“What have we done?” Cory Gardner accuses public health experts of politicizing the pandemic

In some of his most can­did remarks to date about the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, U.S. Sen. Cory Gard­ner told a con­ser­v­a­tive crowd that pub­lic health advice and sci­ence have been politi­cized in recent months, caus­ing an ero­sion of pub­lic trust.

Gard­ner, a Yuma Repub­li­can, spoke in per­son to the Steam­boat Institute’s annu­al Free­dom Con­fer­ence on Aug. 28. Video of Gardner’s remarks was uploaded to YouTube this week.

Gard­ner was asked by a pan­el mod­er­a­tor how the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic became “so polit­i­cal” and why it had erod­ed “pub­lic trust in our media, in our insti­tu­tions, in our gov­ern­ment.” The sen­a­tor, who faces re-elec­tion in two months, crit­i­cized pub­lic health experts, sci­en­tists, gov­ern­ments and the media for, he said, pick­ing eco­nom­ic win­ners and losers based on polit­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal beliefs.

“If we lose this econ­o­my, the dam­age will be cat­a­stroph­ic. Yes, we have a health cri­sis that we have to address and get through, but we can’t do it while we tell peo­ple, ‘Wal­mart can be open, but you have to be closed.’ I can’t tell you the num­ber of peo­ple who came to me in tears. ‘I’ve been in busi­ness for 40 or 50 years,’ they’d say. ‘I’ve lost every­thing. But the busi­ness down the road that’s open does the same thing I do and they’re fine.’ What have we done?” Gard­ner said.

Small busi­ness own­ers across the coun­try have com­plained that large retail out­lets were able to stay open in the spring months while much small­er shops shut their doors, giv­ing an unfair advan­tage to cor­po­rate giants.

“You want to talk about trust? Trust is when you hear health experts say, ‘I don’t agree with what you’re doing because it’s against the health rules but what you’re doing is just fine because it agrees with me philo­soph­i­cal­ly and polit­i­cal­ly,’” Gard­ner said as he point­ed from one per­son to anoth­er. “That destroys trust.”

“When we’re try­ing to base things on sci­ence and the same sci­en­tists come up and say, ‘Well, if you were just of this polit­i­cal belief, you’d be OK.’ Because to me and to many Amer­i­cans, that’s what the mes­sage seemed to be for a very long time. That’s not right, that’s not fair, and that kind of — has to stop,” the sen­a­tor said, men­tion­ing he stopped him­self from say­ing an exple­tive after “kind of.”

Gard­ner was refer­ring to epi­demi­ol­o­gists who have said peo­ple should not con­gre­gate at sum­mer pic­nics, for exam­ple, but have defend­ed mas­sive Black Lives Mat­ter protests. The extent to which BLM protests have spread the virus is an open ques­tion, but Repub­li­cans and oth­er con­ser­v­a­tives have accused pub­lic health experts of tak­ing sides rather than offer­ing objec­tive health advice.

In June, near­ly 1,300 health pro­fes­sion­als from across the coun­try — includ­ing a hand­ful from Col­orado — signed an open let­ter prais­ing BLM protests dur­ing the pan­dem­ic but con­demn­ing protests against stay-home orders.

Gard­ner, a care­ful and tal­ent­ed speak­er, was unusu­al­ly frank in his remarks, acknowl­edg­ing at one point that he’s “pas­sion­ate about” the issue. At one point, he deliv­ered with a straight face an appar­ent joke about when the pan­dem­ic will end.

“My 8‑year-old son came to me and said, ‘Dad, I know when the pan­dem­ic ends.’ And I said, ‘You do?’ He says, ‘Yes, the day after the elec­tion.’ Now, he picked that up some­where or heard that some­where, or maybe mom and dad were talk­ing too much around him,” Gard­ner told a laugh­ing crowd.

The anec­dote plays into right-wing con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries about the virus being used — or even man­u­fac­tured — to harm Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s re-elec­tion chances. Gard­ner will face John Hick­en­loop­er, a Demo­c­rat, on Nov. 3 and is cur­rent­ly trail­ing the for­mer gov­er­nor, accord­ing to pub­lic polls.

“This is a seri­ous cri­sis. A seri­ous pan­dem­ic that cre­at­ed a seri­ous eco­nom­ic cri­sis,” Gard­ner told the Free­dom Con­fer­ence last Fri­day. “We can’t have peo­ple toy with it on the nation­al news for their own agen­das or out­comes for Novem­ber 3rd and raise your hands if you think that has not been a prob­lem here.”

Because of health restric­tions in Steam­boat Springs — or “gov­ern­ment edicts,” as the event’s orga­niz­ers called them — the 200-per­son Free­dom Con­fer­ence was held in Beaver Creek this year. Gard­ner spoke on a pan­el with Dr. Scott Atlas, a radi­ol­o­gist and con­tro­ver­sial White House health advis­er who has sug­gest­ed let­ting all younger Amer­i­cans con­tract the virus to cre­ate “herd immunity.”

“Over 185,000 Amer­i­cans are dead and mil­lions have lost their jobs because Pres­i­dent Trump ignored the sci­ence as Sen­a­tor Gard­ner stayed silent,” Hick­en­loop­er said in a state­ment respond­ing to Gardner’s remarks Friday.

“Now he’s par­rot­ing Pres­i­dent Trump, imply­ing that the coro­n­avirus cri­sis is a hoax while dis­parag­ing pub­lic health experts. It’s mad­den­ing,” Hick­en­loop­er added. “Sen­a­tor Gard­ner needs to be back in Wash­ing­ton get­ting Col­orado the help we need to get through this cri­sis, not telling bad jokes along­side the Trump advi­sor who thinks we should let the virus kill anoth­er two mil­lion of our neighbors.”

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