One
Week at the White House Was America’s Pandemic in a Microcosm
President Trump’s reckless
abandon made a superspreader event all but inevitable, and it jeopardizes more
lives just as a second virus surge begins.
By
Robert
Langreth
and
Michelle
Fay Cortez
October 8, 2020, 3:00 AM
CDT
SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t pay attention to party affiliation. Nor does
it listen to spin that the nation is turning a corner in the pandemic or
promises that a vaccine to solve everything is imminent. All it does is spread,
silently and efficiently, wherever and whenever it can, taking advantage of
people who let their guard down to find more throats and noses to infect.
The coronavirus apparently found plenty of throats to colonize
at the White House. At least 12 people who attended a Rose Garden ceremony for
Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett on Sept. 26, or other indoor events
associated with it, have now tested
positive, including the president and the first lady, two Republican
senators, the president of the University of Notre Dame, former aide Kellyanne
Conway, and press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. Numerous others in Trump’s orbit
who aren’t known to have attended the Rose Garden event, including top aides
Hope Hicks and Stephen Miller and campaign manager Bill Stepien, have also
contracted the virus.
The White House outbreak,
consuming the highest levels of the U.S. government, is a superspreader event
with geopolitical shock waves. It’s driven several of the country’s top
military leaders into quarantine and could ultimately put thousands of ordinary
people, including staff at the White House and Trump’s Bedminster, N.J., golf
club and their families, in danger. And it’s a microcosm of the Trump
administration’s handling of the pandemic from the beginning: All along, it has
bet on quick fixes over unglamorous preventive measures like masks, social
distancing, and contact tracing.
Even now, the White House is focused on moving on. “The
president is conveying confidence and resilience and demonstrating to the
American people that we must not live in fear, that we must reopen in a safe
way and go back to school, go back to work, go back to church, because to do
otherwise would be un-American,” deputy press secretary Brian Morgenstern said
on Oct. 6.
Trump announced on Twitter that he’d tested
positive for the virus soon after midnight on Friday, Oct. 2, hours
after Bloomberg News’s Jennifer Jacobs broke the news that
Hicks, one of his closest aides, had tested
positive. He spent three days in the hospital before returning to the
White House on Monday night. Exactly how serious his condition was isn’t clear.
But physicians were worried enough to administer an experimental antibody
cocktail from Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc., and
then, when his blood-oxygen level dipped for a second time, they started him on
a steroid treatment that’s usually reserved for severe Covid cases. On his
release, Trump’s doctors said he wasn’t out of the woods yet; the illness can
take a severe turn 7 to 10 days after symptoms appear. By Oct. 7, Trump had
been symptom-free for over 24 hours, his doctor said.
Given how many crowded events the president attended the week he
got sick, including rallies in two states and a fundraiser in a third—as well
as hours of apparently mask-free prep for his Sept. 29 debate with Democratic
presidential nominee Joe Biden—it’s not clear exactly how or when the virus
spread through the White House, and it may never be. What is clear is that the
White House, for months, has been ignoring basic public-health precautions urged
by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, such as limiting large
gatherings, wearing masks, and practicing social distancing.
At the Rose Garden event, rows were packed, people were hugging
and shaking hands, and few wore masks. But that wasn’t anomalous: This summer,
Trump held a rally
inside a Tulsa arena and gave a convention
speech to 2,500 people on the South Lawn of the White House. As
his reelection campaign gained steam, de facto political rallies became full
outdoor rallies, which soon turned into indoor ones. All featured Trump
supporters largely maskless and packed together. “Anytime you are increasing
contact between people, you’re increasing opportunity to become infected,” says
Kate Grabowski, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University. Trump may have
been lucky not to have been infected earlier, she says.
Instead of social distancing, the White House has relied on
technology to fend off the virus. Its main line of defense has been a rapid
test from Abbott Laboratories. But
tests like these, as useful as they are in spotting cases early so people can
be isolated, were never intended to be the sole safeguard against Covid and may
have given a false sense of security. While some White House staffers wore
masks early on in the pandemic, most stopped in the weeks after the president
ended his regular coronavirus briefings. “There are a lot of important lessons
from this, and one of them is that testing in and of itself is not enough to
keep the virus out,” says Tom Frieden, a former director of the CDC.
That’s because patients become contagious before they develop
symptoms, and rapid tests won’t catch all of these early cases until it’s too
late. If just one patient with a false-negative result slips through, a
superspreader event can quickly ensue. “It’s almost impossible to test often
enough” to catch all cases before they become contagious, says Graham Snyder,
medical director of infection prevention and hospital epidemiology at the
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “That is why masking and distancing are
so important.”
The reliance on testing alone within the White House is
emblematic of the silver-bullet approach the president has taken from the
beginning of the pandemic. In January, Trump promised he could keep the virus
out of the U.S. by restricting
passengers arriving from China. When that didn’t work,
and deaths started to soar, he championed hydroxychloroquine, an old malaria
drug that had meager data showing it might help against Covid. The Food and
Drug Administration cleared it for emergency use, but had to retract the
authorization after evidence showed it didn’t work and could even cause heart
rhythm problems.
