COVID's side effects are still spreading. Why do Trump, Biden run from how they handled it?

In the run-up to the presidential election, Misters Biden and Trump are disturbingly reticent about America’s once-in-100-year plague — and averse, even, to criticize each other’s performance.     

This is not a case of left-right harmony. Rather, the candidates fear an issue that might expose flaws in—or voter disagreement with — their COVID-19 response.    

In a matchup unique in history, the receding pandemic straddled two presidencies, giving each leader a singular moment to show presidential mettle. But it also killed 1.1 million Americans (the highest rate among wealthy countries); introduced a vaccine that worked poorly and harmed some, and left a legacy of sickness, suicide, overdose and government distrust.   

If the presumptive candidates believe they have earned another chance to govern, they should answer for what they did, for better or worse, to tame the SARS-CoV-2 virus. There must be an accounting, including hard questions in the first debate on June 27. 

Five months before America’s first post-COVID-19 presidential election, pollsters, pundits, articles on “key issues” and the candidates themselves seem largely to have forgotten the last four years.    

A national poll asked voters which candidate they trusted most on democracy, crime, U.S. standing, and immigration, but did not bring up the event that grade schoolers will recall into their 80s. If they get there.   

The economy, abortion, Israel and healthcare are surely important. But so is a pandemic. Ask the families of the million-plus.   

190,000 ‘excess’ deaths

The tentacles of COVID-19 are insidious and spreading. The number of Americans with a disability is up by 3.4 million, or 11%, from before the pandemic. Cancer is surging in young adults. And more people are still dying than normal and predictable. 

In 2023, 190,742 more Americans died than in 2019, the year before the virus changed everything. Those 5.3% extra deaths are more than America’s combined military losses since Korea.  

While the elderly perished first in 2020, deaths among 25-to-44-year-olds are surging now, rising 21% from 2019 to 2023, our analysis of CDC data shows.  

Think of these numbers when young adults succumb to unexplained causes, or when the FDA commissioner tweets that declining longevity in America, a pre-pandemic trend, is “catastrophic.” U.S. lifespans—lower than 30 other countries — are not only going down in 70-somethings.  

Given their history with this contagion, both candidates must answer for what the British Medical Journalcalled America’s “devastating pandemic outcomes.”    

“Americans killed by covid-19 represent 16% of global deaths in a nation with 4% of the world’s population,” BMJ said. Behind that dismal outcome is a broken public health system and an unhealthy, unequal population.  

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COVID vaccines promoted, not treatment 

America’s leaders — former President Donald Trump first, then President Joe Biden — chose to vaccinate the nation’s way out of COVID-19, to the point of mandating shots for 100 million workers and adopting them for infants, for whom they are still not formally licensed.   

Facilitating emergency use of an unapproved vaccine required, under law, that there be no “adequate” alternative. There was another option, but doctors were all-but banned from treating COVID-19 with cheap, approved drugs. 

The Biden FDA led a crusade against one drug in particular, branding ivermectin — its 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine notwithstanding—as a “dangerous and even lethal” drug meant for horses and cows. It was not true.   

In March, the FDA removed its misleading posts after a federal judge said it had no authority to give medical advice on a legal drug that, incidentally, “also comes in a human version.”  

Unfortunately, FDA’s advice was hyped by media and heeded by medicine. A 52-year-old woman died after a hospital cut off her court-ordered ivermectin three times, even as she improved. (Dr. Kory is an expert witness in her family’s wrongful death lawsuit.) Many could have been saved with many proven early treatments. 

In recent weeks, the pandemic discussion has shifted. A New York Times article told of “thousands” of vaccine-harmed people. A former FDA official, Janet Woodcock, admitted these were “life-changing” injuries that “should be taken seriously.” A former CDC director, Robert Redfield, told an interviewer, “Those of us that tried to suggest there may be significant side effects…we kind of got cancelled.”    

Such assertions have unilaterally been labeled pandemic “conspiracy theories”. The vaccine skepticism of Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is pointedly reported.  

But less well-known is a study of 99 million COVID-19-vaccinated patients, published in April in Vaccine, that found significant neurological, cardiovascular and hematologic side effects. In early June, another study in BMJ Public Health found ongoing excess deaths in 43 countries, the U.S. included, despite “containment measures and COVID-19 vaccines.” 

“This raises serious concerns,” the article concluded. 

Ask the candidates: Do they share that concern? 

Dr. Pierre Kory, M.D., a pulmonologist and critical care specialist, is a founder and president emeritus of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, based in Washington. Mary Beth Pfeiffer is an investigative reporter and author. Thanks to expert actuary Mary Pat Campbell, FSA, who accessed and analyzed CDC mortality data.