Most of the coronavirus tests the U.S. does are worthless. But there's a solution that could actually work — and stop the spread
These are not the same thing as the antibody tests you might have heard of, which detect virus-fighting substances in the blood of people who were infected previously (and may therefore have immunity). Rapid antigen tests are meant to detect ongoing, active infections.
So why isn’t the U.S. government mass-producing antigen tests and distributing them freely to everyone? The major hurdle, so far, has been what news stories tend to describe as “accuracy.” But “sensitivity” is a better way to think about it.
PCR tests make thousands of copies of the virus’s RNA and thus can detect it at very low levels. Antigen tests rely on a molecule that binds to the coronavirus’s protein spikes; at very low levels of infection, there may not be enough viral particles in a sputum sample to trigger a positive result.
The fear is that if we rely on antigen tests, we’ll miss many cases. But there are two reasons this fear may be unfounded
These are not the same thing as the antibody tests you might have heard of, which detect virus-fighting substances in the blood of people who were infected previously (and may therefore have immunity). Rapid antigen tests are meant to detect ongoing, active infections.
So why isn’t the U.S. government mass-producing antigen tests and distributing them freely to everyone? The major hurdle, so far, has been what news stories tend to describe as “accuracy.” But “sensitivity” is a better way to think about it.
PCR tests make thousands of copies of the virus’s RNA and thus can detect it at very low levels. Antigen tests rely on a molecule that binds to the coronavirus’s protein spikes; at very low levels of infection, there may not be enough viral particles in a sputum sample to trigger a positive result.
The fear is that if we rely on antigen tests, we’ll miss many cases. But there are two reasons this fear may be unfounded
Respiratory therapist Diana Vega of the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada collects coronavirus tests during a preview of a new testing site on Monday. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
The first is that we’re already missing tons of cases. According to CDC antibody data, our current PCR system is testing only enough people to detect about 10 percent of the total number of infections. “If everyone took an antigen test today — even identifying only 50 percent of the positives — we would still identify 50 percent of all current infections in the country,” Jha has explained. That’s “five times more than the 10 percent of cases we are likely currently identifying because we are testing so few people.”
The second is that the amount of coronavirus in the body increases exponentially in the early days of infection. At first, during the incubation period, no test would be sensitive enough to detect it. About three to five days later, a PCR test would pick it up. After another eight to 24 hours, according to Mina, a rapid antigen test would show a positive result.
So the question isn’t whether an antigen test would detect an infection. It’s when.
This is a crucial distinction. Say the PCR test delivers a positive on day four, and the antigen test delivers a positive on day five. As best as experts can tell, both day four and day five are before or near the beginning of the window when people can transmit the virus to others. But if the person who takes the PCR test doesn’t find out whether he or she is positive until day eight, or even day 14, while the person who takes the antigen test finds out on day five, the antigen test is far more useful for stopping the spread of the virus, even though it’s less sensitive.
What if your viral load was too low on day five for the antigen test to detect it? Your infection probably wouldn’t be very transmissible yet. Then the next test you take, on day seven, would pick it up. And the person who took the PCR test still wouldn’t have the results.
“The vast majority of PCR positive tests we currently collect in this country are actually finding people long after they have ceased to be infectious,” Mina recently explained. “All we’re doing with all of this testing is clogging up the testing infrastructure, and essentially finding people for whom we can’t even act because they are done transmitting.”
Current FDA guidelines stipulate that any new coronavirus test vying for emergency clearance must perform nearly as well as a PCR test. But as fall approaches — and with it colder weather, increased indoor activity, a return to school and the potential for even larger waves of infection — the time may have come to rethink those regulations.
Rapid antigen tests have their challenges. Equitable distribution on a mass scale would probably require billions of dollars in government investment; cheap and easy at-home tests would work only if everyone takes them conscientiously.
But experts say they’re starting to make more sense than the status quo.
