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What Trump’s Covid-19 Malfeasance Warns Us About the Next Epidemics
With confirmation hearings soon to begin for Kennedy and other healthcare department heads with similar views about to begin, the threat of future pandemics in an administration with a disastrous track record is another reason to urge their defeat.
Jan 15, 2025
One barely noticed pledge by President-elect Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign appeared in a May Time magazine interview that offers an especially ominous warning about Trump 2.0. If he won a new term, Trump said, he would “probably” disband the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response policy established by Congress in 2022.
Fast forward to his new nominees, especially Secretary of Health and Human Services anti-vax conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has said he would pause National Institute of Health infectious disease and drug development research for eight years. As the saying goes, we might have a problem.
With confirmation hearings soon to begin for Kennedy and other healthcare department heads with similar views about to begin, the threat of future pandemics in an administration with a disastrous track record is another reason to urge their defeat.
If the U.S. had the same death rate as Australia, The New York Times later reported, about 900,000 American lives would have been saved.
The 2022 law was prompted by the worst pandemic in a century, that has killed over 1.2 million Americans. The law’s roots were in a pandemic global health security office former President Barack Obama set in the National Security Council. It followed Obama’s experiences with the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009 that killed up to 575,000 people globally, including more than 12,000 in the U.S., and the 2014 Ebola outbreak that claimed thousands of lives in West Africa and provoked a major scare in the U.S.
Trump eliminated the office in 2018, suggesting, The Associated Press reported, “that he did not see the threat of pandemics in the same way that many experts in the field did.” In March, 2020, former pandemic office director Beth Cameron wrote she was “mystified” by the unit’s shutdown “leaving the country less prepared for pandemics… all with the goal of avoiding a six-alarm blaze.” Trump officials insisted they were fully prepared. Facts on the ground tell a different story.
In December 2019 the first reports emerged of patients in China suffering symptoms of an unknown pneumonia-like illness, drawing reminders of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus, SARS Cov-1. By early January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) began referring to the outbreak as a 2019 Novel Coronavirus, soon to be renamed Covid-19.
With infections spreading in Asia, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in late January reported the first U.S. cases. The first U.S. deaths occurred in January 2020. By mid-March, when Cameron’s op-ed appeared, the WHO confirmed more than 118,000 Covid cases and 4,291 deaths.
Australia, which had a similar profile of libertarian individualism and a right-wing prime minister in 2020, created a bipartisan response with opposition Labor Party and state leaders, and medical officers out front. They quickly subsidized production and distribution of masks, prioritized testing and contact tracing, and understood some shutdowns were necessary. If the U.S. had the same death rate as Australia, TheNew York Times later reported, about 900,000 American lives would have been saved.
Trump: ‘It’s Going to Be Fine’
The first year of Covid-19 was critical to establishing the protocols and public health protections to confront the crisis and reduce the deaths and suffering. But, due to widespread government failures, infections spread like wildfires. Yet the Trump administration was glacially slow to react. In his first public statement January 22, 2020, Trump declared, “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
In multiple comments tracked by Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), Trump downplayed the danger. February 2020: “Looks like by April… when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away,” “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus,” “We’re going very substantially down, not up,” and, “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
Due to Trump’s malfeasance; promotion of misinformation, including false miracle cures; and actively discouraging government and community safety steps to slow the spread, Covid-19 exploded.
As Trump’s term ended on January 20, 2021, the U.S. recorded 25 million cases, and over 400,000 deaths.
Embracing the sluggish signals from Washington, hospitals stalled on adopting critical safety protocols and were ill-prepared for the flood of desperately ill patients that led to cascading deaths, with bodies piling up in makeshift morgues or refrigerated trucks outside hospital doors. It was made worse by inadequate isolation of infected patients and shortages of ventilators and proper protective equipment for overwhelmed nurses and other healthcare workers who paid a horrific price with thousands of deaths and many leaving due to unwillingness to work in unsafe conditions.
Trump’s failures continued for months. At a White House press conference on April 3, Trump eroded a new tepid CDC guidance people consider wearing masks, as other countries were now requiring to reduce transmission of the virus, by adding he would not do so.
