So Help Me God, page 45
From the outset I told all the governors, regardless of their party or whether they had criticized our administration, that they could call me day or night, and many of them did throughout the year. I gave them all my longtime assistant Zach Bauer’s cell phone number and told them if they had a need or a problem, they could call him virtually twenty-four hours a day to get a message to me. I’m not sure how jazzed Zach was about that. He had joined my team when I was a member of Congress, right after he graduated from college, and followed me to Indiana when I became governor. He became almost a member of our family and worked longer hours and harder than almost anyone else who ever served at my side. And he had a servant’s heart, always willing to take on any task or follow up on any detail, no matter how small. Later in the year, when I was traveling the country, we learned that he was now something of a rock star. When we were on the road, governors regularly asked if they could meet Zach, who had been a helpful voice on the phone and an indispensable link between the state and federal responses. There’s only one Zach Bauer.
All of us on the task force were there to make the governors successful. Our federal response to covid was going to be only as good as our state-level response. That was certainty true in the early days of the pandemic. Birx was following trends in the states and was in contact with the governors away from our regular calls. She kept a catalogue of new ideas governors were trying. Before our weekly conference call with the nation’s governors, she would ask me to let this or that governor speak so they could share what they were working on so their colleagues might adapt it for their own state. We were not just communicating data but encouraging governors to communicate with one another. As the Bible says, “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” When our press briefings waned, I encouraged Birx and Redfield to visit the states and meet with governors and health officials. I believed that our role was to give our best counsel but respect the state leaders—which we did without fail. Though some Republican governors came under fire for reopening their states, we made it clear that the decision was theirs to make and supported them.
As May approached, infection rates began to decline, and the White House worked with states to carefully reopen the country. We launched Guidelines for Opening Up America Again, acknowledging that although the virus wasn’t vanishing, our health care system was now in a much better place to give the American people the care that we would want for any family member. It was a recognition that prolonging lockdowns carried its own damaging consequences to the mental health of Americans and their livelihoods. On Arbor Day in late April, Karen and I joined President Trump and Melania for a ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House. After the president and I made formal remarks about conservation and our progress in reopening the country, the president unexpectedly waved Karen to the podium. With no notes, she took the opportunity to talk about her work on mental health—a very real issue in the covid pandemic. She sent people to the PREVENTS program page, a suicide prevention initiative on Facebook that had been refocused on mental health issues, and ended with the words “We don’t want anyone to feel like there isn’t help, because it’s okay to say ‘I’m not okay.’ ” President Trump returned to the podium and said simply, “Wow.” So proud.
By May, as Americans were moving forward with their lives, the media never let up, stringing daily infection and death counts across news shows at a time when cases in more than half of the states were dropping, and case rates were also in decline, numbering twenty thousand a day, down from thirty thousand in April. And the country was in a much better place in terms of fortifying its health care system than it had been at the height of the pandemic. I articulated that in an editorial printed in the Wall Street Journal on June 16, 2020.
I wanted the American people to know that we were all making real progress in mitigation and care, despite the incessant alarmism of the national media. I wasn’t claiming that we had defeated the virus. Dr. Fauci had told me that, like the swine flu, it was possible that covid was seasonal and there would be a natural abatement during the summer. But as it turned out, people began to move indoors in the heat, and there was a summer surge in the South. Nevertheless, as I stressed in the Journal, because of the whole-of-America approach and our progress in increasing testing capacity, supplies of personal protective equipment, and ventilators, we were in a much stronger position to fight covid. We had, I wrote, “created a solid foundation for whatever challenges we may face in the future.” Unfortunately, the paper placed a somewhat misleading headline on the essay, titling it “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave,’ ” and medical experts and media outlets (who thought they were medical experts) called the op-ed “reckless anti-science optimism.” I am an optimist, but they apparently never got past the headline.
As the country opened back up, the task force’s work went on, but the press conferences, having become increasingly adversarial, wound down following some unfiltered musings by the president.
On April 23, our task force was given a briefing by William Bryan, the undersecretary for science and technology at the Department of Homeland Security. He had come to present information on the benefits of sunlight and disinfectant against the virus with the intention that he would present his findings at our press conference to encourage people to enjoy the outdoors and be confident that surfaces could be sanitized and safe.
After the task force meeting, we went to the Oval Office for a pre-brief before the press conference and introduced Bryan to the president, who was encouraged by his findings. Later, at the press conference, Bryan informed the public that the coronavirus weakens more quickly when exposed to sunlight, heat, and humidity, suggesting, as Dr. Fauci had told me, that the virus might be less contagious in warm weather. Things went downhill from there.
President Trump had a habit of thinking out loud in meetings, throwing out ideas just to get a reaction. I had seen him do it on countless occasions in the Oval Office. I always thought it was part of his process of reaching a decision. This time it got the better of him.
