Viewing This Election Through a Health-Care Lens

—guest post by Michael Stewart, Local 328 vice president—

Americans will be going to the polls this election during an uncontrolled and, in some states, surging, pandemic. Health-care workers’ lives have been especially impacted by COVID-19. Many of us work directly with patients to comfort and help heal them under conditions that are   often difficult and dangerous. Some of us support frontline workers in ways that are vital to OHSU’s ability to continue to save lives. We have been sickened and have lost family members, coworkers and friends — all while never losing focus of our mission. It is through this lens that we must view the 2020 presidential election.

President Trump’s response to the pandemic has been one of political expediency and callous neglect. He saw the pandemic not as a health-care crisis that is endangering the lives of the citizens of the country he leads, but first as something that could be ignored and now as a political crisis that is endangering his reelection. Trump has lied to the public about nearly every aspect of this pandemic from day one — about the seriousness of the disease, about testing, about PPE, about treatments. He turned the simple act of wearing a face mask into a political statement and pushed hydroxychloroquine as a cure long after its efficacy had been debunked, all while minimizing the rising infection rates and death toll.

The president has recklessly continued to hold campaign rallies, packing thousands of mostly maskless supporters together with little if any social distancing, likely costing at least one life and putting entire communities at risk. The refusal of his administration and his supporters to abide by the simplest of public-health guidelines even resulted in a “super-spreader” event that infected people at the highest levels of our government, including the president himself. Even his own illness hasn’t tempered his behavior, and he continues to downplay the lethality of the disease, which has killed more than 218,000 Americans, and the long-term effects of COVID-19 infection on those who survive.

If the president refuses to protect his administration and his most fervent supporters —even his own family — why would we expect him to take any action to protect the rest of us? We cannot ignore the damage wrought upon our country due to Trump’s hostility to science, disdain for public-health experts and denial of the seriousness of this pandemic. As healers, support staff, researchers and people who care about science and health, it is our duty to ourselves, our coworkers and our community to hold him accountable by voting him out of office. Vote as if your life depends on it, because it just might.