Trump’s position, New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg recalled, “undermined it,” suggesting “to anyone in his world that wears a mask, it’s cowardly, weak, feminine, so no one’s going to wear masks. [It] becomes clear to everyone in the Republican establishment that bearing your face is the way to show solidarity and support to the president,” reinforcing a partisan political divide on not just masks but soon all public health measures.
In late April 2020, as the U.S. death toll passed 60,000, Trump said, “This is going away.” In May, amid 80,000 deaths, Trump said, “We have met the moment, and we have prevailed.” In June, with 110,000 dead Americans, Trump said, “It is dying out, it’s going to fade away.”
On August 31, with the death count passing 180,000, Trump said, “We’ve done a great job in Covid, but we don’t get the credit” blaming a “fake news media conspiracy.” For months, Trump demanded an end to steps some states were implementing to limit infections. As Trump’s term ended on January 20, 2021, the U.S. recorded 25 million cases, and over 400,000 deaths.
National Nurses United (NNU), one of the first to respond to prior pandemics during H1N1 in 2009 and Ebola in 2014, had gained valuable experience. By early January, 2020, “before most people in the U.S. had even heard of Covid-19,” as The New York Times noted, NNU began mobilizing and aggressively pushing employers, government elected officials, and health and regulatory agencies to implement decisive safety actions. In contrast to public agencies, NNU launched multiple public endeavors from rallies to marches, vigils, pickets, and other collective action, including strikes, to demand optimal protections for nurses, other healthcare workers, patients, and the broader public.
Employers took their lead from Trump and the federal agencies he influenced, including the CDC and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) that continually eroded safety guidelines and workplace regulations. Hospitals, observed NNU executive director Bonnie Castillo, RN, “took a gamble relative to how much to have and how much to be prepared. And the CDC came out with guidelines shifting, commensurate to what the hospitals are complaining of. The lower standard is cheaper. So they just kept lowering and lowering, all the way down to bandannas. They’re looking at us like fodder.”
The racist Legacy of Trump’s Covid-19 Malfeasance
Trump’s mismanagement and indifference to who was most harmed proved catastrophic for communities of color, including a large percentage who were essential workers in transit, food processing, service industries, and healthcare.
Early in the pandemic, Trump sought to shift blame from his administration to China, repeatedly referring to Covid-19 as “the China virus,” though by April the U.S., with 4% of the world’s population, accounted for 17% of global Covid-19 deaths. Trump’s racist scapegoating ignited a sharp rise in anti-Asian hate speech and physical assaults.
His future HHS nominee Kennedy was among those adding fuel to the fire. At a 2023 New York press event Kennedy claimed “there is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately… The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
“We’re being treated like we don’t matter and we’re dispensable.”
Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) healthcare workers subsequently reported a rise in racist incidents, both in hospital settings and in their daily lives. Twice as many verbal and physical assaults were directed at women. “We must unite to challenge anti-Asian violence, harassment, and racism,” said University of California San Diego RN Dahlia Tayag at a statewide California Nurses Association protest against ongoing anti-Asian hate crimes.
The disproportionate racial impact was evident in Covid=19’s devastating toll on Filipino healthcare workers. Kansas City RN Celia Yap Banago, one of many RNs who had pressed her hospital to fix inadequate protections, was one of the first RNs to die in April 2020. “We were being told we’re not allowed to wear masks because it’s going to scare our patients,” said Jenn Caldwell, RN.
By August 2023 when the government stopped reporting healthcare-worker Covid-19 data, 5,753 healthcare workers, including 501 RNs, had died of Covid-19. In a June interview, Zenei Triunfo-Cortez, RN, CNA/NNOC’s first Filipina president, noted that nurses call for help from Trump and Congress “fell on deaf ears… Our employers are banking on (CDC) guidelines, which have been watered down… We’re being treated like we don’t matter and we’re dispensable.”
