The president's statements to the press were terrifying. That press availability was a repudiation of good science and good crisis management from inside one of the world?s most respected scientific institutions. It was full of Dear Leader-ish compliments, non-sequitorial defenses of unrelated matters, attacks on an American governor, and - most importantly - misinformation about the virus and the US response. That's particularly painful coming from inside the CDC, a longtime powerhouse in global public health now reduced to being a backdrop for grubby politics. During a public health crisis, clear and true information from leaders is the only way to avoid dangerous panic. Yet here we are.
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Azar started talking about the tests health care workers use to determine whether someone is infected with the new coronavirus. The lack of those kits has meant a dangerous lack of epidemiological information about the spread and severity of the disease in the US, exacerbated by opacity on the part of the government. Azar tried to say that more tests were on the way, pending quality control.
Then Trump cut Azar off. "But I think, importantly, anybody, right now and yesterday, that needs a test gets a test. They're there, they have the tests, and the tests are beautiful. Anybody that needs a test gets a test," Trump said.
This is untrue. Vice President Pence told reporters Thursday that the US didn't have enough test kits to meet demand. New York governor Andrew Cuomo announced that his state would develop its own coronavirus tests because the federal government version wasn't available in enough quantity.
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The president seems not to want to allow passengers out of their quarantine on board the ship and into quarantine on land. It wasn't clear at the CDC why sick people on board the Grand Princess wouldn't get counted in US numbers of infected people, or why he thinks that accounting is relevant, but it very much sounded like the president didn't want to bring sick people to safety and medical care because doing so might make him look bad. "I like the numbers being where they are. I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault," the president said. Apparently what that means is that he doesn't want the numbers of sick people to reflect the actual numbers of sick people? - a statistic that would help researchers understand the spread of the disease.
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Then the president returned to another old talking point - that because one of his relatives was a scientist, he, too, is good at science. A reporter started asking a question, and Trump cut her off: "I like this stuff. You know my uncle was a great person. He was at MIT. He taught at MIT for, I think, like, a record number of years. He was a great supergenius, Dr. John Trump."
The president has often mentioned his uncle, a respected engineer who worked with Robert Van de Graaf at MIT in the 1930s on electrostatic generators and went on to pioneer the treatment of cancer with radiation. President Trump has brought up his uncle in reference to climate change and as evidence that the president himself would have a genetic predisposition to be good at science. It?s putting it kindly to call this a bold claim. No one has identified a gene for science ability, because?well, how would that work, exactly? The effects of genetics on intelligence more broadly are controversial in science, and probably much less than the effects of environment and upbringing.
"I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it," the president went on. He started talking about his tour of the CDC he'd taken before his talk to the press. "Every one of these doctors said, 'How do you know so much about this?' Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president."
It seems unlikely that every scientist at the CDC marveled at the president's scientific acumen. Earlier in the very same press conference, the president admitted that he didn't know, before Covid-19, that people died of the flu. Not only does seasonal influenza kill tens of thousands of people every year, but President Trump's own grandfather was an early victim of the global 1918 flu pandemic.
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But the president insisted. "I understand that whole world. I love that world. I really do. I love that world," he said "And you know what? The whole world is relying on us."
Unclear what he meant there - whether the president loves the world of the CDC, or the world of science or medicine. Regardless, it's clear that the world is in fact not relying on the US to do anything about Covid-19. According to Science, at the end of February the World Health Organization had sent its version of a coronavirus test to 57 countries - but not the US, for reasons the US government still hasn't explained. China was conducting 1.6 million tests a week with five different kinds of test kits, and South Korea had tested 65,000 people - all without US help. Singapore researchers invented the first blood-based test for use in keeping track of people with the disease. Italy and Japan are relying on their own public health infrastructures to deal with their outbreaks, and so far every other country where the disease is circulating guarantees paid sick leave, so people can stay home rather than spread it further. That's a low bar, because the US guarantees zero days of paid sick leave to anyone.
So no. The world is not counting on the US response to Covid-19. And judging by this short press conference at the CDC, that's probably for the best.
https://www.wired.com/story/trumps-coronavirus-press-event-was-even-worse-than-it-looked/
