The Health 202: Joe Biden is using the pandemic to court senior voters

Trump won among seniors by eight points in 2016 and had been counting on them to keep him in the White House next year. That is, until a pandemic hit, killing more than 100,000 people over age 65 in just a few months. 

It’s not hard to see why. Seniors account for roughly 80 percent of all U.S. deaths from covid-19. Those in nursing facilities were particularly vulnerable to quickly spreading infections as centers ran short on personal protective equipment and struggled to get residents tested quickly.

The Trump administration has since vowed to do a better job protecting nursing homes and has started collecting more comprehensive data on how the virus is affecting seniors. 

His campaign is running ads playing into the fears and vulnerabilities of seniors and their families. Yesterday it announced a $14 million television and digital ad buy highlighting the pandemic’s impact on older Americans, including how many seniors had to die alone, separated from family and friends by strict quarantine rules.

In this ad, a Wisconsin woman named Jessica shares her thoughts about losing her grandmother to covid-19:

“There was a lack of leadership, a lack of responsibility and a lack of resources,” she says. “I felt like our elderly have not been a priority for this administration, that they don’t matter, and I felt like my grandmother didn’t matter.”

Similar messaging in a digital ad:

It’s the first time Biden has expressly targeted Trump for the impact of his coronavirus response on seniors, but expect the theme to recur through the rest of the campaign season.

“It’s a powerful message and it really drives home the impact of Trump’s mismanagement of this,” Biden spokesman Michael Gwin told me.

It’s been more than two decades since a Democratic presidential candidate won among the country’s seniors. Yet surveys show the elderly are largely distrusting of Trump when it comes to the coronavirus.

In a Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted in mid-July, 52 percent of people over age 65 said they trust Biden more in handling the pandemic, while 39 percent sided with Trump. When asked whether they trust what Trump says about the pandemic, 61 percent indicated they don’t trust the president, while 36 percent said they do.

National polls have found Trump is trailing Biden by five points on average, my colleague Jenna Johnson wrote earlier this month.

“In Florida, where more than 20 percent of voters in 2016 were over the age of 65, Trump won the senior vote by a 17-point margin,” she wrote. “A Quinnipiac poll in late April found 52 percent of Florida seniors supporting Biden to 42 percent for Trump, while a Fox News poll around the same time found Biden narrowly ahead. Democratic strategists say if Biden can win over roughly 10 percent of seniors who picked Trump in 2016, he could steal the state.”

FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver notes Trump’s approval ratings are suffering:

The former vice president leads Trump 55 percent to 40 percent among registered voters, Dan Balz and Scott Clement reported. Biden’s lead was just two points in March, as the pandemic began to spread, and 10 points in May. Biden has an 11-point lead among those who say they’re certain to vote.

And because seniors comprise a large sector of the nation’s voting demographic, even small shifts among this age group can have big effects in swing states. A number of states Trump won in 2016 are increasingly up for grabs.

The vaccines — one by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and another from biotechnology company Moderna in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health — will each be tested in 30,000-person trials, Carolyn Y. Johnson reports.

“We are participating today in the launching of a truly historic event in the history of vaccinology,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said at a news conference. 

Leading public health expert Anthony S. Fauci said the United States has never moved this fast on vaccine development and predicted researchers could know by November or December if the Moderna candidate is effective. Pfizer officials expect to seek regulatory authorization or approval by October. 

“Both vaccines require two doses, spaced several weeks apart. Then researchers will have to wait to see whether people get infected or sick from the novel coronavirus,” Carolyn adds. “What they hope to witness is a clear benefit: fewer infections in people who received the vaccine, or less severe episodes of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. There are many unknowns about how long it could take to see a clear signal of success or failure — including how fast the trials will recruit participants and how long it takes for enough people to become infected to observe whether there is an effect.” 

Other candidates facilitated by the federal government’s effort to hasten the development of a vaccine could follow. 

The effort, dubbed Operation Warp Speed, includes an experimental vaccine from the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, one from Johnson & Johnson, and another candidate from the biotechnology company Novavax.

“To officials in these adjacent places, and to many experts, the tensions illustrate problems inherent with a highly fragmented national response to a virus that knows no boundaries,” Karin Brulliard and Rachel Weiner report.

Public health officials in Las Cruces, N.M., for example, are wary of travel to El Paso, Tex., which is about 45 miles away. New Mexico Health Department spokesman David Morgan told The Post that as pandemic fatigue settles in, it becomes harder to convince people not to travel between the states.

“We ask, ‘Did you travel recently?’ They’ll say, ‘No, but I went to El Paso to have my hair cut.’ Well, that’s travel and that counts,” Morgan said. “ … If they can’t get the service they want in one state, it’s just natural that they seek it in the state where they can. But the consequences are greater than a lot of people appreciate.”

“Leaders in many places have adopted strategies aimed at thwarting the virus’s roving, borderless nature,” Karin and Rachel report. “ … As reopening began this spring, blocs of states in the West, Midwest and Northeast banded together to coordinate plans. In an announcement about its formation, the five-state Western States Pact — which was joined by Oregon but not Idaho — noted the ‘virus has preyed upon our interconnectedness’ and ‘doesn’t follow state or national boundaries.’ States in the South, where cases are surging, discussed forming a compact, but it never materialized.”

