White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany:
Trump's son Eric Trump:
Over the next two weeks, the septuagenarians will accept their parties’ nominations at highly unusual national conventions.
Made all-virtual amid the coronavirus pandemic, the conventions will feature video feeds from sites around the country instead of balloon drops and cheering crowds. The Democratic convention, which starts today, is using a behind-the-scenes crew of about 400 with operation centers in New York, Milwaukee, Los Angeles and Wilmington, Del., The Post’s Michael Scherer reports.
“In two-hour nightly chunks, only one hour of which the broadcast networks have vowed to air, the live footage will be mixed in real time with a roughly equal share of prerecorded performances, mini-documentaries and speeches,” Michael writes.
It’s likely the question of age will come up, particularly for Biden who is facing the potential for two terms as president.
In fact, health researchers are even putting morbid odds on how long the two men could theoretically survive in the job – and they're pretty high, all things considered.
Biden has a 79 percent chance of surviving through a first term and a 70 percent chance of surviving through a second term, according to a paper released by the American Federation for Aging Research, which made life expectancy projections for the candidates based on their age and gender.
The authors estimated Trump’s chance of surviving through a second term is 85 percent.
Those are better chances than you might expect, given how critics on both sides love to cast the candidates as feeble and frail.
Trump critics raised questions about his fitness after he struggled with a glass of water and walked unsteadily down a ramp in June. Libertarian commentator Ben Shapiro regularly describes Biden as “barely alive" on his podcast.
But Biden and Trump are still elderly, by any measure.
The paper’s authors used data from the Centers for Disease Control and the Census Bureau published annually by the Social Security Administration. They estimated that on Inauguration Day 2021, Trump’s life expectancy would be 11.4 years while Biden’s would be 9.3 years.
The paper notably didn’t take the candidates’ health status into consideration –and they stressed that presidents tend to be healthier than the average population due to education, wealth and access to to high-quality medical care.
“The number of times you’ve traveled around the sun should not be a litmus test for being president of the United States,” S. Jay Olshansky, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an author of the study, told me in March.
Doctors have pronounced both candidates in good health.
Biden’s doctor Kevin O’Connor wrote he is a “healthy, vigorous, 77-year-old male, who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency,” in a medical report released in December by the campaign. O’Connor noted that Biden has an irregular heartbeat and subsequently takes a blood thinner to reduce the likelihood of a blood clot.
Trump “remains healthy” according to the results of his latest physical, released by the White House in June. While Trump’s 244-pound weight puts him in the category of being considered “obese,” his lab values and test results were in the normal range.
“There has been no interval change to the President’s medical history,” physician Sean Conley wrote.
Age didn't seem to have an impact on either man in fending off the bevy of candidates who ran against Trump in 2016 or against Biden this year. Both men managed to win crowded primary battles, disappointing those who hoped for fresh, young faces to lead the parties.
Republicans and conservatives have particularly latched onto the idea that Biden may not run for a second term, given his age. That could mean Harris has an opportunity to run for president in 2024, instead of having to wait until 2028.
“Make no mistake — Kamala Harris is her party’s de-facto nominee for president, and this should scare all Americans,” Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, wrote in a Fox New op-ed.
The Constitution is clear that the vice president is sworn-in if a president expires while in office.
Coronavirus does disproportionately affect the elderly, and both Biden and Trump are at higher risk of contracting the disease in more serious form than their young peers. But they're also being extraordinarily cautious, with Trump avoiding large rallies and Biden mostly campaigning virtually.
If the worst were to happen before the election and the parties had to replace their nominees, both parties have contingency plans in place.
The Democratic National Committee has a clear rule, New York University law professor Richard Pildes recently explained in this piece for The Post.
“The 447 members of the Democratic National Committee, the entity that formally hosts the convention, would choose the new nominee," Pildes said. "The DNC chair, currently Tom Perez, is required to consult with the Democratic leadership in Congress and with the Democratic Governors Association. After the consultation, the chair provides a report to the DNC members, who then make the choice.”
The Republican National Committee’s rules are similar, providing that its delegates would cast the same number of votes their state is entitled to at the convention.
Then the parties would now have to replace the name of the candidate on each state’s ballot with that of the new candidate – a process that could be highly fraught considering the ongoing drama around mail-in ballots.