“If you had asked me this a couple months ago, I would have said we just need to be doing the PCR tests,” Susan Butler-Wu, a clinical microbiologist at the University of Southern California, told the New York Times Wednesday. “But we are so far gone in this country. It is a catastrophe. It’s kitchen sink time.
After two weeks battling COVID-19, State Rep. Randy Fine (R-Palm Bay) posted on Facebook that he needed his lungs X-rayed as his symptoms now included a recurring fever and a hacking chest cough. He remarked that the hydroxychloroquine therapy he had been on proved ineffective.
“I’ve had a cold who knows how many times. I have never had to deal with anything like this. And for those who want to believe that (hydroxychloroquine) is some kind of magic solution, I’ve been taking that too (I don’t oppose it, but I am tired of people pretending it is magic),” he wrote in the post.
By the time the X-ray images came back showing lung damage serious enough that doctors ordered Fine to stay for observation, a debate over hydroxychloroquine raged on Fine's Facebook page.
“Hydroxychloroquine as stated by many Doctors here and abroad is very effective. Had you been given that at the outset you might think it was magic indeed...” wrote one user.
“Was given it the day my test came back,” Fine replied. “Sorry to burst the magic bubble.”
A selfie by Republican State Rep. Randy Fine from his hospital bed at Holmes Regional Medical Center on Aug 4., 2020 where he was admitted for observation for COVDI-19.
Further on, netizens commented that surely Fine must have not been taking the drug “as prescribed” or following “protocol” (there is none established by any medical authority).
"I'm over it," Fine texted FLORIDA TODAY from his Holmes Regional Medical Center hospital bed on Monday. "People should be able to use it if they want. But people should stop pretending it is some kind of magic potion as well. If they need proof, look at me."
Since the early days of the pandemic, excitement over the possibility that cheap, widely available drugs might be repurposed to combat the novel coronavirus has spurred a flurry of research and clinical trials. But one non-peer reviewed, clinical study from France, which has been widely derided for its shoddy methodology, including randomly eliminating test subjects without explanation, and small sample size, touted the effectiveness of the decades old anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine when used alongside azithromycin the antibiotic commonly sold as Z-Pak.
Fervor around a possible miracle cure exploded, fueled by anecdotal reports that patients recovered suddenly after taking the drug. Before science could validate the results of the study, the drug was seized on by President Donald Trump who along with allies such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis secured vast quantities of the untested “cure” at taxpayer’s expense.
A pharmacist shows a bottle of the drug hydroxychloroquine on April 6, 2020, in Oakland, California. The malaria drug is not yet officially approved for fighting the new coronavirus, and scientists say more testing is needed before it's proven safe and effective against COVID-19.
But successive clinical trials following standard scientific methods failed to replicate the results touted by the flawed studies that championed the therapy. The scientific consensus is that there is no measurable impact from taking the drug, alone, or alongside other medications.
U.S. health authorities began recommending against the use of the therapy outside of the controlled setting of a clinical trial because of the risk of adverse side-effects.
On Jul. 22 the highly-respected journal Nature published a first of it's kind study that looked at live human lung cells and found definitively that chloroquine had no anti-viral properties when it came to the virus that causes COVID-19.
The argument appeared to be settled.
Then, last week, President Trump again touted hydroxychloroquine after a group of physicians calling themselves “America’s Frontline Doctors” staged a press conference in front of the Supreme Court building in Washington D.C.
A video of one of the doctors, Stella Immanuel, claiming that a combination of hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin and the nutritional supplement zinc were a cure quickly went viral. Even as social media platforms feverishly tried to take down the video for containing false and misleading claims it was re-posted by President Trump, major right-wing personalities and Donald Trump Jr.
A screenshot from the Tea Party Patriots website shows video of the group that calls itself America's Frontline Doctors speaking earlier this week in Washington.
Dr. Immanuel’s credentials have since come under scrutiny, along with her prior claims that certain real-life ailments are caused by sexual intercourse with demons.
This prompted assistant secretary for Health and Human Services, Adm. Brett Giroir, who was appointed to the White House's coronavirus task force to coordinate testing efforts, to say on 'Meet the Press' Sunday that it was time to "move on" and that the government does not recommend the therapy.