In tweets, the president undermined the reopening guidelines of
his own White House Coronavirus Task Force, encouraging states to accelerate
the process. And after scientific evidence mounted that masks can prevent
spread, Trump still didn’t embrace them. He didn’t wear one in public
until July
11 and has done so only sporadically since then. At the first
presidential debate, two days before he tested positive, his family didn’t wear
masks while seated inside the event hall, and Trump mocked Biden for wearing
“the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.”
Inconsistency and magical thinking at the top, public-health
experts say, are among the main reasons the U.S. never got the pandemic under
control. “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear,” Trump said of the
virus back in February. There has been no nationwide mask requirement and no
testing strategy, leaving state governments to set their own policies while
they scrambled for everything from personal protective gear to diagnostics.
Large gatherings continued, sowing the pathogen widely.
Despite the expanding cluster inside, the White House has no
plans to track exposures from the Rose Garden ceremony. (An administration
official says that the Coney Barrett event was held too long ago for that—and
it would be the responsibility of the local health authority anyway—but that
the White House is tracing contacts of those who test positive or show symptoms
on-site going back 48 hours.) This is consistent with the larger indifference
to ramping up contact tracing, which has flopped in the U.S. because of lagging
test results, weakened public-health services, and a broad lack of support.
Additional money Congress set aside for the CDC’s testing and
contact tracing has been delayed or redirected to other priorities. Trump is
focused instead on accelerating the development of promising drugs and
vaccines—sometimes at the expense of other measures that could slow
transmission. While Congress directed about $10 billion to Operation
Warp Speed, the administration expanded the funds available to that
vaccine-focused program to as
much as $18 billion, Bloomberg News reported in September. Some
$6 billion was transferred from the Strategic National Stockpile, part of an
allocation meant to replenish reserves of medical protective gear, ventilators,
and testing supplies, all of which have seen shortages this year. The
administration also steered $700 million of the CDC’s funding to Warp Speed.
One drug Warp Speed has funded is the antibody cocktail from
Regeneron that Trump received. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious
disease doctor, views it and other anti-Covid antibodies being developed
at Eli Lilly & Co. as
a bridge to vaccines. Lilly said on Oct. 7 that it’s asked regulators to
authorize emergency use of its antibody based on promising preliminary trial
results. But even assuming they are approved, antibodies by themselves won’t
magically solve the pandemic. Antibodies are even harder and more costly to
manufacture than vaccines, and they’re likely to be in short supply initially.
It may be a while before most people, unlike the president, can get them.
Then there are vaccines. By
all accounts, testing is proceeding at an unprecedented speed, with
immunizations from Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson in giant
final-stage trials in the U.S. A fourth big U.S. trial of an AstraZeneca shot
is on hold while regulators conduct safety checks. The first of these trial
results could come this fall, leading to an emergency authorization for some
vaccines by year’s end. But it’s just not the case that vaccines will be widely
available “momentarily,” as the president suggested in a video on the night he
left the hospital, vaccine experts say. On Oct. 6, the FDA issued strict
requirements for vaccine applications that will likely slow down the timeline.
Trump called this a “ political
hit job.”
Even if they were ready, the shots wouldn’t immediately
eradicate the virus. Supplies may be limited at first, and authorization will
likely be restricted to a select group of health-care workers and others at
high risk. It will take months to get vaccines to the broader public. They may
be only partially effective, and some people may refuse to take them, notes
Vanderbilt University infectious disease specialist William Schaffner. That
means, he says, some social distancing will likely be needed even after a
vaccine becomes available.
There is no silver bullet when it comes to taming the
coronavirus, just the hard, grinding work of putting together basic
interventions, from mask-wearing to contact tracing, on a massive scale. So
far, the virus has killed
more than 210,000 Americans—six times as many as die
in motor vehicle accidents annually—and infected
more than 7.5 million. As the weather turns
colder, sending people indoors, Covid is on the upswing again. Thirty-four
states are seeing more cases than they were a month ago, and hot spots like
Wisconsin and the Dakotas are hitting new peaks. “It is just mind-blowing to
me, when we have the ability to control further spread of the infection, we are
not doing it,” says Leana Wen, a public-health professor at George Washington
University and former Baltimore health commissioner.
President Trump downplayed the virus again during his
hospitalization at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. “Don’t be
afraid of Covid,” he tweeted. That night, standing before news cameras after
returning to the White House, he triumphantly removed his mask. But SARS-CoV-2
is still out there, ready to infect new victims at any opportunity. It’s
established itself around the world and is settling down for the long haul. Far
from being a quick fight, the battle with the virus will be fought for many
months, and possibly years, to come. —With John Tozzi and Josh
Wingrove
