The new Vaccine Wars mean the coronavirus casualties won’t end | Trudy Rubin

Late in the fourth year of the Trump presidency, the United States is confronting a far more dangerous war than the “forever wars” he says he is ending.

This is a multiphase conflict begun by the president himself, with new battle fronts opened daily. The deadly combat can end only if he is voted out of office.

It began as Trump’s War on Science, which has cost tens of thousands of U.S. lives due to the White House failure to contain COVID-19.

It has morphed into a Vaccine War, a new battle ground in which Trump contradicts his scientists with false claims that a vaccine will be generally available before the election. However, the White House politicization of science has created such mistrust that only 4 in 10 Americans say they would take a vaccine if offered prior to November. Thus the president undermines the very cure he claims will save the country.

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Moreover the price of Trump’s science wars extends beyond the relentless rise in the U.S. death toll, now nearly 200,000. His reckless battles have undermined America’s reputation and security interests worldwide — and the cost will mount if they don’t end soon.

Trump’s Vaccine War was in full view on Wednesday with his public slap down Wednesday of Robert R. Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Redfield told a Senate committee a vaccine won’t be widely available until at least the middle of next year, with at best a “very limited supply” in November or December. Meantime, Redfield said, masks were “the most important, powerful public health tool we have.”

The president publicly scorned Redfield’s remarks as “incorrect” and a “mistake.” This was just the latest skirmish in Trump’s effort to push public agencies and private companies partnering in Operation Warp Speed to speed up production of a vaccine - so it will appear before Nov. 3.

Meantime, the president continues to denigrate mask-wearing at White House ceremonies and his non-social-distanced rallies. This, despite broad scientific agreement with Redfield.

“Vaccines are only one of two necessary tools, along with hygienic measures,” says Paul Offit, a renowned epidemiologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman school of Medicine. Of the two tools, masking and social distancing are “more potent,” Offit told a Perry World House webinar. “If I mask and stand six feet from you I won’t catch the virus.”

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Yet a steady stream of derogatory critiques by the administration toward its scientific advisers continues to confuse the American public. Which undercuts any trust in a future vaccine.

Only recently the top communications official at the Department of Health and Human Services, Michael Caputo, posted a Facebook video accusing CDC scientists of “sedition,” claiming they included a pro-Biden cabal “who do not want America to get well.” (Caputo came under such fire, he is stepping down for two months but is not resigning.)

The political tinkering with CDC directives, the presidential promotion of unproven cures, the false statistics used (and later retracted) by the Food and Drug Administration’s director, all point to a health bureaucracy under terrible pressure from Doctor Trump.

So it’s no wonder that a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation showed that only 14% of Americans expect a vaccine before November, while 50% of Democrats, 41% of independents, and 36% of Republicans would refuse to take it. As the Vaccine War rages, the number of takers is bound to drop.

“Trust is going to be an issue, and the current leadership has squandered trust,” I was told by epidemiologist Philip Landrigan, director of Boston College’s Public Health Program. “You can bet the anti-vaxxers are gearing up.”

Indeed, anti-vaccination activists are mobilizing online, many of them supporters of Trump, who was once an anti-vaxxer. (Their numbers are swelled by with members of the expanding QAnon cult, also encouraged by Trump, who blame the coronavirus on a plot by Bill Gates.)

Meantime, many on the left and in the center doubt the vaccine will be safe, given Trump’s politicization of science. And many in the Black community are suspicious, given the history of the U.S. Public Health Service’s Tuskegee experiments on Black men in the 1930s.

There are, of course, still U.S. safeguards. Nine leading drug companies have pledged that they won’t submit vaccine candidates for FDA review until clinical trials ensure they are safe and effective.

And a top FDA official, Peter Marks, pledged to resign if the FDA authorizes pre-election approval to any vaccine before data support its use. In such a case, pressure by the media, Congress, and scientists would be critical. But even if such pressure works, trust will take a further hit.

And the danger from Trump’s war on science extends beyond our boundaries. A recent Pew Poll shows a stunning plunge in America’s reputation among its democratic allies in Europe and Asia, in large part linked to how the United States has handled the pandemic. Across 13 countries polled, a median of just 15% said the United States had done a good job.

The growing disrespect for America’s competence emboldens China and Russia, and further degrades our alliances.

Trump’s his disdain for science, so glaring in his Vaccine War, will continue to impose terrible costs at home and abroad if it continues. Only U.S. voters can bring this war to an end on Nov. 3.

On Sept. 25, I’m hosting a live interview with foreign affairs specialist Fiona Hill about Russia and the 2020 election. Join us for this free event, by registering here.