Trust science — not friction
Pros assure pols, rip conspiracies
WASHINGTON — Two of the Trump administration’s top medical officials pleaded Wednesday for people to ignore conspiracies and pronouncements about coronavirus vaccines f rom crackpots and politicians, including President Trump.
Trump has both complained about a “deep state” at the FDA getting in the way of progress on COVID-19 treatments and promised a vaccine before Election Day. Democrats have repeatedly pointed to those comments and other actions by the White House to say Trump is trying to politicize medicine.
But Surgeon General Jerome Adams and National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins both insisted to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee that politics and conspiracies have no part in the rush to develop a vaccine, and that safety was the top concern.
“There will be no shortcuts,” Adams told the committee. “This vaccine will be safe, it will be effective, or it won’t get moved along. When a vaccine is either approved or authorized by the FDA, I and my family will be in line to get it,” he said.
“I can’t say strongly enough that the decisions about how this vaccine is going to be evaluated and assessed is going to be based on science,” said Collins.
Both pointed to the decision Tuesday by AstraZeneca to suspend its development of a possible vaccine as evidence of the focus on safety, noting that it halted human testing because one person may have had an adverse reaction. Five other vaccines are also in the works.
Democrats on the committee pointed out that doubts about vaccines and the coronavirus response often start in the White House. They pointed to Trump’s coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas pushing for developing “herd immunity” to the virus in the United States by letting more people get sick. They also pointed to Trump’s recent tweet saying “The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics.”
Tuesday, Trump went in the other direction, insisting a vaccine will be ready by the end of October, though medical experts say the end of the year is much more likely.
Asked by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D -Mass.) if Trump’s efforts were helpful or harmful in reassuring Americans that they should take the vaccine once one is fully approved, Collins dodged, but said people should be getting their vaccine advice from doctors.
“I just hope Americans will choose to take the information they need from scientists and physicians, and not from politicians,” Collins said.
Warren in her questioning noted that scientists estimate that at least 70% of the population needs to be immune to the coronavirus before the country will have the herd immunity that Trump adviser Atlas wants, and being able to deliver vaccines is the safest way to get there.
Committee Chairman Sen. Lamar Alexander (RTenn.) made a special point of criticizing the herd immunity strategy that just lets people get sick.
“To me it seems important to say to the American people that their herd immunity is what we want — we want most Americans to be immune to COVID-19,” Alexander said. “But there are only two ways to get there, and one is just to let it roar through the population, killing people until we’ve killed enough and in fact enough have recovered, to have herd immunity.
“The much preferable way is the vaccine that has a good prospect of being available by the end of the year,” he said.
Collins and Adams also pleaded for people to ignore the conspiracy theories.
“The craziest one I’ve heard is this is all designed by [Microsoft cofounder] Bill Gates, and when you get the vaccine, it has a chip in it that’s going to get stuck into your system, and it’s going to watch everything you’re doing,” said Collins, who added incredulously, “And people believe that stuff.”