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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 series of 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, and reelection odds, from the coronavirus outbreak.
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.” That’s what Trump, speaking to the National Association of Counties Legislative Conference, said he had formerly implored of pharmaceutical executives about the progress toward a vaccine for severe acute respiratory syndrome–coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
“Transmission rates and death rates are not measurements that can be changed with 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 written 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 newly questioned in recent weeks when he was named to head up the administration’s handling of the virus. The vice president, when running for Congress in 2020, 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 makers 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 said.
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