Coronavirus Files: Public health takes a beating at the ballot box

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Public health takes a beating at the ballot

While it’s been a bruising year for those who think scientific expertise should guide our approach to public health, last week delivered a particularly jolting blow. “The 2020 election results were a disaster for public health,” writes Washington correspondent Nicholas Florko for STAT, who adds that “more than 67 million Americans already seem to have sided with Trump on public health.” Trump’s pandemic response appears to have played a surprisingly small role for a large part of the electorate. “In preliminary exit polls, just 14% of Republican voters surveyed said the coronavirus pandemic was the deciding factor in who they voted for, despite the fact that the virus has killed more than 233,000 Americans and is spreading unabated across the nation,” writes Florko, who talked to a number of scientists and public health experts for clues on where the field goes from here. “Most insisted there were straightforward, albeit challenging, ways to win over the people who have, until now, disavowed public health measures and who seemed to have voted against a more stringent public health response on Tuesday. But at least one expert said the cause was hopeless.” Read the full piece for early ideas on the future of public health — and the perils of giving up. As Yale’s Gregg Gonsalves told Florko: “If scientists shut up, there’s no countervailing weight to the crackpot theories and charlatanism.”

A White House welcome mat for scientists?

In a dramatic shift from President Trump, President-elect Joe Biden has stressed that scientists would get a full hearing in his administration. “I would listen to the scientists,” he has said. (Trump tellingly saw it as an attack line at a campaign rally: “He’ll listen to the scientists.”) But we got fresh details on which scientists Biden would listen to when Politico’s Alice Miranda Ollstein, Theodoric Meyer and Alex Thompson gave us an early peak last week at the names flagged for Biden’s coronavirus task force. “The task force would include former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler, New York University’s Dr. Celine Gounder, Yale’s Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, former Obama White House aide Dr. Zeke Emanuel and former Chicago Health Commissioner Dr. Julie Morita, who is now an executive vice president at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation,” the outlet reported. Emanuel, an architect of the ACA and the brother of former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, told Politico that the Biden administration envisions “sub-groups of officials who work on testing, vaccine distribution, therapeutics, guidance for schools to open, and coordination with the states, so everyone is singing from the same hymnal.” But a stronger federal response on everything from contact tracing to rebooting the CDC will require coordination with key agencies, and the start of that work could be delayed as long as the election outcome remains contested by Trump.

Face mask déjà vu

We’ve seen this story before: N95 masks are in short supply in health care facilities throughout the country. The Wall Street Journal’s Austen Hufford reports that the latest surge in cases and hospitalizations is fast eroding states’ stockpiles. “Many health-care facilities continue to ration and reuse masks, even as manufacturers have raised production, and some state health departments said they expect supplies to tighten further,” Hufford writes. One Michigan health system reports a supply of only a few weeks, while 90% of hospitals in New Mexico are reusing masks, according to the Journal. This all comes despite massive increases in mask manufacturing: 3M Co. is on track to produce 100 million masks a month in the U.S., quadrupling its pre-pandemic output, while Honeywell is producing another 20 million a month. Other manufacturers have ramped up, too. Yet the nationwide surge in COVID-19 cases mean it’s still not enough. As ProPublica deputy managing editor Charlie Ornstein tweeted, “Stories like these make me sad to no end. And mad. Why are we repeating the past six months?”

The Health Divide