“The vice president admittedly was in a difficult situation; he was asked to lead a project where his boss wasn’t on board,” said Senator Angus King, independent of Maine, who clashed with Mr. Pence during an April conference call about coronavirus testing. During that call, Mr. King erupted at the vice president for what he believed were his evasive answers.

“And so, the question is: To what extent, if any, did he try to push back on the president, minimizing masks, minimizing testing, continually claiming the virus was behind us?” Mr. King said. “And it looks like he didn’t.”

He said Mr. Pence “was complicit in the real abdication of the federal role in confronting” the pandemic.

Several people directly engaged in the pandemic response said that Mr. Pence, whose stewardship of the task force was a subtext of the vice-presidential debate on Wednesday, was respectful of scientific arguments and often was a calming presence amid fractious arguments about how best to respond to the virus.

But his inclination to stay above the fray was also seen by some people involved in the effort as a fault, allowing an aggressive team of political aides to gain outsize influence over scientific decisions and allowing a task force created to protect public health to morph at times into an operation bent on carrying out the president’s agenda.

Mr. Pence acknowledged these political crosswinds this year during a quiet moment with a member of his staff. “Fighting a pandemic of this magnitude is very hard,” he said. “Fighting a pandemic in an election year is even harder.”

Mr. Pence took over the coronavirus response in late February, a time of reluctant recognition inside the White House that Mr. Trump’s reassurances that the pandemic posed little threat was detached from reality.

Source: New York Times

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