When asked if she believes that public health experts and scientists will get the last word on the efficacy of a coronavirus vaccine, Sen. Kamala Harris gave something close to one of her running mate’s lines. “If past is prologue, they will not,” Harris told CNN’s Dana Bash. “They’ll be muzzled. They’ll be suppressed.”
Joe Biden said something similar in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. “We’ll put the politics aside and take the muzzle off our experts so the public gets the information they need and deserve,” he said.
What muzzle? Who has been “suppressed?” What information has been kept from the public? These are false notions.
There is no real sense in which leading public health officials have been muzzled — if “muzzled” means anything at all. President Trump’s preferences have been challenged by public health officials, some of whom are his own appointees, yet they have hardly been shut up.
Despite Trump’s opinion on the question, Brett Giroir, who runs the administration’s efforts on the national coronavirus testing regime, said back in early August that “we need to move on” from hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment. FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn has expressed agreement with Giroir’s position on the drug. Both still have their jobs, and neither has been delivered a gag order, so far as we know.
Anthony Fauci has been the single most visible public health official since March — and the one most frequently and publicly at odds with the president. Fauci has been much more open to locking down shares of the economy than has Trump, and he has judged the nation’s performance on the virus much more gravely than Trump administration surrogates.
In response, Trump has challenged Fauci in petty and even ridiculous ways, as when he questioned why Fauci’s approval rating was better than his own. He called Fauci an alarmist, which may be true but is hardly appropriate for an interview. He is completely indelicate, but it doesn’t amount to suppression.
Fauci, Giroir, Hahn, and CDC Director Robert Redfield have been ever-present in news and other media, making their cases about the coronavirus. Among them, Fauci most recently suggested that public health officials will, in fact, get the last word on a vaccine’s efficacy. All four have testified before Congress on multiple occasions. These officials have been weighing in an awful lot more than one would expect from suppressed scientists.
Trump hasn’t muzzled them, and he can’t muzzle them. That Trump ought to show more deference to public health officials is an argument worth having. That he has shut public health officials away or could act unilaterally on a vaccine without their cooperation and without being checked is simply pretending.
