Wednesday was a bad day in the fight against COVID-19. The government announced a record number of deaths, more than 3,600. Meanwhile, a House committee released internal Trump administration messages, which demonstrated that Americans were unknowing lab rats in the president’s grail-quest for herd immunity.
In a July 4, 2020 email, Paul Alexander, a political appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services, spelled it all out. In his words, infants, young adults, and middle-aged folks with no conditions had “zero risk,” and were there to take the hit as America marched off a cliff. “We want them infected,” declared Alexander.
Unfortunately, the administration never asked their permission to become human guinea pigs. Indeed, as fate would have it, younger Americans are now dying at historic rates, according to a study recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. As for herd immunity, it’s a lot like waiting for Godot.
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But then again, Alexander is the same fellow who also tried to muzzle Anthony Fauci and criticized the CDC as alarmist. In fact, he even commented that the agency’s COVID warning to pregnant women read as if it were designed to frighten as opposed to inform. As Alexander saw things, the agency was portraying the president and his administration as if they “can’t fix this” and that things are “getting worse.”
For the record, Alexander got it wrong on both counts. Donald J. Trump and his minions failed to fix things, and the situation has gone from bad to horrific. The CDC’s worries were borne out.
Early administration projections of no more than 70,000 dead now read like fantasies or wishful thinking. Come Joe Biden’s inauguration—a month away, as we’re losing around 3,000 Americans every day—the death toll may even surpass 400,000.
Vaccines are not a cure. Personal conduct still matters.
Rather, from the outset, the administration sought to hide the truth from the general public. As the president told Bob Woodward last spring, “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down.” The president refused to be honest with the country.
Not to be outdone by his boss, Mike Pence derided press warnings of a second wave, claiming “such panic was overblown.” At best, the vice president was performative; at worst mendacious. Regardless, Pence failed to faithfully discharge his duty to the U.S.
Pence heads the White House’s COVID task force. In other words, he knew the truth all along but refused to let the public in on the lethal secret. Loyalty to Trump came first. After all, 2024 still beckons.
Well-placed investors, however, were treated very differently. In late February, administration officials let it be known that the pandemic’s course was uncertain, which triggered a market sell-off.
On cable, Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, boasted in a Feb. 25, 2020 interview that the virus was contained, saying “It’s pretty close to airtight.” In private, Kudlow’s message was markedly more ambiguous. The virus was “contained in the U.S., to date, but now we just don’t know,” according to Kudlow.
Sadly, this is not the first time our country knowingly abused its citizens without their informed consent. Starting in 1932, the government conducted a study of Black men and syphilis, which lasted for 40 years. Labeled the “Tuskegee Study,” the participants were never told the purpose of the study or treated—even after penicillin became available.
The Tuskegee experiment was morally abominable, let there be no doubt. But it was limited to 600 men. The Trump administration has conducted a Tuskegee experiment with the entire nation. Its stance toward the pandemic is one of broad and systemic neglect, not the type of governance usually associated with a first world democracy. It isn’t just racial or ethnic minorities anymore.
Somehow, everyone was thrown under the bus. Instead, welcome to what Martin O’Malley, a Democratic former governor of Maryland, calls the “Darwinian approach to federalism.”
Unlike the Swedish government, which openly opted for herd immunity from the outset and received public support, the president and his aides conducted a persistent misinformation campaign surrounding the virus. It also fell to the governors to do the heavy-lifting.
The government’s gambit possessed the air of authoritarian-style human experimentation cloaked in the name of “freedom”; more Kremlin than Independence Hall. Let people do what they want regardless of societal costs, while reinforcing the Republican base’s sense of grievance. Nothing says rugged individualism better than coughing at a grocery counter without any barriers and getting an innocent bystander sick.
To be sure, there was no involuntary surgery, just carnage. And not everyone was in on the joke. Trump even chided Fox’s Laura Ingraham for protecting herself at an October campaign rally in Michigan.
With the cameras rolling and the crowd staring, Trump intoned, “I can’t recognize you… No way, are you wearing a mask?” “Look at you. Laura, she’s being very politically correct. Whoa!”
Woe indeed. The fact that Herman Cain, a Trump supporter and a candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, had died months earlier after attending a Trump rally in Oklahoma was to be memory-holed, as was Trump’s own hospitalization. Not surprisingly, the White House is slated to undergo a deep-clean before the new president arrives.
Regardless, the clock ticks down on Trump, and yet his resistance to reality persists. The president continues to refuse to concede, incessantly tweets, and threatens not to leave office. But facts have a way of catching up.
Trump has lost in the Electoral College and twice before the Supreme Court. The only legal avenue left to him is a joint session of Congress where another Biden victory is foreordained. Come noon on Jan. 20, Trump will be out of a job.
As for COVID’s victims, they won’t be as lucky. It isn’t that Trump could have stopped the pandemic in its tracks. No country or leader has.
Instead, he failed to level with his fellow Americans. Trump is neither king nor sovereign but an elected official who owes his tenure to all citizens and the Constitution, not just his fans. Beyond that, compassion from the Oval Office remains absent and will do so as long as Trump is president.
This is not the last pandemic this country will likely face. Moving ahead, we need to insist that with the power to tax and wage war comes the obligation to keep us informed. Yes, we can handle the truth.
