The prestigious British peer-reviewed general medical journal, The Lancet, asks Americans not to re-elect Donald Trump as president on November 3. It contends Trump keeps undermining American public health experts doing their utmost to suppress the raging COVID-19 pandemic to advance his re-election bid.
Instead, Americans should elect someone "who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics," which is an indirect reference to Joe Biden, the Democratic Party candidate.
The journal took this unusual foray into American politics Friday with an editorial entitled, "Reviving the US CDC." Apart from strongly criticizing Trump, the editorial argues Trump has rendered the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) useless in the fight against the disease. Trump's taking control of the U.S. response to the pandemic "is dangerous for both the U.S. and the world," contends The Lancet.
"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," said the editorial.
The journal slammed the Trump administration's "inconsistent and incoherent national response" to the crisis. It also assailed Trump's personal obsession with "quickie" cures to COVID-19 such as hydroxychloroquine and disinfectants injected inside the human body, and wishful thinking SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2), the virus that causes COVID-19, will just fade away on its own one day.
"The Administration is obsessed with magic bullets -- vaccines, new medicines, or a hope that the virus will simply disappear. But 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."
The editorial, however, asks why the CDC, which it said was once "the gold standard for global disease detection and control," has allowed Trump to trample on it and use it for his political ends. It upbraided the CDC for allowing Trump to turn it into an "ineffective and nominal adviser" on the U.S. response to COVID-19.
The Lancet called for CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield to resign. It said, "The CDC needs a director who can provide leadership without the threat of being silenced."
More to the point, Trump has "chipped away at the CDC's capacity to combat infectious diseases." Trump must be blamed for reducing CDC staff in China tasked with monitoring viral outbreaks. Trump must also take responsibility for removing the last American CDC expert from the Chinese CDC campus last July. These massive errors on Trump's part left an "intelligence vacuum" when COVID-19 was detected in Hubei province in December 2019.
The Lancet also accuses Trump of accelerating the "erosion" of the CDC, which began under two previous Republican presidents: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Like Reagan and Bush, Trump used the CDC to score political points that seriously limited the agency's ability to combat emergencies at the time, such as the HIV/AIDS crisis.
"More recently, the Trump administration has questioned guidelines that the CDC has provided. These actions have undermined the CDC's leadership and its work during the COVID-19 pandemic," wrote The Lancet.