"The most well-designed studies so far, that are not anecdotal, but are actual studies, have indicated that there does not appear to be any beneficial effect on the use of hydroxychloroquine," said Jay Wolfson a public health policy expert and senior associate dean at the University of South Florida's medical school.
Despite this, believers in the treatment have persisted.
“He didn’t use the HCQ correctly,” a comment said on Randy Fine’s page. “You must take zinc with the hydroxychloraquine. (sic) The zinc is the magic bullet and the hydroxychloraquine (sic) carries it so it can prevent viral replication. Just curious, did you take the zinc too?”
“Yup. Sorry to burst the magic bubble,” Fine shot back.
A selfie by Republican State Rep. Randy Fine from his hospital bed at Holmes Regional Medical Center on Aug 4., 2020 where he was admitted for observation for COVDI-19.
In fact Fine said he took the drugs on the recommendation and prescription of his doctor, and contrary to assertions that the public is being denied access to the drug, Fine said he had no problem filling his prescription at CVS.
Certain states have curtailed easy access to hydroxychloroquine to prevent hoarding that was endangering access for patients with Lupus who also need the drug. But anybody with a prescription from a doctor willing to prescribe it for COVID-19, in theory, has access.
Fine has now stopped responding to commenters asking about whether he was taking the therapy.
"I just got tired of every time I made an update people stating that if I just took (hydroxychloroquine) I'd be magically healed which was particularly frustrating because I was taking it," he told FLORIDA TODAY in a text.
"Much of COVID has become politics as opposed to science," said USF's Wolfson. "And it's an old issue of science being viewed in some social circles as being antithetical to belief systems."
Whether it was polio or smallpox, Wolfson said resistance to science and public health expertise, despite concerted public information campaigns, has always been an issue.
"It took a long enough time where enough people died or were affected by it, that both individuals and communities and political systems and communities, took action. We've only been at this for seven months in this country."
Only then, Wolfson said, will the walls individual's belief systems have erected come down.
For Fine the situation is reminiscent of the polarization over masks. "It's like people can no longer accept disagreement with their view."
It should be noted that Wolfson has been retained as an expert witness for Hillsborough County, which is fighting against a lawsuit to repeal their mask mandate brought by Republican State Rep. Anthony Sabatini (R—Howey in the Hills).
Fine, for his part, thinks it's a matter of people needing to feel comforted during a difficult time.
"I think perhaps some people are clinging to this to psychologically manage their anxiety over the disease." he continued, adding "because if some pill can magically make it go away who has to worry?"
Alessandro Marazzi Sassoon is a watchdog reporter at FLORIDA TODAY.
Contact him at 321-355-8144, or asassoon@floridatoday.com. Twitter: @alemzs
But Swan said on MSNBC on Tuesday that the moment that stood out to him was the wild back-and-forth they had on the coronavirus pandemic.
“He is not confronting reality when it comes to the virus,” Swan said. “And he is reaching for data points that are good for publicity or sound good, but are not actually the best metrics for revealing what’s going on in this country.”
“You know there are those that say, you can test too much,” Trump said. “You do know that.”
“Who says that?” Swan asked.
“Oh, just read the manuals,” Trump said. “Read the books.”
Speaking on MSNBC on Tuesday, Swan said Trump never named the books or manuals, and added that there’s “no credible public health expert who is suggesting that there is a danger to testing too much.”
He also said Trump’s claim that the United States is doing the most testing isn’t particularly meaningful in context.
“The reason the U.S. has had to do all these tests is because the virus spread undetected like wildfire through this country in February, March, April, and it took a very long time to get the testing working and effective,” Swan pointed out. “And we’re still not there with these delays, so people are walking around for, in some cases 10, 11 days, spreading the virus.”
Swan said public health experts agree that, without a vaccine, the best way to control the virus is with aggressive and rapid testing as well as isolation, contact tracing and quarantining.
