested positive, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Katherine Clark, Scott Peters, Gregory Meeks, and Derek Kilmer.
The first thing to say here is to wish everyone well, to wish that no one becomes seriously ill. At this point, it appears no one has. Hopefully that will be the case for everyone, should they become symptomatic at all.
So far, no one has published a USA Today-style photo from the event, with each attendee carefully numbered, nor have there been any crowdsourcing appeals to help identify them all. Nor has any establishment organization suggested that there was some partisan nature to the spread, although it appears that of the names made public so far, nearly all are Democrats.
But the fact is, the Gridiron event was more evidence, if anyone needed more, that the virus is no respecter of place or party or position or anything else. Predicting what the virus will do next is a fool’s errand. Those who attended the dinner were required to show proof of vaccination, organizers said. They were vaccinated, and most likely boosted, too. They did everything public health authorities told them to do. (By the way, Fauci himself, along with CDC head Rochelle Walensky, attended the dinner.) They also showed up knowing that there are still some risks in attending big indoor events like the Gridiron. Here is hoping that they will be spared some of the politicized opprobrium directed at those who attended events where COVID spread in the past.
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