Joe Biden will rebuild public trust in science and public health institutions

The argument

Joe Biden's campaign stated that his administration intends to direct the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to issue transparent, evidence-based guidance around the public-health risks of reopening restaurants, schools and public spaces. This would also help to restore morale within the CDC and This could also go a long way towards restoring morale within the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), who feel they have been unheard throughout the pandemic by the Trump administration. Biden has also committed to supporting and working with the World Health Organization (WHO), which Trump began to withdraw from in July. As well as providing important funds to enable the WHO to help fight the coronavirus pandemic along with other diseases, reinstating US commitment to the WHO would eventually enable it to join its international COVAX facility. This aims to accelerate the search for and manufacture of vaccines to fight coronavirus, and would put the US at the forefront of healthcare innovation during a crucial moment in its history.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics of this argument note that it lists intentions and institutional signals rather than showing that outcomes would follow. Guidance from a federal agency is advisory; the levers that determined transmission — closing or opening schools and businesses, mask mandates, gathering limits — sat overwhelmingly with governors and local authorities, and compliance had already divided along partisan lines by late 2020. Restoring morale at an agency does not by itself change what a state chooses to do or what individuals accept. The international commitments are a separate matter from the domestic epidemic. Funding the World Health Organization and joining the COVAX facility bear on global vaccine distribution and on cooperation abroad; they are defensible on their own terms but do not address case numbers at home, and the vaccine development programme that produced the American vaccines was already under way and would have been inherited by either candidate. The subsequent record is read differently by each side. The United States continued to record very high COVID mortality after the transition, through the Delta and Omicron waves. Supporters attribute that to variants and to vaccine refusal concentrated in particular communities; critics take it as evidence that the change of administration did not determine outcomes, and that the constraints were structural rather than a matter of who occupied the office. The entry's text is also garbled mid-paragraph, with a clause about restoring CDC morale repeated in two forms.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Federal guidance is advisory, and the decisions that governed transmission — closures, mandates and gathering limits — rested with states and with individual compliance already polarised along partisan lines. [Rejecting P2] Rejoining and funding the WHO and COVAX addresses international cooperation and vaccine equity abroad rather than domestic case numbers, and vaccine development was already under way and would have been inherited either way.