The Racial Disparity of Infections and Death
Centuries of structural racism accelerate the disproportionate impact of any crisis, including pandemics. As Trump was continuing to downplay the tsunami of infections and deaths, and discouraging safety procedures, the racial impact escalated. Black Chicagoans, 30% of city residents, comprised 72% of the Covid-19 deaths. Black Michigan residents, under 15% of the population, accounted for 40% of the deaths. Milwaukee African Americans, 26% of the population, totaled 70% of Covid-19 deaths. Similar rates were evident across the country, from states with large Black populations like North and South Carolina, to those with smaller percentages, such as Nevada and Connecticut.
Latinos were 80% of the first people admitted for care at San Francisco’s large public hospital and in Latino San Jose neighborhoods. Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islander infection and death rates were also higher in California. In March 2020, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham cited “incredible spikes” in Navajo Nation. Two months later, Navajo Nation still had higher Covid-19 infection cases per capita than much more publicized, hard-hit New York City.
Columnist Jamelle Bouie linked the disparities to “longstanding structural inequities.” Systemic racism in healthcare had a long history, evident in less access to medical institutions and caregivers, provider treatment biases, lower rates of costly health coverage, housing segregation, and higher concentration in polluted neighborhoods. Hospitals in Black neighborhoods were far more likely to close than in mostly white areas, a National Institutes of Health study found.
“What it meant to be an essential worker was to be deemed expendable.”
Black and Latino workers were also far more likely to hold “essential” jobs. Many were concentrated in lower paid jobs often forced to keep working due to economic need or employer pressure, including in food services, grocery and drug stores, and poultry and other meat processing plants. The Guardianreported alarmingly high transit worker death rates among bus and subway drivers, mechanics, and maintenance workers in New York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Washington D.C., and other major cities.
In September 2020, the CDC drew condemnation for reportedly soft-pedaling safety precautions due to political interference at a South Dakota meatpacking plant. All these factors resulted in workers of color having less economic ability or opportunity to shelter or work from home, and less access to safety measures, from masks to social distancing on the job where they risked constant exposure.
It also reinforced a class chasm with “a lot of professional and more affluent people who could afford to make the kind of sacrifices this public emergency called for who were able to protect themselves, able to sustain a level of comfort that other people in America were not,” says sociologist Klinenberg.
“It wasn’t like when we called them essential, we said, because you’re essential we’re going to honor you, we’re giving you masks, you get the best access to healthcare in the world, and here’s a bonus from all of us and our forever gratitude. What it meant to be an essential worker was to be deemed expendable. And it wasn’t just you, you got exposed to the virus, then you were more likely to go back home to your family who also got exposed to the virus. So you’ve got these neighborhoods throughout the country where there’s a lot of working class people who are getting exposed and they have higher mortality,” he added.
“Covid was kind of a search light that showed us everyone, everywhere we had studiously looked away from,” writer and activist Naomi Klein observed. “Suddenly we’re forced to think about the way in which our culture produces disposable people, whether they are working in elder care facilities when there’s suddenly Covid outbreaks, or the poultry plants [that] were Covid hotspots. Places where you never see a camera because we’re not supposed to think about, [like] what’s going on in prisons.” Klein cited “the myth of neoliberalism, like we are just individual people and families, and we don’t owe anything to each other. Covid said that wasn’t the case because you can’t just treat individuals, you have to treat a body of enmeshed individuals.”
Workers and unions had to fight their employers and public agencies under Trump to protect their members and the public. Union pressure, Castillo told The New York Times, moved some hospitals to act. In the first six months alone, NNU “staged more than 350 socially distanced protests, including two vigils in front of the White House for the nurses who died from the virus.”
Though Trump’s first term ended with the rollout of a Covid-19 vaccine, lasting damage had been done with his encouragement of opposition to critical community protections from masking to social isolation to needed closures to reduce the spread of the virus, and his sympathy for an escalating anti-vax movement. NNU early in 2021 characterized the Trump administration’s response as “one of denial and abandonment.”
Going forward, with Trump nominating people with similar views opposing the importance of a robust approach to public health, including full preparedness and action on sure-to-come future epidemics, there is ample cause for concern. A new avian flu’s first U.S. death has already occurred. Measles, polio, and other illnesses could mushroom, especially with health officials hostile to vaccines in charge of health agencies with vaccination rates already declining.
