Politic?: The Imponderable Dichotomy of an Incorrigible Outlier Administration on COVID

"The USSS [United States Secret Service] is taking all necessary precautions and putting anyone who is considered close contact in quarantine."
"There has been zero impact on the mission. Staffing levels are high enough to manage."
"The Secret Service maintains well-established protocols inclusive of testing, conducting contact tracing related to confirmed and suspected exposure, and immediately isolating of any employee who tests positive for COVID-19."
"This program ensures that every precaution is taken to keep our protectees, employees, families, and the general public, safe and healthy."
United States Secret Service Official

It was unclear how the Secret Service officers contracted the virus. Many had traveled to campaign events in the final weeks of the election, according to people briefed on the matter.

Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Over 130 Secret Services officers assigned to protect the White House and President Trump on his travels have been ordered to isolate or to go into quarantine, either as a result of their having tested positive for the novel coronavirus or that they have had contact with others infected with COVID-19. There has been no official public announcement, but three unauthorized insiders in the Secret Service who are familiar with agency staffing recently divulged details of the situation.

The situation has led to ten percent of the agency's core security team having been sidelined, the spread believed to have been linked in part to a series of campaign rallies held by President Trump in weeks prior to the November 3 election. Although the three insiders spoke freely to some news media in interviewed they spoke on condition of anonymity on a matter whose very nature represents a breach of security. There is irony in the outcome of Secret Service officers assigned to protect a president coming to harm by actions of that president.

The Secret Service's presidential security unit has been struck particularly hard, echoing in part the growing numbers of White House intimates, prominent Trump campaign allies and officials who have fallen like dominoes following campaign events at which many of those attending habitually spurn mask-wearing. Judd Deere, speaking for the White House, emphasized that the administration takes "every case seriously" referring questions to agency officials who themselves declined comment, as they would.

President Trump held to a tough, efficient and gruelling campaign schedule that led to five campaign stops each on the last two days of the campaign. At each of which events five disparate groups of Secret Service officers were deployed; each group comprised of 20 to several dozen officers tasked to screen spectators and secure the perimeters of the president's events. By comparison, his challenger made two campaign stops, requiring Secret Service protection in smaller numbers.

Following the example of Donald Trump, White House staffers typically eschew the wearing of face masks. Leading the agency to examine whether some of the infections among their officers might have resulted from positions right around the White House itself. On some occasions Secret Service officers have emulated the staffers at the White House, and not themselves taken to wearing masks.

A U.S. secret service agent stands guard as US President Donald Trump speaks during a rally at Prescott Regional Airport in Prescott, Arizona on Oct. 19, 2020.A U.S. secret service agent stands guard as US President Donald Trump speaks during a rally

About a thousand, three hundred Secret Service officers are deployed in guarding the White House and the residence of the vice-president, just as they also are tasked with security for presidential trips out of town, and at official events. As a result of the pace of the frenetic activities related to the election campaign, the team had been under performance stress. Now that the number of officers has been so significantly reduced, the overworked team is in further stress.

A blue-ribbon panel struck in 2015 had identified overworked Secret Service officers as a key factor contributing to White House security breaches. This, needless to say, predates Donald Trump's time in office. It is undeniable that the president's penchant for underplaying the serious nature of the SARS-CoV-2 contagion in the greater interests of maintaining the economy has influenced those members of the vast American public who trust and admire him not to themselves wear protective face masks.

He has routinely made light of the medical community's urging to the public to practice social distancing, hand hygiene and mask-wearing, jeering at those who trustfully follow those instructions while himself insouciantly defying such namby-pamby instructions, even after he had himself been struck with COVID. Many tens of thousands of Americans, needless to say, were not as fortunate as he was, to receive the most expert professional medical aid for a speedy recovery.

His influence continues to instruct his followers to defy medical advice in precautionary measures at a time when the United States has become the centre of the worst global outbreak of COVID.

President Trump hinted he may 'fire Fauci' after the election, to the cheers of the audience at a campaign rally in Florida. Associated Press

Matters, however, are never as simple as they appear to be. While he has been a backward influence in the U.S. on necessary precautions the public should adhere to in an effort to protect themselves and their neighbours from the global pandemic threatening life on a heretofore unseen scale in living memory, his administration has also been responsible for shaping events to the extent that a U.S. pharmaceutical giant in collaboration with a German company has developed the first efficient and safe vaccine for COVID.

It was his administration's early, sustained focus on development of a vaccine as public policy that spoke to good governance, a reflection that modern medicine could ultimately find a way out of a global threat. Operation Warp Speed; government in partnership with the private sector worked expeditiously to accelerate, develop, manufacture and distribute a vaccine. The expedited regulatory processes, the $2 billion of federal funds pre-purchasing 100 million doses benefited the discovery of Pfizer's vaccine.