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Getty Images President Donald Trump addresses the nation Wednesday night from the Oval Office about the widening coronavirus. Known as COVID-19, the pandemic has infected more than 109,000 people and killed more than 3,800 people in 105 countries.
‘I don’t expect politicians to know Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism or the Diels-Alder chemical reaction (although I can dream). But you can’t insult science when you don’t like it and then suddenly insist on something that science can’t give on demand.’
That’s H. Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science journals. He’s questioning the Trump administration’s rediscovered reliance on science — an area Democrats and select industries argue the White House has severely underfunded — in order to save the world from the coronavirus outbreak, and bolster re-election hopes along the way.
Thorp was writing in a commentary on his publications’ site Wednesday, before the president took to prime-time television for an update on the now pandemic.
The Trump administration’s budget proposals, including the latest one, a $4.8 trillion blueprint submitted last month, have regularly cut federal spending for science, health and the environment. However, requested cuts may hit congestion in the House of Representatives, which holds the purse strings and has a Democratic majority.
“Do me a favor, speed it up, speed it up,” Trump recalled telling pharmaceutical executives when more recently bringing the National Association of Counties Legislative Conference up to speed. He said he had formerly implored those pharmaceutical heads to accelerate progress toward a vaccine for severe acute respiratory syndrome–coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes the coronavirus disease identified in China late last year, or COVID-19.
“Transmission rates and death rates are not measurements that can be changed [at] will and an extroverted presentation,” a riled Thorp wrote.
The administration had said that virus spread in the United States is contained, although Trump did take additional steps at the federal level on financial relief and travel bans, which were detailed in his Wednesday address and later clarified by staff.
Scientists all along have told a different story. “[It] is clear from genomic evidence that community spread is occurring in Washington state and beyond. That kind of distortion and denial is dangerous and almost certainly contributed to the federal government’s sluggish response,” Thorp suggested in his piece.
Early Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence on the “Today” show said that there has been “irresponsible rhetoric” downplaying the seriousness of the viral spread. Trump as recently as Monday said the “fake news media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything to inflame the coronavirus situation.”
Pence’s scientific bona fides were freshly questioned in recent weeks when he was named to head up the administration’s response to the virus. The vice president, when running for Congress in 2000, wrote of the tobacco-industry settlement with the government: “Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill. In fact, 2 out of every three smokers does not die from a smoking related illness and 9 out of ten smokers do not contract lung cancer.”
Pence’s view then was in contradiction to what cigarette manufacturers themselves had conceded in their deal.
Thorp, writing of the administration’s current pressure on the pharmaceutical industry, conceded that the steps required to produce a vaccine could possibly be made more efficient. But the effort “depend[s] on biological and chemical processes that are essential,” he said. “So the president might just as well have said, ‘Do me a favor, hurry up that warp drive.’ ”
Trump is expected to announce an executive order insisting on American-made medical supplies and pharmaceuticals in response to the coronavirus outbreak, according to a person familiar with the plan, the Associated Press reported.
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