THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2020 Y A
Tracking an OutbreakThe Proposals
WASHINGTON — Joseph R. Biden Jr.
is preparing for the biggest challenge he
would face if elected president — ending
the coronavirus pandemic — by reach-
ing back nearly a century to draw on the
ideas of President Franklin D. Roosevelt,
whose big-government policies lifted the
country out of the Great Depression and
changed the shape of America.
With infection rates ticking back up in
much of the country as the weather cools
and social distancing becomes tougher,
addressing the public health crisis could
reach new levels of urgency by Inaugu-
ration Day. If current trends hold, as
many as 400,000 Americans may have
died from Covid-19 by then, recent pro-
jections show.
On Thursday, Mr. Biden will face vot-
ers in a televised town hall style meeting,
offering him a chance to lay out his plan
to bring the surging pandemic under
control. Mr. Biden has staked his cam-
paign on promising a more muscular fed-
eral role than Mr. Trump’s leave-it-to-
the-states approach. His health advisers
have been working on a set of plans that
he would push out as soon as he took of-
fice, including ramping up testing, en-
suring a steady supply of protective
equipment, distributing a vaccine and
securing money from Congress for
schools and hospitals.
Many of his ideas carry echoes of
Roosevelt’s New Deal vision of the ro-
bust role the U.S. government should
play in helping the nation recover from a
crisis. He would quickly appoint a na-
tional “supply chain commander” to co-
ordinate the logistics of manufacturing
and distributing protective gear and test
kits, invoking the Defense Production
Act more aggressively than Mr. Trump
has to build up supplies.
Mr. Biden wants to mobilize at least
100,000 Americans for a “public health
jobs corps” of contact tracers to help
track and curb outbreaks. And he has
even called for a “Pandemic Testing
Board” to swell the supply of coronavi-
rus tests — a play on Roosevelt’s War
Production Board.
“I’m kind of in a position that F.D.R.
was,” Mr. Biden told Evan Osnos of The
New Yorker in a recent interview, speak-
ing about the challenges of the pandemic
and the broader problems it has brought
on, though he quickly added he was not
comparing himself to Roosevelt.
“If you think about it, what in fact,
F.D.R. did was not ideological, it was
completely practical,” he added.
But the country Mr. Biden would lead
is very different from Roosevelt’s Amer-
ica, and his coronavirus response pro-
posals may not be all that easy to put into
place. The pandemic has been caught up
in partisan politics, and the public has
lost faith in government institutions. And
there will be no fireside chats in today’s
fractious social media environment.
“It’s certainly going to be one of the
biggest challenges he faces, given the
amount of misinformation and under-
mining of public health authority that
has occurred,” said Dr. Ingrid Katz, an in-
fectious disease specialist at the Har-
vard Global Health Institute, who re-
cently briefed Mr. Biden on school safety
during the pandemic. “The seeds of dis-
content have been sown.”
As the campaign moves into its weeks,
some of Mr. Biden’s plans might leave
him vulnerable to the charge that Mr.
Trump has leveled against all Demo-
crats: that they are practitioners of “so-
cialism” who would use the federal gov-
ernment to supersede individual and
state rights.
Exhibit A is the debate over Mr. Bi-
den’s seesawing call for a national mask
mandate. Mr. Biden first raised it at the
Democratic National Convention, then
walked it back, before again characteriz-
ing it as a strong priority. Mr. Biden ac-
knowledged that his team was still ex-
ploring whether he had the power to re-
quire Americans to wear masks outside
their homes — or whether he would have
to leave it to governors, as Mr. Trump has
done.
“The question is whether I would have
the legal authority as president to sign an
executive order,” he recently told report-
ers. “We think we do, but I can’t guaran-
tee that yet.”
Mr. Trump has attacked the plan, ac-
cusing Mr. Biden of trying “to bring the
full weight of the federal government
down on law-abiding Americans,’’ who,
the president said, “must have their free-
doms.” At the first debate, he also repeat-
edly accused Mr. Biden of wanting to
“shut down the whole country” again to
contain the virus; he was apparently re-
ferring to comments Mr. Biden made to
David Muir of ABC News in September,
when Mr. Muir asked whether he would
shut down the country if scientists ad-
vised him to do so.
“I would shut it down, I would listen to
the scientists,” Mr. Biden said at the time.
He subsequently said he did not think
that would be necessary if measures
were taken to slow the spread of the vi-
rus.
The success of Mr. Biden’s approach to
the pandemic would also depend heavily
on intangibles, including his ability to get
buy-in from governors whose political
leanings are nothing like his own, and
from citizens, who are deeply, rancor-
ously divided. Mr. Trump’s behavior dur-
ing his own illness from the virus this
month, including downplaying its dan-
ger, removing his mask for the cameras
as soon as he returned from the hospital
and exhorting the public not to “be afraid
of it,” was a reminder of the contentious
landscape Mr. Biden faces.
At least one Republican, Tom Ridge, a
former governor of Pennsylvania who
served as secretary of Homeland Securi-
ty under President George W. Bush, said
a more forceful federal response could be
workable, but only if Mr. Biden commu-
nicates with all governors and surrounds
himself with scientific and medical ex-
perts and leaders on both sides of the po-
litical aisle — something Mr. Biden has
repeatedly promised to do.
“You may not get unanimity, but you’ll
certainly build a consensus,” Mr. Ridge
said.