With confirmation hearings approaching, The New York Times this week reported the alarming vaccination drop “creating new pockets of students no longer protected by herd immunity [with]… now an estimated 280,000 kindergartners without documented vaccination against measles, an increase of some 100,000 children from before the pandemic.” Resurgence of polio, once virtually eradicated, is also a threat.
Rising temperatures from climate change mean that bacteria not only grow faster but are also associated with increased antibiotic resistance, facilitating the rise of new deadly pandemics. Factor in expected cuts in federal agencies and reduced enforcement of workplace and community protections by an administration more friendly to corporate demands for cuts in regulations.
Over the coming days and years, our vigilance and mass action will be critical to protecting public health.
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'Make Polio Great Again': Alarm Over RFK Jr. Lawyer Who Targeted Vaccine
"So if you're wondering if Donald Trump is trying to kill your kids, yes, yes he is," said one critic.
Dec 13, 2024
Public health advocates, federal lawmakers, and other critics responded with alarm to The New York Timesreporting on Friday that an attorney helping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. select officials for the next Trump administration tried to get the U.S. regulators to revoke approval of the polio vaccine in 2022.
"The United States has been a leader in the global fight to eradicate polio, which is poised to become only the second disease in history to be eliminated from the face of the earth after smallpox," said Liza Barrie, Public Citizen's campaign director for global vaccines access. "Undermining polio vaccination efforts now risks reversing decades of progress and unraveling one of the greatest public health achievements of all time."
Public Citizen is among various organizations that have criticized President-elect Donald Trump's choice of Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, with the watchdog's co-president, Robert Weissman, saying that "he shouldn't be allowed in the building... let alone be placed in charge of the nation's public health agency."
Although Kennedy's nomination requires Senate confirmation, he is already speaking with candidates for top health positions, with help from Aaron Siri, an attorney who represented RFK Jr. during his own presidential campaign, the Times reported. Siri also represents the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) in petitions asking the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) "to withdraw or suspend approval of vaccines not only for polio, but also for hepatitis B."
According to the newspaper:
Mr. Siri is also representing ICAN in petitioning the FDA to "pause distribution" of 13 other vaccines, including combination products that cover tetanus, diphtheria, polio, and hepatitis A, until their makers disclose details about aluminum, an ingredient researchers have associated with a small increase in asthma cases.
Mr. Siri declined to be interviewed, but said all of his petitions were filed on behalf of clients. Katie Miller, a spokeswoman for Mr. Kennedy, said Mr. Siri has been advising Mr. Kennedy but has not discussed his petitions with any of the health nominees. She added, "Mr. Kennedy has long said that he wants transparency in vaccines and to give people choice."
After the article was published, Siri called it a "typical NYT hit piece plainly written by those lacking basic reading and thinking skills," and posted a series of responses on social media. He wrote in part that "ICAN's petition to the FDA seeks to revoke a particular polio vaccine, IPOL, and only for infants and children and only until a proper trial is conducted, because IPOL was licensed in 1990 by Sanofi based on pediatric trials that, according to FDA, reviewed safety for only three days after injection."
The Times pointed out that experts consider placebo-controlled trials that would deny some children polio shots unethical, because "you're substituting a theoretical risk for a real risk," as Dr. Paul A. Offit, a vaccine expert at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, explained. "The real risks are the diseases."
Ayman Chit, head of vaccines for North America at Sanofi, told the newspaper that development of the vaccine began in 1977, over 280 million people worldwide have received it, and there have been more than 300 studies, some with up to six months of follow-up.
Trump, who is less than six weeks out from returning to office, has sent mixed messages on vaccines in recent interviews.
Asked about RFK Jr.'s anti-vaccine record during a Time "Person of the Year" interview published Thursday, the president-elect said that "we're going to be able to do very serious testing" and certain vaccines could be made unavailable "if I think it's dangerous."
Trump toldNBC News last weekend: "Hey, look, I'm not against vaccines. The polio vaccine is the greatest thing. If somebody told me to get rid of the polio vaccine, they're going to have to work real hard to convince me. I think vaccines are—certain vaccines—are incredible. But maybe some aren't. And if they aren't, we have to find out."