“The fact that he’s ... still expressing ambivalence over the value of testing is stunning,” he said.
So far, most of the conversation about COVID-19 vaccines has focused on the question of whether researchers can develop an effective vaccine in record time.
But maybe we should start asking another question as well: Will enough Americans actually get the vaccine for it to be effective?
For a COVID-19 vaccine to actually stop the pandemic, scientists estimate that at least 60 percent of the population — and probably more like 75 or 80 percent — would need to be vaccinated, a number that depends on many factors, including the efficacy of the vaccine itself and how widely the virus has already spread.
With that in mind, Yahoo News and YouGov have been polling the American people for the past few months: “If and when a coronavirus vaccine becomes available, will you get vaccinated?”
The trend lines have been discouraging.
At first, responses were mostly favorable. In early May, 55 percent of Americans said yes, they would get vaccinated. But that number shrank in each subsequent survey, slipping to 50 percent in late May and 46 percent in early July.
Now the latest Yahoo News/YouGov poll, conducted July 28 to 30, shows that just 42 percent of Americans plan to get vaccinated for COVID-19 — the smallest share to date.
The outlook for universal vaccination is clouded by political considerations from both sides: skepticism about medical authority and expertise (more common among Trump supporters), and suspicions (mostly among Democrats) that the administration is cutting corners on safety to rush a vaccine into production before the election.
Together, these forces threaten to undermine COVID-19 vaccination in the U.S.
Vaccines against different diseases vary in their effectiveness. The efficacy of the measles vaccine is 95 percent to 98 percent, which means that If 100 people who haven’t been exposed to the measles were given that vaccine, 95 to 98 of them wouldn’t get infected (on average). The efficacy of the flu vaccine generally ranges from 40 percent to 60 percent. The more effective a vaccine is, the fewer vaccinated people it takes to stop a pandemic. The reverse is also true — as efficacy falls, coverage must rise.
Last month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it would be willing to approve a COVID-19 candidate vaccine with an efficacy of 50 percent. Such a vaccine would help slow the virus’s spread, but it probably wouldn’t extinguish the U.S. epidemic — even if all Americans got vaccinated.
If, say, only 42 percent of Americans got such a vaccine, then many lives would still be saved. As with the flu vaccine, some COVID-19 vaccines may not prevent infection entirely, but they could still prepare a person’s immune system and lessen symptoms, possibly eliminating them altogether. Transmission would be tamped down.
Even so, the pandemic would continue.
Experts are optimistic that the efficacy of whatever COVID-19 vaccines emerge will be higher than 50 percent. They’re also hopeful that uptake — i.e., the percentage of the population that agrees to get vaccinated in the near term — will exceed the 42 percent who already say they’re on board.
There’s good reason for hope. In the Yahoo New/YouGov polls, the number of Americans who say they won’t get vaccinated (between 19 and 25 percent) is lower than the number who say they’re not sure (between 26 and 33 percent). Together, the yeses and the not-sures account for about three-quarters of the population.
Given the unprecedented speed of the current development process — it’s possible that a COVID-19 vaccine could arrive three years faster than any previous vaccine — the public’s anxiety about cutting corners is understandable. Overall, 34 percent of Americans say they are “very concerned” about the safety of “fast-tracked” COVID-19 vaccines, according to the latest Yahoo News/YouGov survey. Another 35 percent say they are somewhat concerned.
“Why should we expect Americans to agree to a vaccine before one is even available?” coronavirus expert Natalie Dean, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida, recently wrote in the New York Times. “I’m a vaccine researcher, and even I would place myself in the ‘not sure’ bucket. What we have right now is a collection of animal data, immune response data and safety data based on early trials and from similar vaccines for other diseases. The evidence that would convince me to get a COVID-19 vaccine, or to recommend that my loved ones get vaccinated, does not yet exist.”
Once the large “phase III” or “efficacy” trials that are just getting underway deliver such evidence, the thinking goes, then a lot of not-sures will transform into yeses. And once a vaccine that regulators deem safe and effective is actually widely available — and once people see other people getting vaccinated without incident — then uptake will snowball. A new CBS News poll, for instance, shows that 50 percent of Americans say they will “wait and see” what happens to others before getting vaccinated themselves.
