Influential Medical Journal Castigates Trump, Says ‘Public Health Should Not Be Guided By Partisan Politics’

TOPLINE

In a scathing editorial published this week, The Lancet, one of the world’s most respected medical journals, harshly criticized the Trump administration’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and suggested that Americans should look for new leadership during the upcoming election.

KEY FACTS

According to The Lancet, “The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the flagship agency for the nation’s public health, has seen its role minimised and become an ineffective and nominal adviser in the response to contain the spread of the virus.”

Per the editorial, this is alarming and disconcerting because the CDC’s epidemiologists and scientists, working in the U.S. and abroad, have helped to discover new viruses and develop accurate tests for them since the agency’s founding in 1946.

Yet funding to the CDC has been subject to conservative politics that have increasingly eroded the agency’s ability to mount effective, evidence-based public health responses.

The Trump administration has continued to chip away at the CDC’s capacity to combat infectious diseases by cutting back CDC staff in China (with the last remaining CDC officer recalled home from the China CDC in July of 2019), “leaving an intelligence vacuum when COVID-19 began to emerge.”

Back in April, Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, tweeted, “President Trump’s decision to defund WHO is simply this — a crime against humanity. Every scientist, every health worker, every citizen must resist and rebel against this appalling betrayal of global solidarity.”

Lancet editors do acknowledge that CDC made mistakes in its initial handling of the pandemic, but argue that punishing the agency by marginalizing it is not the solution.

Critical quote: 

“Americans must put a president in the White House come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics.”

Big Number:

250%. That’s how much higher the U.S. death toll — 85,571 as of Friday morning — is than any other country.

Key Background:

The Lancet, founded in 1823, is among the world’s leading medical journals. In March, The editor-in-chief of the journal Science called out President Trump in an op-ed, saying “distortion and denial is dangerous and almost certainly contributed to the federal government’s sluggish response.” As noted above, The Lancet concedes that The CDC erred when, convinced that they had contained the virus, retained control of all diagnostic testing for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, and later admitted that they had developed faulty test kits. Nonetheless, to their determinant, the “administration is obsessed with magic bullets—vaccines, new medicines, or a hope that the virus will simply disappear.” According to The Lancet, “only a steadfast reliance on basic public health principles, like test, trace, and isolate, will see the emergency brought to an end, and this requires an effective national public health agency.”

Further Reading:

Reviving the US CDC (The Lancet) 

As deaths mount, Trump tries to convince Americans it’s safe to inch back to normal )The Washington Post) 

Prestigious medical journal blasts Trump over meddling with the CDC and ignoring warnings (CNN)

Coronavirus Test Kits Sent to States Are Flawed, CDC. Says (New York Times
NYT


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