Emergency Medial Technicians with the Albany County Sheriff's Department administer a booster COVID-19 vaccine shot in 2021.

In his first term as president, Donald J. Trump badly mismanaged America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He denied its severity, promoted dubious treatments, and fed skepticism about strategies like wearing masks and social distancing. By some estimates, including those cited in a study on the National Institutes of Health’s website, more than 200,000 of the nation’s 1.2 million fatalities may be attributable to his administration’s failures.

Now, Mr. Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seem determined to repeat that performance.

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But there is a dangerous and reprehensible difference this time: The first Trump administration was guilty largely of a failure of leadership that the public and private health care........

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