That number could climb to 6,000 within weeks, according to a new report from the Labor Department’s inspector general. 

The report “assessed coronavirus-related trends in workers’ compensation programs including the Federal Employees’ Compensation Act, which covers the 2.1 million employees of executive branch departments and agencies plus the 630,000 employees of the semi-independent U.S. Postal Service,” Eric Yoder writes. “ … The report said that soon after the pandemic was declared in March, the FECA program took several steps to prepare for coronavirus-related claims, including to designate occupations such as law enforcement, first responders, and front-line medical and public health personnel as at the highest risk of contracting the virus while at work.” 

Employees at the departments of Homeland Security, Justice and Veterans Affairs have a high concentration of jobs determined to have the highest risk of exposure. They made up most of the claims filed through July 23. 

Eric adds: “Of those, 1,623 had been granted, fewer than seven denied, 25 withdrawn and the rest were waiting to be adjudicated — including all of the death claims — according to data provided by the Labor Department.” 

“Trump’s shortcomings have perplexed even some of his most loyal allies, who increasingly have wondered why the president has not at least pantomimed a sense of command over the crisis or conveyed compassion for the millions of Americans hurt by it,” Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker report. 

People close to the president told them that “the president’s inability to wholly address the crisis is due to his almost pathological unwillingness to admit error; a positive feedback loop of overly rosy assessments and data from advisers and Fox News; and a penchant for magical thinking that prevented him from fully engaging with the pandemic.” 

As coronavirus cases have surged in recent weeks, the White House has sought to adjust the approach. Ashley and Phil write: “In the past couple of weeks, senior advisers began presenting Trump with maps and data showing spikes in coronavirus cases among ‘our people’ in Republican states.”

“They also shared projections predicting that virus surges could soon hit politically important states in the Midwest — including Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin…This new approach seemed to resonate, as he hewed closely to pre-scripted remarks in a trio of coronavirus briefings last week.” 

“This could have been stopped. It could have been stopped quickly and easily. But for some reason, it wasn’t, and we’ll figure out what that reason was,” Trump said during a briefing late last week, remarks that seemed to acknowledge his quandary while trying to point fingers elsewhere. 

In the interview, Fauci said he does not have a “good answer” and “cannot explain” the discrepancy between the U.S. and other countries, according to ABC. He said part of the problem stems from the fact that “many of the things that we needed were not produced in the United States.”

“We keep hearing when we go to these task force meetings that these [issues] are being corrected,” Fauci said. “But yet when you go into the trenches, you still hear about that.”

Fauci was also asked about Trump’s statements seeming to undermine him and his work:

Karen Travers, ABC News White House correspondent:

He’s the highest-ranking Trump administration official known to have tested positive, Anne Gearan and John Wagner report. “Trump said Monday that he had not seen O’Brien recently, but the White House did not respond to questions about their interactions, whether other White House employees might have been exposed or the timing of O’Brien’s illness,” they write. 

O’Brien told friends he believes he became infected following a family gathering about a week ago, said one person familiar with the case. “White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told reporters at the White House on Monday that he believes that O’Brien’s daughter also had contracted the virus and that O’Brien could have been infected by her,” Anne and John add. 

Here are a few more stories to catch up on this morning: 

• Senate Republicans on Monday unveiled an approximately $1 trillion “Heals Act” stimulus package that is set to include more than $100 billion for America’s schools, a liability shield to protect businesses from lawsuits and another round of stimulus checks, among other measures, Jeff Stein, Laura Meckler and Tony Romm report.
• The bill also includes more funding for public health agencies: $16 billion for coronavirus testing, $16 billion for the National Institutes of Health and $3 billion for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
• The Senate GOP package “sets up new battles over health care funding as the coronavirus continues to overwhelm the country,” Politico reports. “From a smaller hospital bailout to stiffing strained Medicaid programs, the GOP’s opening bid revealed stark differences with the plan passed by House Democrats this spring. As Congress tries to resolve thorny issues like unemployment aid and liability protections, health care funding could become another sticking point.”

• Some cities are facing a worsening shortage of health-care workers. “While many hospitals have devised ways to stretch material resources — converting surgery wards into specialized covid units and recycling masks and gowns — it is far more difficult to stretch the human workers needed to make the system function,” Frances Stead Sellers and Abigail Hauslohner report.

• A judge in Florida upheld a county ordinance to require masks in public places and rejected the claim from challengers that the mandate violates rights to privacy and personal autonomy, the Associated Press’s Terry Spencer reports.

• Top pharmaceutical executives were supposed to meet with the president on Tuesday, but the discussion was canceled “because the major drug lobbies, reeling from Friday’s cluster of executive orders on the topic, refused to send any members,” Politico’s Sarah Owermohle reports. “Drugmakers and Trump were slated to discuss an executive order, signed Friday but not yet released, that would order health officials to release a plan linking Medicare payments for certain medicines to lower costs paid abroad. The provision, known as a most-favored-nations rule, has been lambasted by the drug industry and some patient groups that say it would curb innovation and reduce drug access.”

And check out this New York Times story that explains how Trump, upset by Fauci’s throwing out of the first pitch for Washington’s baseball team, decided – unbeknownst to pretty much anyone – he would do so for the Yankees. It never happened.