New England Journal of Medicine Blasts Trump Admin Covid Failures: Our Current Political Leaders Are ‘Dangerously Incompetent’

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The New England Journal of Medicine has posted a stunning and unprecedented editorial blasting the failures of President Donald Trump’s administration on the coronavirus and saying Americans should vote them out in November.

The editors write that the U.S. has failed a crucial test of leadership during the pandemic, saying, “The magnitude of this failure is astonishing”:

Why has the United States handled this pandemic so badly? We have failed at almost every step. We had ample warning, but when the disease first arrived, we were incapable of testing effectively and couldn’t provide even the most basic personal protective equipment to health care workers and the general public. And we continue to be way behind the curve in testing. While the absolute numbers of tests have increased substantially, the more useful metric is the number of tests performed per infected person, a rate that puts us far down the international list, below such places as Kazakhstan, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia, countries that cannot boast the biomedical infrastructure or the manufacturing capacity that we have. Moreover, a lack of emphasis on developing capacity has meant that U.S. test results are often long delayed, rendering the results useless for disease control.

They also fault inconsistent and too-late lockdown measures “after the disease had spread substantially in many communities,” and the fact that the loosening of restrictions had been done “long before adequate disease control had been achieved.”

The editorial lambastes U.S. leadership over the politicization of masks and for politicizing the development of a vaccine.

They write that it’s impossible to calculate how many lives could have been saved if not for “weak and inappropriate government policies,” but conclude that “anyone else who recklessly squandered lives and money in this way would be suffering legal consequences.”

There is no explicit endorsement of Joe Biden, but there’s little doubt their conclusion is that the current administration should be held to account on election day.

“When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs,” the editorial concludes.

Editor-in-chief Eric Rubin spoke to CNN — which first reported on the editorial — and explained the rare move saying, “We’re not a political journal and I don’t think that we want to be a political journal — but the issue here is around fact, not around opinion. There have been many mistakes made that were not only foolish but reckless and I think we want people to realize that there are truths here, not just opinions.”

You can read the full editorial here.

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!