“Different states have different deadlines for when the parties must certify their candidates for the ballot,” Pildes said. “In 2016, most were in August and September. If states do not have laws that permit changing the candidate’s name after that date, courts would probably have to be brought in. It’s hard to imagine courts refusing to permit one of the two major parties to replace a deceased candidate’s name with that of a validly chosen replacement.”
Ahh, oof and ouch
AHH: Trump has brought on Dr. Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no expertise in public health or infectious diseases, as a pandemic adviser to the White House.
Atlas, the former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center and a fellow at Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution, is a frequent guest on Fox News Channel and has long been a critic of coronavirus lockdowns, the Associated Press reports.
“Scott is a very famous man who’s also very highly respected,” Trump told reporters as he introduced the addition. “He has many great ideas and he thinks what we’ve done is really good.”
Atlas was the only doctor to share the stage at Trump's pandemic briefings last week.
“Atlas’ hiring comes amid ongoing tensions between the president and Drs. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, and Deborah Birx, the task force’s coordinator,” the AP writes. “While Birx remains closely involved in the administration’s pandemic response, both she and Fauci have publicly contradicted the rosy picture the president has painted of a virus that has now killed more than 167,000 people in the United States and infected millions nationwide.”
OOF: Doctors have gotten better at treating covid-19 patients, but they still lack much solid evidence upon which to base their decisions.
“When the coronavirus appeared in the United States in late January, hopes were high for quick progress: Science would find a treatment for people with the illness and develop a vaccine to prevent future cases,” The Post's Carolyn Y. Johnson writes.
“Today, the vaccine race is on, but answers about treatments remain frustratingly elusive, with a handful of basic therapies supported by evidence, and a messy and imperfect scramble to extract information about what works from what has been given to thousands of patients. Therapeutic regimens vary from hospital to hospital, and much of what is offered is supported by hints and hunches — what official treatment guidelines refer to as a 'knowledge gap.'”
“There’s a lot of things about this pandemic that have been so challenging, and I just don’t think in the early days people really appreciated how important it was to set up rigorous clinical studies right away of treatments,” Kevin Schulman, a professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, told Carolyn. “We’re so focused on a vaccine, and hopefully they work. We’re a little less focused on drug trials and other treatments.”
OOF: Latina mothers make up nearly half the coronavirus cases among pregnant women.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data collected from Jan. 22 until last week show that among more than 14,100 pregnant women who tested positive for the novel coronavirus and provided information about race and ethnicity, 6,447 were Latina — the largest group by far.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have found the rate of virus exposure among Black and Hispanic women to be five times higher than among White and Asian women.
“Doctors say that, anecdotally, they are seeing this same pattern in the D.C. area,” The Post's Samantha Schmidt and Rebecca Tan write. “During a conference call about three months ago for local obstetricians, D.C. health officials and representatives from hospitals, it became clear that some clinics serving predominantly Latina populations were seeing some of the highest numbers of infections among pregnant women."
“Among the hardest hit was Mary’s Center, a nonprofit organization that operates community health clinics in the Washington area,” they add. “Between March and July, Mary’s Center tested 215 pregnant women for the coronavirus, the vast majority of them Latina. More than 150 of them — nearly 70 percent — were positive.”
“It’s very, very alarming,” said Maria Gomez, chief executive of Mary’s Center. “We still can’t figure out why we’re seeing these numbers.”
The United States of Care is recommending four ways political candidates should talk about health-care problems this election cycle.
The nonpartisan group focused on expanding health care has released a candidate guide, provided first to The Health 202, which lays out ways candidates can respond to voters' heightened anxiety around the coronavirus pandemic.
“Americans are feeling a mix of emotions related to the pandemic, and those emotions are overwhelmingly negative,” the guide says. “In addition, the pandemic has illuminated deficiencies of our health care system. People feel that the U.S. was caught unprepared to handle the pandemic and our losses have been greater than those of other countries. People blame government for the inadequate pandemic response, not health care systems.”
What should candidates do? Acknowledge the moment, take an active stance, commit to prioritizing people's needs and commit to both addressing diparities and finding common ground, the guide says.
A few more good reads from The Post and beyond: