The pandemic persists, despite Trump’s sidestepping

With less than two months to go until Election Day, the presidential contest increasingly reminds me of a 1950s game show; “Who Do You Trust?”

Or, as I feel compelled to add in a salute to my finicky-yet-beloved English teachers, “Whom Do You Trust?”

Nowadays we could recast the show with our current contestants, Republican President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Lately, that contest has turned into a matter of life and death over who can best handle the coronavirus pandemic, a clash that has produced another conflict between the president and members of his own administration over when a safe and reliable vaccine might be available.

At center stage, Trump has departed from the wisdom of Dr. Robert Redfield, his appointed head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Redfield testified before a Senate committee Wednesday that even if the vaccine is announced in November or December, as the president has speculated, it won’t be “fully available” until mid- or late 2021. For one thing, those who are most in need would have to be treated first.

He also offended Trump by saying face masks are “more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine.”

No, no, no, insisted the president, who rarely wears a face mask, in a public rebuke of both statements. Redfield “made a mistake” Trump said, adding that he had called Redfield.

If so, I’m sure that was a riveting phone call. Yet Redfield’s projection about the timetable for vaccine approval and distribution echoed that of other officials, including Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Moncef Slaoui, chief scientist of the president’s controversially named Operation Warp Speed.

But, with his reelection on the line and the coronavirus death count approaching 200,000, this president is not about to let up on his refusal to let mere science get in the way of a favorable campaign narrative.

For us Americans living with that narrative, face masks have become more than a public health measure. For many — too many, in my view — they have become a political statement.

Videos stream across social networks of men and women who refuse to put on a face covering in food stores and other public places, throwing things in some cases and screaming about their “constitutional rights” and how “I woke up in a free country,” as if the Constitution guaranteed your right to be a superspreader of the COVID-19 virus.

Trump-appointed Attorney General William Barr only added to the confusion in a Constitution Day appearance at Hillsdale College on Wednesday by comparing the pandemic lockdown to slavery. I wonder how he feels about “no smoking” signs.

But back to the vaccine question, Biden stepped up to offer his side of the “Whom Do You Trust” narrative by insisting simply that, if a vaccine is announced, we should trust the scientists, not the politicians.

And Trump volleyed back in a typically Trumpian way. He accused his Democratic opponent of being the political and cynical anti-science, anti-vaxxer in the argument.

We have seen this “You’re another” countercharge before, most memorably when Hillary Clinton described him as “Putin’s puppet.”

Lightning quick, he responded reflexively, “No, you’re the puppet!” making the event sound like a tongue-twister contest.

But this time, the pandemic brings an issue that hits Americans literally where they live. Trump has tried to shift the conversation to “law and order” issues, conjuring up images of suburbs supposedly under siege by urban marauders.

But the death toll continues to rise, and the pandemic keeps coming back — along with the president’s remarkably clumsy attempts to get ahead of it. Instead, he just seems to dance around the subject, even attempting this week to make it a “blue state” problem, even as the states with the highest positive rate, according to a New York Times database, tended to be states that Trump won in 2016.

Whom do you trust? As the clock ticks away to Election Day, fellow voters, consider that question as if our lives depend on it. They might.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)