Washington Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen’s commentary in the Sept. 12 News Tribune (“Politics playing no role in the timing of a vaccine”) demands a response. Thiessen excoriated Sen. Kamala Harris for her remarks questioning the safety of a potential coronavirus vaccine approved before the election. He wrote, “For Harris to undermine public confidence in a vaccine for political gain is shameful.”
Thiessen apparently lives in a world without a past and a world where the president hasn’t lied 20,000 times in almost four years. In particular, in the past seven months, Trump has repeatedly — and, as we now know, knowingly — pushed misinformation about the coronavirus, fake cures, and quack theories. Thiessen seems to live in a place where the president hasn’t politicized so very many federal agencies and where the president’s political appointees aren’t pressuring career employees and undermining scientific information for political purposes, as Politico reported about on Sept. 11.
In short, Thiessen must live in a world where President Donald Trump hasn’t spent the entirety of the past nearly four years destroying any credibility his government might have and proving time and again that he cares far more about his re-election than the lives of the American people.
Sadly — catastrophically — Sen. Harris and the rest of the American people, including me, do not live in Thiessen’s world. We live in the real world where Trump has committed every trust-busting act described above. Theissen may wish to pretend the past didn’t happen, but we cannot.
If anyone has undermined public confidence in a pre-election vaccine “for political purposes,” it is Trump. Full stop. Thiessen was right about only one thing, that confidence in our public health institutions has been so eroded is indeed shameful — as well as irresponsible and potentially deadly.
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Michael P. Grossman
Duluth