When the president took to the podium, he spoke with enthusiasm about Undersecretary Bryan’s findings and mused about possible treatments, then asked if hitting “the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light” could be beneficial. He then brought up disinfectants, asking, “I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?” Despite the fact that the president went on to say, “It wouldn’t be through injections.… Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t work,” the damage was done.
The hysterics in the media accusing the president of telling people to ingest bleach were deafening. Later that year, when Joe Biden accused the president of saying, “Maybe if you drank bleach you may be okay,” even the liberal fact-checkers at PolitiFact wrote, “No, Trump didn’t tell Americans infected with the coronavirus to drink bleach.” Point of fact, the president was not telling people to ingest bleach. The reality was the president made an unforced error and his political opponents, including those in the media, never let it go.
* * *
In late April, Mark Meadows, who had become the White House chief of staff at the end of March, pushed for the president to end the task force briefings. That, I thought, was regrettable. My belief was that we should continue to communicate about the virus while the country reopened. I spoke to the president about it during the summer from time to time, but it was clear that Meadows had prevailed, and it was, after all, the president’s decision.
The greatest challenge remained creating a vaccine. In early March, we had assembled a meeting in the Cabinet Room at the White House with leaders from the pharmaceutical industry. At the meeting, President Trump asked about the possibility of creating a vaccine. That would take five to seven years at least, one of them explained. “Not good enough,” Trump shot back. It’s true that the development, creation, approval, and mass production of a new medicine often take up to a decade. The president wanted us—the federal government, together with private research and drug companies—to get it done in less than a year. It was an unprecedented task, but no one blinked. The FDA, under the capable leadership of Dr. Stephen Hahn, a thoughtful and brilliant physician who had served as the chief medical officer at the University of Texas, allowed drugmakers regulatory flexibility without abandoning the agency’s regulatory oversight. Any treatments for covid had to be safe and effective as well as delivered with record-breaking speed. Clinical trials, which prove a new medicine’s viability, were accelerated and greatly expanded. Dr. Hahn, with his experience as both an administrator and a scientist, was an invaluable partner in achieving a medical miracle by year’s end.
An already existing antiviral drug named remdesivir showed early promise in trials in helping covid patients recover. The FDA authorized its emergency use, and the task force increased the provision of its limited supplies of the drug to areas and communities most impacted by the virus. To combat the most severe symptoms of covid, the government also approved the emergency use of other drugs, including steroids, monoclonal antibodies, and convalescent plasma treatment. If a drug was safe and showed promise in treating the virus, we wanted to get it to doctors. In part because of our acceleration of those tools, measured against the peak in March and April, by the end of the year, the covid mortality rates declined by 70 percent among Americans age seventy and older and by 85 to 90 percent among Americans below seventy.
When it came to a vaccine, though, the United States had a running start: China had released the genetic sequence of covid-19 in January. Days later, the federal government was working with Moderna, a Massachusetts-based biotech company, on a vaccine. By March, the first clinical trial utilizing messenger RNA vaccines that teach our cells how to make a protein that will trigger an immune response was under way. That was incredible progress. But even if the vaccine proved effective, we would need to produce an incredible amount of it to make sure every American who wanted it could get it—all 330 million of them.
Drugmakers don’t begin production while they are still in the testing stage for obvious reasons: the cost and risk of mass-producing a drug that is not yet approved make zero financial sense. But to meet the president’s timeline, we needed to plan ahead. In March, the Department of Health and Human Services stepped in and provided the financial assistance—more than $400 million—to the drugmakers working on vaccines—not just Moderna but also Johnson & Johnson—to begin production while the trials were under way. That was the beginning of Operation Warp Speed. The outcome of the trials was far from certain. The rate of failure among new drug candidates is high. Knowing that, the government worked with a number of companies developing potential vaccines, and by May there were more than a hundred candidates. Fourteen promising vaccines emerged from those. By the fall the number was reduced to four. By the end of 2020, two, produced by Moderna and Pfizer, were approved. They were both nearly 95 percent effective against contracting covid. Thanks to Operation Warp Speed, millions of doses were already manufactured and ready to be distributed. To have two safe and effective vaccines available to the American people within nine months of the start of a pandemic was a medical miracle. While those research companies are to be commended, so, too, are the leaders of Operation Warp Speed, Moncef Slaoui and HHS assistant secretary Paul Mango, who shepherded the vaccines through the process in record time, and General Gus Perna, who worked with states and American companies such as FedEx to distribute the vaccine across the country before the year was out. The day we left office in 2021, we were vaccinating a million Americans a day. Only in America.