Nathanael Carlson of Nevada opens a coronavirus test kit during a preview of a COVID-19 testing site in Las Vegas. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
“It seems likely to me that many activities will require a vaccine, including many schools and some employers,” data journalist Nate Silver recently predicted. “If people see a vaccine as a ticket back to normal life, not just for society but also in a more literal way for themselves personally, that could encourage more vaccination.”
Yet there’s also reason to think people could be swayed in the opposite direction — that is, against getting vaccinated.
Just look what happened in the latest Yahoo News/YouGov poll when Americans were asked the same question — “Will you get vaccinated?” — but this time under various (realistic, even likely) conditions.
Would you take a vaccine if it caused side effects such as fever and headaches in one-third of recipients?
The yeses fell from 42 percent to 35 percent. The nos soared from 27 percent to 40 percent. And the not-sures fell from 32 percent to 25 percent.
Think about that for a second. Roughly 7 percent of those who said yes and another 7 percent of those who said they were not sure switched to no after finding out they might have a 1 in 3 chance of experiencing a fever or headache after getting inoculated against a virus that has killed more than 155,000 Americans since February.
Common side effects, in other words, were enough to transform COVID-19 vaccination from something that Americans favored by 15 points to something they opposed by 5.
Would you take a vaccine if it was only 60 percent effective at preventing COVID-19 infection?
Even more people said no in this scenario: 43 percent. Just 34 percent said yes and 23 percent said they were unsure.
Would you take a vaccine if it required multiple doses over a couple of weeks?
This was the most acceptable scenario, with the yeses (39 percent) and the nos (38 percent) evenly divided. Still, those numbers represented a 3-point decline for the yeses and an 11-point increase for the nos.
Would you take a vaccine if it required waiting in line for hours at a time or scheduling an appointment weeks in advance?
Nope — at least not according to 42 percent of Americans. Again, just 39 percent said yes.
Across the board, information about the potential downsides of vaccination — discomfort, inconvenience, less-than-total protection against the virus — reduced the number of people who said they would get vaccinated by several percentage points (3 to 7) while slashing the number who said they were unsure by more (7 to 13).
In all cases, the nos gained ground.
This suggests that Americans are just as ready to reject a potential COVID-19 as embrace it — especially because every one of these conditions is more likely than not to apply. In fact, all of them might apply at once.
Around one-third of the young, healthy people dosed with the COVID-19 vaccine under development by Oxford University and the drug giant AstraZeneca “experienced moderate or severe chills, fatigue, headache, malaise, and/or feverishness.”
Again, the FDA’s efficacy threshold is 50 percent, which is lower than 60 percent.
And it’s hard to imagine how a country that has taken six months to administer 52 million COVID-19 tests will be able to quickly administer 300 million doses of a vaccine — or 600 million, if a booster is required.
As a recent Washington Post report put it, “Deploying the vaccine to people in the United States and around the world will test and strain distribution networks, the supply chain, public trust and global cooperation. It will take months or, more likely, years to reach enough people to make the world safe.”
Given how fragile Americans’ current support for COVID-19 vaccination appears to be — a product, in part, of the tenacious anti-vaccination movement that has taken hold in the U.S. during the past decade or so — trust and cooperation may ultimately make the difference between a successful vaccine and an unsuccessful one.
It’s easy to imagine any number of ways that trust could be squandered and cooperation sabotaged — politics and polarization chief among them.
A Black Lives Matter counterprotester chants slogans during an "anti-mask" rally at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus. (Megan Jelinger/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
When asked about safety, nearly identical numbers of Republicans, Democrats and independents told Yahoo News and YouGov that they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned: about 70 percent. And even though Democrats tend to be about 20 points more likely than Republicans to say they will get vaccinated, Democratic intent to get the vaccine (down 15 points) has actually fallen more since early May than Republican intent (down 10 points).
