President Garvey Attends Rose Garden Event

Photo Courtesy of ABC News

By Angela Hickey

Catholic University President John Garvey attended the September 26 White House Rose Garden event for Supreme Court Judge nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, that seemed to be on the news cycle for weeks after it was discovered that many of the guests, including the president and first lady, had contracted COVID-19 afterward. 

Attending this close-knit, invite-only event, Garvey never felt as if he was at risk of catching the virus, especially considering he was one of the very few attendees to wear a mask. 

“I’m not particularly concerned about [the virus], but I am worried about the message that I send and about communicating to our students that [wearing a mask] is important to do,” Garvey said.

On March 19, President Garvey announced to the Catholic University community that he has tested positive for coronavirus following a business trip abroad and had been adhering to CDC guidelines during his quarantine. 

The event had received major backlash from news outlets after photos surfaced, mostly because nearly every attendee was seemingly breaking COVID-19 guidelines. There were photos of party-goers refusing to wear masks, eating and drinking near one another, and even sitting closer than six feet away from one another. People were outraged by this seemingly blatant disregard of social distancing, and the repercussions of this event came to fruition only five days later.

Yet, Garvey stated that felt very safe at the event, saying that everyone was adequately informed of the virus. When speakers, such as the president or Judge Barrett, formally addressed the guests, they followed the typical protocol many others seem to follow while speaking. 

“When you’re speaking, you don’t need to speak through a mask, you notice this with TV personalities,” Garvey said. “Some of them tend to wear masks and some of them not when they’re speaking, but the president and Judge Barrett were six feet apart at all times and speaking into a microphone, so I think it was appropriate for them not to be wearing masks.”

Also in attendance at the Rose Garden event was Notre Dame University President Rev. John I. Jenkins. Jenkins was one of the eleven attendees to contract coronavirus, causing outrage among students and staff at his university. Jenkins’ reported disregard for social distancing guidelines, as well as his previous incidents involving his disregard of social distancing guidelines, have caused an uproar among the students and faculty of Notre Dame. His recent positive diagnosis has even prompted students to begin petitioning for his resignation, angry over what students consider to be blatant “hypocrisy.”

“My concern was that whatever I did would be seen by our students and our faculty, and I wanted to send a message to them because my principal concern is we get [the university] as open as we can as fast as we can, and the way to do that is for people to engage in safe behavior and to be able to do surveillance testing that lets us catch cases early,” Garvey said. 

The sudden rise in positive diagnosis prompted USA Today to begin attempting to identify every person who may have attended the event. The team at USA Today has been attempting to identify every one of the over 200 individuals who attended the event solely through photos and eye witness testimonies. It has only managed to properly identify a fraction of the individuals who attended the event.

While discussing social distancing guidelines, Garvey expressed his thoughts on how mask-wearing has become more of a political debate tactic than anything else. 

“I’m not sure I understand why it should divide the way it does along political lines because there isn’t any natural fault line about mask-wearing. Republicans should be as concerned as Democrats about the spread of the virus; Democrats should be as concerned as Republicans about people needing to get to work and go to school and do their jobs,” Garvey said. “You can see a world where both parties landed in the same place about this, so I’m not clear on why that is.”

Garvey then expressed his dissatisfaction with how the media plays into this political ploy, stating how it was used especially after news broke of how COVID-19 spread at the event.

“It was the top story or the second story on the top of the news cycle for a week. After a while I just got tired of hearing it; it wasn’t interesting anymore. But I think it kept playing because of the political aspect of it,” Garvey said. “We should do what’s best for public health and leave it at that.” 

All in all, Garvey was glad to go to the event, proud to support a former student and family friend.

“I was very glad I went to the event,” Garvey said. “The judge is a long time friend of mine and a former student of mine. I sat right behind her sisters at the event and I was just very proud and happy to be there. I was very happy to be invited.”