We did not end the covid pandemic, but we battled against it with everything our nation had. By the end of 2020, more than four hundred thousand Americans had lost their lives to the pandemic. Not a day went by when I wasn’t thinking of the families who had lost loved ones, that my heart wasn’t breaking over people who had not been able to say goodbye to loved ones because of hospital quarantine rules. At our press briefings, I always expressed my sympathies to those who had lost loved ones, and I prayed often for people who were suffering from loss. But I believe the work we did all across America made a difference: it bought us time, it gave us weapons, it saved lives. But the American people were the real heroes—people such as Leilani Jordan.
On Memorial Day, we visited Arlington National Cemetery with the president as he laid a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Leaving the cemetery, I spotted a family visiting a fresh grave. Karen and I told our motorcade to pull over. When we approached them, we learned it was the grave of a young woman named Leilani Jordan. Part of a military family, she had been afforded a spot in Arlington among our veterans. Rightly so. Leilani, who had had cerebral palsy, had been a bagger at a Giant Food store in Largo, Maryland. Her family told Karen and me how after the virus hit, she had refused to stay home. Some of her coworkers had not been going to work, and she said she had to go. Her customers, many of them elderly, needed her. She wasn’t going to let them down. While doing her job, she was infected with covid and died shortly after in her mother’s arms.
I left Arlington, where so many heroes rest, humbled and full of gratitude: to Leilani and countless others all across this nation who had selflessly stepped forward in so many different ways—from rushing to treat patients without even the help of medicines to being there for neighbors cut off from family to innovating in record time to just showing up at work.
The covid pandemic was the worst health crisis to strike the United States in a century. Because of the dedication of countless federal officials, the agility and generosity of our businesses, and the selflessness of doctors, nurses, first responders, truck drivers, grocers, and everyday Americans who looked after one another, we got through the worst of it. For our part, I will always be proud of what the American people accomplished in those early days of the pandemic. We reinvented testing from a standing start, produced and distributed billions of pieces of personal protective equipment, and manufactured tens of thousands of ventilators. In nine short months we developed three safe and effective vaccines; when we left office in January 2021, we were vaccinating a million Americans a day. Together, we saved millions of lives in the greatest national mobilization since World War II. It took all of us, the whole of government, the whole of America. But we did it.
Only in America.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN Overcome Evil by Doing Good
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
—Romans 12:21
When I arrived back at the vice president’s residence on the evening of May 25, Karen was waiting with a question: “Have you seen the video?” I hadn’t, and when I did, I was horrified. That morning in Minneapolis, George Floyd, a Black man, had been killed by a White police officer. In the middle of an arrest, the officer had pinned Floyd down, pressing his knee to Floyd’s neck for nine minutes. And it had all been captured on video. Within hours, the entire shocked country saw Floyd die, crying for his mother, on a Minneapolis street.
I have supported the police for my entire career, and that will never change. The men and women who wear the badge consider our lives more important than their own every day, and they deserve our gratitude and respect. Nobody hates bad cops more than good cops do. There was no excuse on Earth for what happened to Floyd. The spectacle of a White police officer killing a Black man awakened memories of the racism and inequality in America’s painful past.
The following day, Minneapolis residents took to the streets in protest over Floyd’s death. The protests spread across the country over the following days as America’s justice system worked: The police officer was fired and charged with third-degree murder. The other officers who had been on the scene and done nothing while Floyd was killed were dismissed as well.
But as the days passed, the peaceful protests deteriorated into broken windows, gutted and smoldering businesses, and cities turned into war zones. Though many of the Americans who took to the streets to protest during the summer of 2020 did so peacefully, others hijacked their cause as an excuse for violence and looting.
Some of it was sheer opportunism, a chance to ransack a Target, and some of it was fueled by radical politics, the violence eventually spreading to the toppling and vandalization of monuments and statues of historical figures deemed insufficiently enlightened, including statues of Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York, and Abraham Lincoln in San Francisco.
The right to peaceable assembly is enshrined in the Constitution, but there is no justification for rioting and looting in the name of any political cause. And it does nothing but diminish and discredit that cause. The burning of buildings and the destruction of entire neighborhoods, owned by and lived in by people who had had nothing to do with Floyd’s death, was not justice.
As rioting spread across the country in the summer of 2020, the government had the obligation to restore order and protect citizens and also to listen to the voices of the disaffected with open hearts. We could do both.
During the summer, elected leaders, public figures, and citizens began to take a knee in the name of racial justice. They said, “Black lives matter” rather than “all lives matter.” Some of it was well meaning and charged by a real sense of outrage and desire for change. Much of it, however, was just political theater: Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and fellow Democrats not only taking a knee in the Capitol but doing so while wearing kente stoles, ceremonial garments from the African nation of Ghana, was a symbolic gesture. I don’t believe they furthered the cause of justice or equality.