Why? Probably because Democrats don’t trust President Trump to keep politics out of the process, considering that he has tied his reelection hopes to the vaccine, and the administration once announced an October (i.e., preelection) deadline for “broad access to the public.”
Meanwhile, only 26 percent of those who intend to vote for Trump say they trust experts such as “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and public health authorities” to “judge the risks of vaccines.” Among Joe Biden voters, that number is 68 percent.
With most experts predicting that a vaccine could arrive this winter, in the wake of what’s sure to be a very heated election, almost any misstep could transform it from a possible public health triumph into a politicized disappointment: supply-chain snafus, inequitable distribution, shortcuts on safety, inadequate expectation-setting about otherwise tolerable side effects or imperfections.
It’s a political minefield, and neither party is immune.
To make a COVID-19 vaccine work, Americans of all ideologies will need to get vaccinated. For months, we’ve been talking about the medical side of vaccination — and despite encouraging signs, there’s still no guarantee that a safe, effective vaccine will arrive on schedule.
But even if it does, the latest data suggests another, perhaps more unsettling possibility: that America could get the medicine right and still mess this up.
Several of the moments in Donald Trump’s interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios have gone viral for good reason, but the extended clip where the two men argue about how well the U.S. is doing when it comes to coronavirus cases is especially jaw-dropping—and informative. As Swan presses Trump on the terrible outcomes in the U.S., we get to to see how Trump’s mind works, beat by beat. It is, of course, terrifying.
Throughout the segment, Trump is shuffling and reshuffling a stack of charts of U.S. COVID-19 statistics, pulling out pieces of paper to try to make various points. And it’s obvious that these are charts his staff have given him to support his existing worldview: everything is fine. He’s doing a great job. The U.S. is not an international embarrassment. But in Swan he’s up against a relentless interviewer who politely but firmly insists on reality as the alternative to Trump’s charts, leaving Trump insisting that “You can’t do that” when Swan realizes “Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases. I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the U.S. is really bad. Much worse than South Korea, Germany, etc.”
That “You can’t do that” is so telling. Because it makes obvious both that Trump’s thinking is not agile and flexible enough to deal with information in a slightly different form than it has previously been presented to him and that no one in Trump’s orbit is giving him difficult facts, facts that in this case lay bare his failures. Specifically, the large death toll attached to his failures.
Trump’s appeal is supposed to be that he’s straightforward, tells a simple moral story. He may be lying and the moral story may be racist, but the man supposedly goes straight to the meat of things, uncomplicated by challenging details. Here, he’s frantically shuffling papers, looking for the statistic that will make him look good, while Swan returns repeatedly to a simple fact: “A thousand Americans have died today.” “60,000 Americans are in hospital. A thousand dying every day.” “It’s a thousand a day.” And that’s the information that Trump is so desperately trying to explain away by talking about cases and tests and here, look at this paper.
It’s devastating. Devastating to Trump because we see him so clearly. And devastating to the United States of America, because this is what we have to live under for at least another five and a half months, while people keep dying.