At least once a week for the past six
months, Mr. Biden has been receivinglengthy briefings from a pair of experts
his team refers to as “the docs”: Dr. Da-
vid A. Kessler, who served as commis-
sioner of the Food and Drug Administra-
tion under Presidents George H.W. Bush
and Bill Clinton and Dr. Vivek Murthy,
surgeon general under President Barack
Obama.
The advisers update the former vice
president on the latest pandemic statis-
tics — people infected, deaths, trend
lines — and bring in panels of outside ex-perts, who usually appear virtually on a
screen that looks “like a Jumbotron,” one
said, to discuss specific issues, like
school reopenings, racial disparities and
vaccine distribution.
In an interview, Drs. Kessler and
Murthy described Mr. Biden as eager to
follow their advice and more than willing
to let the scientists do the talking in a Bi-
den administration — unlike Mr. Trump,
who likes to speak for himself and offers
medical and public health pronounce-
ments that often lack any scientific un-
derpinning. They say Mr. Biden is partic-
ularly determined to restore the battered
reputation of the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, whose director,
Dr. Robert R. Redfield, has been repeat-
edly undercut by Mr. Trump.
“He has always understood that he
would allow experts to speak directly
with the public, because he knows that
part of repairing trust is to allow the pub-
lic to hear from people who are pro-
ducing the data,” Dr. Murthy said.
Also serving on Mr. Biden’s Public
Health Advisory Committee are Dr.
Ezekiel Emanuel, a professor of medical
ethics and health policy at the University
of Pennsylvania; Dr. Rebecca Katz, co-
director of the Center for Global Health
Science and Security at Georgetown Uni-
versity; and two officials in the Obama
administration, Dr. Nicole Lurie, an as-
sistant secretary for preparedness and
response and Lisa Monaco, a former
homeland security and counterterror-
ism adviser.
Ramping up testing is a major piece of
the Biden platform. He wants to start his
presidency with the capacity to perform
100 million tests per month, up from
about 30 million currently. Whether that
goal is realistic in the near term depends
partly on addressing continuing supply
and production problems. But as more
companies receive approval to mass-
manufacture tests that can be performed
outside laboratories, some experts are
hopeful that the number is achievable.
But while Mr. Trump has the full appa-
ratus of the federal government at his
disposal to track the pandemic, Mr. Bi-den has only his advisers to analyze
trends and projections. Dr. Kessler said
he has spent hours on the phone calling
pharmaceutical companies about testing
and gathering input from modelers to
project caseloads and deaths for the first
part of 2021. He also presents research
on treatments and potential vaccines to
the former vice president, while Dr.
Murthy briefs Mr. Biden about the vi-
rus’s impact on mental health, schools,
sports and other aspects of society.
Mr. Biden has often pointed to his work
with Mr. Obama to beef up U.S. readiness
for a pandemic, including establishing a
pandemic preparedness office within the
National Security Council, as well as
their efforts to fight the H1N1 flu pan-
demic of 2009. Even before the first docu-mented case of coronavirus infection in
the United States, Mr. Biden attacked Mr.
Trump for rolling back their work.
“We are not prepared for a pandemic,”
he wrote on Twitter in October 2019.
But critics say that the Obama admin-
istration did not do nearly enough to re-
plenish the Strategic National Stockpile,
the government’s cache of medicines
and medical supplies, after the H1N
pandemic, leaving it unprepared for
Covid-19. And they say the H1N1 re-
sponse had some of the same kind of con-
tradictory messaging for which Mr. Bi-
den now faults the Trump administra-
tion. Mr. Trump seized on that framing
during the first debate, describing the
Obama response as ”a disaster.”
On the campaign trail, Mr. Biden is try-
ing to draw a stark contrast to Mr.
Trump, whose advisers are now promot-
ing the controversial goal of achieving
“herd immunity” by allowing the virus to
spread among young healthy people
while attempting to protect the old and
vulnerable. Mr. Biden frequently calls
out the president for undermining career
government scientists. He summed up
his own approach this way, in a recent
speech in Wilmington, Del.:“I’ll level
with the American people, I’ll take re-
sponsibility and I’ll support, rather than
tear down, the experts responsible for
the day-to-day execution of the plan. I’ll
simply follow the science.”
An ad his campaign released last week
makes the same point, showing Mr. Bi-
den taking notes in one of his virtual pan-
demic briefings while the narrator says,
“When Joe Biden wants an update on the
virus, he calls on the nation’s top health
experts.”
Whether that will be enough to per-
suade all Americans to follow public
health advice is unclear. While Mr. Biden
sees that as the role of the president, Mi-
chael Leavitt, a Republican former gov-
ernor of Utah who was health and human
services secretary under President
George W. Bush, says the bully pulpit
only goes so far.
“What I really would like to see hap-
pen is for individual people to begin tak-
ing responsibility for acting in ways that
are not only good for them but for soci-
ety,” he said. “Do I believe the president
of the United States saying everyone
must wear a mask will change that? I’m
not confident it would.”PUBLIC HEALTH
Covid Response Plan From Biden Draws From F.D.R.’s New Deal
From above, Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee, cam-
paigning in Cincinnati on Monday; President Barack Obama at the White
House during an H1N1 flu update in September 2009; President George W.
Bush in October 2001 with Tom Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania
who was about to lead the newly formed homeland security department.CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMESPresident Franklin D. Roosevelt in March 1933. His big-government policies changed the shape of America.ASSOCIATED PRESSLUKE SHARRETT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESPAUL J. RRICHARDS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSEBy ABBY GOODNOUGH
and SHERYL GAY STOLBERGPromising a more
muscular approach from
the federal government.