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Two of the Trump administration’s top medical experts tried to prop up shaky public confidence in a COVID-19 vaccine at a Senate hearing Wednesday amid questions of political interference in this campaign year. “We have unprecedented levels of vaccine hesitancy in our country and globally,” said Surgeon General Jerome Adams, appearing with National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins before the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. “I think it’s also important to understand we have a once-in-a-century pandemic superimposed on top of a presidential election, and that’s made messaging even more difficult and concerning. (Kopp, 9/9)

Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, took issue on Wednesday with President Trump’s suggestion that a coronavirus vaccine would be available by Election Day, as he repeatedly sought to reassure senators and the public that a vaccine would not be made available to the public unless it was safe and effective. “Certainly, to try to predict whether it happens on a particular week before or after a particular date in early November is well beyond anything that any scientist right now could tell you and be confident they know what they are saying,” Dr. Collins told a Senate panel at a hearing on the effort to find a vaccine. (9/9)

Top federal health officials tried to reassure lawmakers on Wednesday that politics will not play a role in determining whether a COVID-19 vaccine is approved, amid fears that President Trump is politicizing the process. “Science and science alone will be the way in which this decision is made, otherwise I’ll have no part in it,” Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. (Hellmann, 9/9/20)

A new poll paints a bleak picture of Americans’ views toward the coronavirus pandemic. The poll, from the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, finds that the public’s trust in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S.’s top doctors, like Anthony Fauci, is rapidly dropping, particularly among Republicans. It also finds that a sizable percentage of Americans still hold a number of incorrect beliefs about the pandemic, and that less than half of Americans surveyed would want to get vaccinated against Covid-19 if a vaccine was available before November. (Florko, 9/10)

A Trump administration appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services is trying to prevent Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, from speaking about the risks that coronavirus poses to children. Emails obtained by POLITICO show Paul Alexander — a senior adviser to Michael Caputo, HHS’s assistant secretary for public affairs — instructing press officers and others at the National Institutes of Health about what Fauci should say during media interviews. The Trump adviser weighed in on Fauci’s planned responses to outlets including Bloomberg News, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post and the science journal Cell. (Owermohle, 9/9)

Kaiser Health News: Most Adults Wary Of Taking Any Vaccine Approved Before The Election 

The public is deeply skeptical about any coronavirus vaccine approved before the November election, and only 42% would be willing to get a vaccine in that scenario, according to a new poll. The results of the poll by KFF reveal widespread concern that the Trump administration will bring pressure on drug regulators to approve a vaccine before the election without ensuring it is safe and effective. (KHN is an editorially independent program of KFF.) (Rau, 9/10)