Biden's team cagey on health questions after exposure to Trump

For months, Joe Biden has gone to great lengths to model responsible behaviour in the coronavirus era. He wears masks in public. He does not hold crowded rallies. When he gives speeches, reporters sit at a distance from one another, with white circles on the ground to mark their turf.

These actions have so far helped keep Biden healthy and able to continue campaigning while President Donald Trump, who mocked masks and held large events, is now hospitalised with Covid-19.

But beyond the public examples of safety precautions, Biden’s health protocols have remained largely under wraps, with his campaign saying little about what steps it is taking to protect the 77-year-old Democratic nominee.

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His aides will not answer questions about whether Biden is tested daily; they say simply that he is tested “regularly.” Until this weekend, they had promised to inform the public only if he had a confirmed positive case. Then, on Saturday night, after two days of refusing to provide details about Biden’s testing procedures, the campaign committed to releasing the results of all his tests. He tested negative Sunday, his campaign said.

Transparency has taken on new significance in the presidential race given the conflicting information about Trump’s health and the fact that his Democratic rival, who is also in an age group that is particularly susceptible to Covid-19, was exposed to the president during their 90-minute debate Tuesday. Biden, who is ahead in national polls and many battleground state surveys, still faces the possibility of a positive test; he is continuing to campaign rather than follow public health guidelines to quarantine, and his campaign has been cagey about his health protocols.

The questions about Biden’s health come as he is confronting an unprecedented political reality: He would be the oldest president ever elected if he wins in November, and he faces the daily personal risks of a pandemic that has killed more than 209,000 people in the United States. Trump’s diagnosis, and the apparent health threat he posed during a debate where he was often talking or shouting over Biden, are forcing the Biden campaign to grapple with its own next steps and disclosures regarding the health of the Democratic nominee.

“Much like I wouldn’t discuss our security plans here on national television, I’m not going to talk about our inner workings of our health plans,” Symone D. Sanders, a senior adviser for the Biden campaign, said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday when asked what the campaign would do if Biden tested positive.

The approaches to transparency and accuracy that the two presidential candidates’ teams have taken on their health are not comparable. Biden, the former vice president, is running against an incumbent who has a long record of falsehoods, and whose White House has withheld critical information and offered misleading or suspect statements, including about the president’s health.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump released a letter from his doctor that predicted he would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency”; the doctor later said Trump had dictated the letter. And this weekend, the White House offered contradictory messages about the condition of Trump, 74, and even about when he had tested positive for the virus, fueling uncertainty for the country.

For Biden, being fully transparent with the public would not just be the ethical approach, but also a smart one, said Dr Kelly Michelson, director of the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

“It engenders trust in the community, it helps allay fears and concerns. And I also don’t really see why you would not be transparent about what’s happening,” she said. “I think that it’s important that the public knows what’s going on.”

Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster, said the health of both a president and a president’s challenger were of vital public interest.

“Both candidates should be very forthcoming,” he said. “Swing voters care as much as anybody about the health of a president or potential president in the middle of a raging pandemic.”

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Going back months, Biden’s campaign has not said much about his plans to be tested for the coronavirus. Shortly after the Democratic National Convention in August, a top campaign official said Biden had not been tested for the virus, although testing had been required of others on hand when he gave his speech accepting the nomination. A day later, the campaign announced that Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, would be tested “on a regular basis,” as would staff members who interacted with them.

Biden’s campaign announced around midday Friday that Biden had tested negative for the virus, distributing a statement from his doctor about 11 hours after Trump announced that he had tested positive.

“Since the start of the pandemic, our campaign has led by example and prioritized the health and safety of our supporters, our staff and the public in everything that we do,” T.J. Ducklo, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, said Sunday. “We take extraordinary measures to ensure we are campaigning safely.”

The Biden campaign’s decision to continue with a planned trip to Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Friday after Biden tested negative raised its own questions, and threatened to undermine the former vice president’s message about putting health and safety above politics.

By continuing to campaign after having been exposed to an infected person — Trump — on Tuesday night, Biden is flouting an important rule in public health, experts said. So, too, is Vice President Mike Pence, who met with the president in the Oval Office on Tuesday and plans to continue campaigning.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, anyone who has been in close contact with an infected person should “stay home (quarantine) since symptoms may appear two to 14 days after exposure to the virus,” and should “stay away from others.”

Michelson, the bioethicist, said of the former vice president, “I don’t see why it’s different for Mr Biden, or Mr Trump, or anybody else,” adding, “I think like he, like every other citizen, should abide by the CDC guidance.”

Dr Irwin Redlener, an expert in pandemic response at the Earth Institute at Columbia University who briefly served on a public health advisory committee for the Biden campaign, described himself as satisfied that Biden and Trump had stood sufficiently far apart on the debate stage and suggested that the Biden team shared that view.

“They believe they were following the rules and they’re not concerned about it,” he said, calling the Biden team “obsessive” about following safety precautions. But he also encouraged additional testing, saying of Biden, “He should be getting tested daily, and they should be just continuing to follow the guidelines — of Trump’s CDC, ironically.”