Since mid-March, President Trump has adjusted his tone about the threat of the coronavirus — but only so much. Trump has continued to optimistically suggest that the virus might disappear sooner than experts say it could, and has played down the potential death toll and the severity of the situation, all in the service of praising the federal (and his own) response.
On Tuesday, his approach seemed to bleed over in a way that prompted one of the country’s top hospitals to rebuke the White House.
Vice President Pence visited the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota on Tuesday. But conspicuously absent from his visit was a mask. While pictures and video show plenty of people around Pence all using masks, he wasn’t wearing one.
This ran counter to the Mayo Clinic’s guidance to the White House, according to a tweet from the hospital after the images and videos were published.
“Mayo Clinic had informed @VP of the masking policy prior to his arrival today,” the clinic’s social media account said. The tweet was soon deleted, but a clinic official confirmed in an email to The Fix that “Mayo shared the masking policy with the VP’s office.”
The White House has previously played down the need for the vice president to wear a mask, saying Pence is frequently tested for the coronavirus and suggesting that the threat from him going without a mask was minimal. Pence, too, cited recent negative tests as his rationale for not wearing a mask Tuesday.
“Since I don’t have the coronavirus, I thought it’d be a good opportunity for me to be here, to be able to speak to these researchers, these incredible health-care personnel, and look them in the eye and say thank you,” Pence told reporters after visiting the clinic.
The recommended face coverings do not prevent eye contact or expressions of thanks, though. And as health officials have noted, having been tested does not prevent the spread of the disease, because people could become infected between tests and the tests might not be completely accurate.
As the New York Times reported last week when Pence previously declined to wear a mask:
Even in Covid-19 patients who are showing symptoms, diagnostic tests may detect the virus only 75 percent of the time, said Dr. Mark Loeb, a microbiologist and infectious disease specialist at McMaster University, and it isn’t clear how sensitive the tests are in asymptomatic cases.“We don’t actually have the estimates for the sensitivity, the ability to rule out false negatives, for asymptomatic testing,” Dr. Loeb said. “So it’s certainly something, but it doesn’t necessarily rule out infection.”At a White House news conference on [April 20], Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator, also emphasized that tests were not always reliable.
What’s more, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that masks are especially necessary in places where the spread of the virus could be particularly problematic.
“CDC recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies), especially in areas of significant community-based transmission,” the agency said in guidance issued April 13.
Pence’s actions are difficult to divorce from Trump’s own stance toward masks. Even after the CDC advised people to wear face coverings in early April, Trump indicated that he didn’t plan to do so and that it was a personal choice for him.
At the first news conference after the guidance was issued, the president seemed to make a point to repeatedly note that wearing a mask was voluntary. “You don’t have to do it,” he said.
He added about his own plans for wearing a mask: “I’m feeling good. I just don’t want to be doing — somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute desk, the great Resolute desk, I think, wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens. I don’t know, somehow I don’t see it for myself. I just don’t. Maybe I’ll change my mind.”
More than three weeks later, his vice president declined to wear one again, even while visiting a medical facility. Health considerations aside, there is certainly something to be said for the leaders of a country setting an example. Trump and his administration have flirted with supporting efforts to flout more-restrictive state measures to confront the coronavirus, and now Trump and Pence are sending a signal that strict precautions might not be necessary for everyone.
Pence has frequently defended Trump, but he’s also known as a rule-abiding conservative who has deftly avoided implicating himself in the president’s most controversial moves. We’ll surely learn more about what happened here in the hours and days ahead. But the photos speak volumes, and regardless of what the Mayo Clinic communicated to the White House, it looks like a questionable decision in light of everything we know.
