Trump’s Surgeon General Says We Could Have Better Separated Medicine from Politics

Former Surgeon General Jerome Adams said on Monday that the Trump administration could have done a better job separating medicine from politics.

The emergence of Covid-19 of course was immediately politicized before the first case was ever reported in the U.S. two years ago.

Former President Donald Trump’s January 2020 travel ban from parts of China was criticized by Democrats, by critics such as then-candidate Joe Biden, who called it xenophobic.

By the spring of that year, many on the right were criticizing the left for wasting what was viewed as valuable time by impeaching Trump.

The argument was that the time should have been spent preparing for what no one knew would become a historic pandemic.

Meanwhile, Trump was criticized heavily for going before the media numerous times and stating that Covid-19 would simply go away.

The way the country responded to the pandemic — with partisan fighting — bothered Adams, he told C-SPAN’s Bill Scanlan on Monday.

On Washington Journal, the former surgeon general told the host that the 2020 election showed how fractured both sides of the aisle were on the issue of the pandemic.

Adams criticized Democrats in 2020 for running on a message that everyone was “going to die.”

“That was literally the framing, you are all going to die if you don’t elect us,” Adams said. “And you had another party who was running on the idea that, hey, there is nothing to see hear this is all going to go away.” He added:

The truth is neither one of those were correct. The answer was somewhere in between. And that made it challenging for me to have a conversation. If I talk about masks, people assume you are either pro-Trump or anti-Biden. if I talk about vaccines, people say you are only saying that because you want Trump to get elected.

Adams also criticized Vice President Kamala Harris for comments she made before the 2020 election in which she cast doubt on the safety of a vaccine developed under Trump.

Adams said, “I mean, it really frustrated me when I heard the current VP go out there and say I would not trust a vaccine under this administration, but then the second they got elected it was, hey you need to trust the vaccine.”

He said that the message was frustrating, but he also conceded that messaging from the previous administration, which he was part of, could have been more effective.

Adams told C-SPAN, “I think we — I could have, should have, done a better job of trying to separate out the medicine, the science from the politics, even as hard as it was.”

Watch above, via C-SPAN.