Both comments generated concern—like the Friday reporting in the Times, which University of Alabama law professor and MSNBC columnist Joyce White Vance called "absolutely terrifying."
She was far from alone. HuffPost senior front page editor Philip Lewis said that "this is just so dangerous and ridiculous" while Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan declared, "We are so—and I use this word advisedly—fucked."
Ryan Cooper, managing editor at The American Prospect, warned that "they want your kids dead."
Author and musician Mikel Jollett similarly said, "So if you're wondering if Donald Trump is trying to kill your kids, yes, yes he is."
Multiple critics altered Trump's campaign slogan to "Make Polio Great Again."
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) responded with a video on social media:
Without naming anyone, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a polio survivor, put out a lengthy statement on Friday.
"The polio vaccine has saved millions of lives and held out the promise of eradicating a terrible disease. Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed—they're dangerous," he said in part. "Anyone seeking the Senate's consent to serve in the incoming administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts."
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Over 75 Nobel Laureates Call On Senate to Reject RFK Jr. as Health Secretary
"In view of his record, placing Mr. Kennedy in charge of DHHS would put the public's health in jeopardy," said the winners of the prestigious prize.
Dec 10, 2024
Nobel laureates rarely wade into politics as a group, but Monday marked the second time in two months that dozens of winners of the prestigious Nobel Prize have banded together to speak out against the agenda of President-elect Donald Trump—this time, calling on U.S. senators to reject his nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
More than 75 Nobel laureates signed a letter warning lawmakers about Kennedy's record of attacking the very agencies he would have power over if confirmed to be Trump's secretary of health and human services, his history of amplifying discredited conspiracy theories about public health—sometimes with deadly consequences—and his "lack of credentials or relevant experience in medicine, science, public health, or administration."
"In view of his record, placing Mr. Kennedy in charge of DHHS would put the public's health in jeopardy and undermine America's global leadership in the health sciences, in both the public and commercial sectors," wrote the Nobel laureates.
Kennedy has alarmed dental experts with his proposal to remove fluoride, which prevents tooth decay, from public drinking water—a plan that Trump has said "sounds OK." The president-elect also said Sunday he would have Kennedy investigate the conspiracy theory that vaccines cause autism, which was the argument made by a 1998 article that has since been retracted and has been debunked by numerous international studies.
The environmental lawyer—whose views and political ambitions have been disavowed by other members of the prominent Kennedy family—has also been condemned for falsely claiming in a letter to the prime minister of Samoa in 2019 that the measles vaccine itself may have caused a measles outbreak that had killed 16 people there. By the time the outbreak was over, 80 people had died, and experts partially blamed "increasing circulation of misinformation leading to distrust and reduced vaccination uptake."
"Maybe there are some [senators] who will read this and think: 'Well, we really do want to protect the health of our citizens. They didn't elect us so that we could kill them,'" Richard Roberts, a co-author of Monday's letter and the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his discovery of split genes, told The New York Times.
Other beliefs of Kennedy's include his rejection of the established scientific fact that the HIV virus causes AIDS and his claim that unpasteurized raw milk "advances human health" and that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has purposely suppressed that information.
Food scientists say there is no documented proof that raw milk has the health benefits proponents like Kennedy claim it does, but there is ample proof that unpasteurized milk contains bacteria and viruses, including H5N1, the avian flu that's been detected in dairy cow herds in at least 15 states.
The Nobel laureates noted that Kennedy has also been a "belligerent critic" of the FDA and other health agencies and employees that are part of DHHS, calling for vaccine scientists to be imprisoned and threatening to fire FDA and National Institutes of Health employees.
"The leader of DHHS should continue to nurture and improve—not threaten—these important and highly respected institutions and their employees," reads the letter, which was signed by Nobel Prize winners including economist Simon Johnson, vaccine scientist Drew Weissman, and Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, who won the prize in physiology or medicine for discovering microRNA.
Dozens of Nobel laureates also signed a letter in October endorsing Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential run and warning that Trump's economic agenda would "lead to higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality."
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