Trump: Take a look at some of these charts. Swan: I’d love to. Trump: We’re going to look. Swan: Let’s look. Trump: And if you look at death [shuffling papers] this one … Swan: Starting to go up again. Trump: Right here, United States is lowest in numerous categories, uh, we’re lower than the world. Swan: Lower than the world? Trump: Lower than Europe. Look, take a look. Right here. Here’s case deaths. Swan: Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases. I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the U.S. is really bad. Much worse than South Korea, Germany, etc. Trump: You can’t do that. Swan: Why can’t I do that? Trump: You have to go by where … look, here is the United States. You have to go by the cases, the cases— Swan: Why not as a proportion of population? Trump: When you have somebody, what it says is when you have somebody that has it, where there’s a case, the people that live from those cases. Swan: But surely a relevant statistic to say if the U.S. has X population and X percentage of death of that population … Trump: NO! Because you have to go by the cases. Swan: Look at South Korea, for example. 51 million population, 300 deaths. It’s like, it’s crazy— Trump: You don’t know that. Swan: I do! Trump: You don’t know that. Swan: You think they’re faking their statistics? South Korea? Trump: I won’t get into that because I have a very good relationship with the country, but you don’t know that. And they have spikes. Look here’s one right here, United States, you take the number of cases, we’re last, meaning we’re first. Swan: Last? I don’t know what we’re first in. What? Trump: Take a look! It’s cases! And we have cases [Crosstalk] Swan: Okay, um ... Trump: And we have cases ... Swan: A thousand Americans have died today. I understand with cases it’s different. Trump: No but you’re not reporting it correctly, Jonathan. Swan: I think I am, but— Trump: If you take a look at this other chart. This is our testing, I believe ... Swan: Yeah, we do more tests. Trump: Well, don’t we get credit for that? And because we do more tests, we have more cases. In other words, we test more, we have, now take a look, the top thing, that’s a good thing, Jonathan. Swan: If hospital rates were going down and deaths were going down, I’d say terrific. You deserve to be praised for testing, but they’re all going up. Trump: [Yelling] Swan: 60,000 Americans are in hospital. A thousand dying every day. Trump: —newspapers, they usually talk about new cases, new cases, new cases— Swan: I’m talking about death. It’s going up. Trump: Death is way down from where it was. Swan: It’s a thousand a day. It was two and a half thousand, it went down to 500, now it’s going up again. Trump: Death? Excuse me. Where it was is much higher than where it is right now. Swan: It went down and now it’s going up again. Trump: But now it’s going down again. It’s going down in Arizona, it’s going down in Florida, it’s going down— Swan: Nationally it’s going up. Trump: Take a look, these are the tests. Swan: It’s going down in Florida? Trump: Yeah, it leveled out and it’s going down, that’s my report as of yesterday.
●NC-Sen: Last week, at least three TV stations refused to air a NRSC commercial that falsely accused Democrat Cal Cunningham of personally benefiting from the federal coronavirus relief effort known as the Paycheck Protection Program.
WasteZero, where Cunningham served as an executive until March, received at least $1 million in government support, but the candidate was no longer on its payroll by then. WasteZero's CEO also said that Cunningham "was not involved in the application for PPP funds and did not benefit from them."
This is one of the highest-profile ad takedowns so far this cycle, so this is a good opportunity to explain why third-party ads are vulnerable to getting taken down like this.
Under federal law, broadcasters cannot censor or refuse to air ads from candidates as long as they're paid for. (In 2018, for example, a TV station in New Mexico had to run a spot from a Democrat who started his ad by saying, "Fuck the NRA.") Consequently, because they have no choice but to run such ads, stations have successfully argued that they should not be liable as publishers if they're ever sued for defamation for anything said in a candidate ad.
However, they're under no similar obligation to run ads from outside groups, which means that in those cases, stations are potentially liable for defamatory claims. Knowing this, campaigns try to hunt down inaccuracies (real or perceived) in third-party ads and demand that broadcasters stop airing them, with the stated or unstated threat that if they fail to comply, they could find themselves on the receiving end of a lawsuit.
Whether or not such a suit might ever succeed, TV and radio stations have to think hard every time as to whether they want to incur legal costs should a campaign ever follow through. In this case, a trio of North Carolina stations decided that the answer was no.
But not all broadcasters immediately roll over every time they get a lawyer letter. No one likes being bullied, but more to the point, these companies want the ad revenue. That's why they typically have their own legal departments review grievances like these to assess their merit. If they wind up disagreeing with the complainants, then they'll tell them to get lost and will keep running the ad in question.
It's also worth noting that sometimes, when a station nukes an ad, the group airing it will edit out or rephrase the offending material and then try to re-run it. That's exactly what happened here: The NRSC took down its spot, but, rather than stop attacking Cunningham for something he wasn't involved with, it began airing an edited version declaring that people "tied to Cal Cunningham" were benefiting from the Paycheck Protection Program.
