President Joe Biden’s battle plan to defeat Covid-19 is “right,” but restoring Americans’ confidence in “science-based leadership” will not be easy after Donald Trump’s four years, public health experts said Thursday. market.
“The most important thing the Biden government needs to do to fight the pandemic is to communicate honestly and openly with the American people about what needs to be done,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the University’s School of Public Health Brown. “The Trump administration’s constant obfuscation and disinformation, all the ‘this is a scam’ stuff, that killed our response to the pandemic.”
Dr. David Battinelli, Northwell Health’s medical director and senior vice president, said in an email: “The plan presented by President Biden and his team of experts is right. It is based on the recommendations of leading scientists and healthcare experts and it should have been the plan all the time. “
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Experts pondered when Biden, on the first full day of his presidency, signed ten decrees that aimed, among other things, to increase the production and distribution of vaccines and to enforce masks at airports and on planes, trains and maritime vessels.
As of Thursday afternoon, 24.5 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 were reported in the United States, with 407,384 deaths, according to the latest statistics from NBC News. Both are leading figures in the world.
“We didn’t get into this mess overnight and it will take months to reverse that,” said Biden, warning that the country is expected to reach 500,000 deaths next month. “But let me be equally clear: we will overcome this. We will defeat this pandemic.”
Biden’s 198-page strategy to end the pandemic has been reduced to seven key points.
Polly Price, professor of law and public health at Emory University, said three points in particular – increasing Covid-19 testing, using the Defense Production Act to increase the supply of personal protective equipment and injecting billions of dollars and technical assistance from federal government Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the distribution of vaccines – will be music for the ears of state and local governments.
“State officials and public health experts pleaded for these three actions in particular,” Price said by email.
The Biden team said the Trump administration left the job of putting vaccines in the arms of Americans to state and local governments, which led to distribution problems. “What we are inheriting is much worse than we could have imagined,” said Jeffrey Zients, coordinator of Covid-19 in Biden, on Thursday in a call with reporters.
Price said that an executive order alone will not solve the problem and that “adequate funding and technical assistance for CDC vaccination programs will be needed in most states to improve distribution” – especially if Biden wants to meet his ambitious goal of giving 100 million vaccinations vaccines in 100 days, which would be a big jump from the 17.5 million injections administered since the vaccines were made available on December 14.
A much heavier uprising, Price said, will be Biden’s goal of establishing “mask mandates across the country, working with governors and mayors”.
“The White House task force under President Trump issued weekly reports to states, demanding mask terms and greater social distance,” said Price. “These warnings have been ignored in several cases, probably because of inconsistent messages from the president and marginalization of the CDC in favor of what appeared to be a ‘politically’ White House task force. Restoring confidence in the CDC’s guidance and leadership based on scientific role will be difficult. “
Trump was singled out as the world’s biggest disseminator of coronavirus misinformation last year by researchers at the Cornell Alliance for Science. They found that nearly 38 percent of the “misinformation conversation” started with Trump doing things like promoting unproven miracle cures for Covid-19, minimizing the danger of coronavirus or claiming without any evidence that the pandemic was a Democratic Party scam with the objective of undermining his presidency.
Trump also prevented Americans from wearing masks by refusing to wear one regularly at public events, even after he himself contracted the virus.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top epidemiologist, who survived an attempt by the White House to undermine him, said on Thursday that Biden appears to have been made of a different fabric.
“One of the novelties of this government is that, if you don’t know the answer, don’t guess,” said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “Just saying that you don’t know the answer.”
Dr. Sadiya Khan, an epidemiologist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said Biden’s plan “offers hope for a systematic and scientific approach to mitigating the burden of the Covid-19 pandemic and is a welcome change.”
“The plan focuses on addressing the critical needs of a strong public health response, as a universal mandate for masking,” said Khan. “There is reliable data that there is no harm or risk in wearing a mask and there is a great benefit.”
Still, she warned, “although the plan describes the critical issues, there is a lack of a clear action plan on how to accomplish these things.”
“But for the first time in four years, the plan is committed to relying on science, reviewing available evidence and promoting equity and access to health care,” she said.