The urge to be President Trump’s antithesis at every turn has led key Democrats, especially Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, to entertain some completely untenable positions. The latest example is their dance with coronavirus vaccine skepticism.
Trump has never embraced a national mask mandate nor national economic lockdowns, so to contrast him, Biden did both. He said during his acceptance speech during the Democratic National Convention that he would institute a mask mandate, though having later realized it is impossible, he has since gone back on that position.
To strengthen the impression that he, unlike Trump, marches to a pro-science drum, Biden told ABC’s David Muir that if “the scientists” recommended that he lock down the nation, he would. “I would shut it down. I would listen to the scientists.” He can’t do that either, nor would it be prudent.
Now, as Trump wishes for a vaccine before election day, the Biden campaign is suggesting that public health institutions are weak enough to allow Trump to make the final call on a vaccine’s efficacy.
“I think that we have learned since this pandemic started, but really before that, that there’s very little that we can trust that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth,” Harris said in a recent interview with CNN. Perhaps, but what about the public health institutions actually making the call on a vaccine?
Harris also suggested that scientists working on the vaccine won’t have the last word. “If past is prologue … they’ll be muzzled. They’ll be suppressed,” she said.
In a Wednesday hearing before the Senate’s health committee, Surgeon General Jerome Adams put that notion to bed. “As a member of the coronavirus task force, there has been no politicization of the vaccine process whatsoever,” Adams said. “We have a process in place that I trust as a doctor, as a dad.”
National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins concurred. “I can’t say strongly enough that the decisions about how this vaccine is going to be evaluated and assessed is going to be based on science,” he said, continuing, “That can be the only basis upon which this decision is made.”
The worst consequence of Harris’s propagation of the notion that Trump calls the shots is surely that it incites more reluctance toward vaccination and adds legitimacy to that reluctance. Those doubts can have deadly consequences if people fail to secure safe vaccinations. In the last week, public health officials, including Adams, Collins, and Anthony Fauci, have been forcefully challenging that notion and working to overcome anti-vaccination sentiment.
Some have suggested that a pledge signed by nine drug makers to “stand with science” was an unprecedented response to executive overreach in the public health sphere, but it is more likely a response to a response, namely the last week of public statements such as this one from former Democratic Rep. Katie Hill: “I’m a big fan of vaccines but DAMN I’m skeptical of one that‘s supposed to have been developed, tested, produced, and distributed in 6 months — right in time for the reelection of our very own dictator.”
Adams even suggested that he and Collins encouraged the drug companies to put out the pledge. “Dr. Collins and I have been on the phone with them and really putting forward a full-court press to help instill confidence in the vaccine process that we know … has been wavering long before COVID,” he said at Wednesday’s hearing.
“He’s grasping,” Harris said of Trump in the same CNN interview, referring to the president’s vaccine push. That probably is true, but even so, Harris misses the reality that even if Trump pushes for a vaccine with his reelection as an ulterior motive, or even a primary motive, the public health infrastructure responsible for approving a safe vaccine can still do so legitimately and speedily. In sum, Trump’s motives are immaterial to the safety of the science.
It should come as no surprise that an incumbent president would want to use a vaccine as consequential as this one as fodder for his reelection campaign. Still, any threat of pressure that Trump might pose to the legitimacy of a vaccine’s development would surely be offset by the institutional strengths of these public health agencies. Unless, of course, these agencies can’t be trusted — but that’s not an argument Democrats would do well to make.
None of this excuses Trump’s solipsism or any ulterior motives he might have. The point is, whatever Trump’s self-serving incentives, it’s a weird thing for the Democrats as the self-appointed “party of science” to be so doubtful of the public health experts for whom they constantly go to bat. Questioning the vaccine so bluntly undermines these experts and institutions, which are the most effective hedge against Trump’s alleged recklessness that is, in Democrats’ assertion, the country’s most grave threat.
There are signs that the Biden campaign, seeing its error, is trying to narrow its criticism. “Given his track record, no one can take Trump’s word alone on a COVID-19 vaccine,” Biden tweeted on Tuesday (emphasis added). Well, thankfully, we don’t have to take Trump’s word alone, nor did we ever, but if Trump’s supposed untrustworthiness were the campaign’s point, it could have been made without slighting vaccine players.
Democrats are expanding the referendum on Trump into a plebiscite on the vaccines developed during his presidency. That’s irresponsible. Waning confidence in the vaccines pushes the pandemic’s end further from reach.
