The coronavirus crisis is a war against a disease, but it’s also the most serious battle yet in the war on truth. That much was clear from the start, as China moved to hush up the first outbreak and gag the doctor who had spotted it. It was a classic case of what we might call Chernobyl syndrome: the tendency of authoritarian systems to react to disaster by rushing to downplay or cover up the problem, focusing more on shifting blame than tackling the threat head on. Viewers of last year’s TV dramatisation of the Chernobyl nuclear accident could recognise the pattern immediately, as the priority of those in charge becomes avoiding embarrassment rather than saving lives.

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There was some of that in the Iranian reaction to the virus, as the country’s deputy health minister coughed and sweated his way through a press conference called to reassure citizens, only later for it to be confirmed that he had himself been infected. (There were already suspicions, since Tehran’s official numbers didn’t add up.) And there was a grim logic to the fact that at the heart of the outbreak in South Korea is a religious sect similarly devoid of transparency.

Usually, the democratic world can contrast itself flatteringly with such closed, controlled societies, proud that its approach to calamity is openness and the free flow of information. Indeed, crises like this one can serve as test cases for the competing merits of free systems v authoritarian ones. True, democracies cannot match Beijing’s ability to lock down whole cities and build an entire hospital in a week. But when it comes to a global pandemic, it’s free speech, full disclosure and cross-border scientific cooperation that ultimately save lives.

Q&A How can I protect myself and others from the coronavirus outbreak? Show Hide The World Health Organization is recommending that people take simple precautions to reduce exposure to and transmission of the coronavirus, for which there is no specific cure or vaccine. The UN agency advises people to: Frequently wash their hands with an alcohol-based hand rub or warm water and soap

Cover their mouth and nose with a flexed elbow or tissue when sneezing or coughing

Avoid close contact with anyone who has a fever or cough

Seek early medical help if they have a fever, cough and difficulty breathing, and share their travel history with healthcare providers

Advice about face masks varies. Wearing them while out and about may offer some protection against both spreading and catching the virus via coughs and sneezes, but it is not a cast-iron guarantee of protection Many countries are now enforcing or recommending curfews or lockdowns. Check with your local authorities for up-to-date information about the situation in your area. In the UK, NHS advice is that anyone with symptoms should stay at home for at least 7 days. If you live with other people, they should stay at home for at least 14 days, to avoid spreading the infection outside the home.

Except this time, the familiar authoritarian v democratic contrast has become muddled. That’s because the current leader of the world’s most powerful democracy, the US, has the same instincts as the authoritarian rulers he so admires, and those instincts have coloured his response to coronavirus. The result is that what for many must have seemed an abstract concern – Donald Trump’s assault on facts, experts and science – is now a matter of life and death.

So while US medical officials have been at pains to brace Americans for the inevitability of coronavirus – a matter of when, not if – Trump and his outriders have worked hard to minimise the threat. On Thursday, Trump repeatedly referred to the figure of “15” cases in the US, when the actual figure was 60, and promised that that number would go down rather than up: “It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

Trump’s chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, breezily assured the US public that the bug had been contained and that the country was sealed “pretty close to airtight” against the disease, when of course it is not. One of the administration’s most influential propagandists – for whom Trump paused his state of the union address this month so that his wife, Melania, might garland him with America’s highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom – the talk radio host Rush Limbaugh has been telling his vast audience that “the coronavirus is the common cold, folks”, and that it had been “overhyped” and “weaponised … to bring down Donald Trump”.

Play Video 1:42 Trump says coronavirus spread not ‘inevitable' – video

Trump has nodded in a similarly conspiracist direction, tweeting that the media are doing all they can “to make the Caronavirus [sic] look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible”. That reference to the markets is key. Trump believes his chances of re-election in November hinge on his stewardship of the economy, betting that voters will back him if their pensions – linked to the stock market – are up. That the Dow Jones suffered the biggest one-day drop in its history on Thursday has him rattled.

And so his first instinct is that of the Manhattan hustler-hotelier loudly assuring guests that the strong smell of burning coming from the ground floor is merely the chef trying out a new barbecue rather than a sign that the building is on fire. Crucial to that effort is talking loudly over the fire marshals, or even gagging them altogether.

You could see that when Trump spoke in the White House briefing room, brazenly contradicting the experts by his side. But it’s now become formal policy, with Trump’s insistence that all federal officials – including those with deep scientific expertise – are to say nothing that has not first been authorised by the White House.

Note the fate of Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. On Thursday he dared say that “we are dealing with a serious virus” with a higher mortality rate than regular flu. That was deemed insufficiently upbeat for the great leader. According to the New York Times, “Dr Fauci has told associates that the White House had instructed him not to say anything else without clearance.”

The new mantra, it seems, is to be one of Trump’s favourite phrases: repeated again on Thursday: “Nobody really knows.” That could be the motto of post-truthists such as Trump, conveying the hope that voters will become confused, concluding that no truth is ever even possible, and that in the fog of information and rumour it’s best simply to trust the man in charge. That’s what Trump wants every American to believe, about coronavirus and everything else for that matter: nobody really knows.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Donald Trump and Mike Pence at a White House press conference on the coronavirus outbreak. Photograph: Barcroft Media/Barcroft Media via Getty Images

Now Trump has put his slavishly deferential vice-president, Mike Pence, in charge of the coronavirus effort. Put aside Pence’s appalling record as governor of Indiana, when his response to an HIV outbreak was to veto a medically recommended needle exchange programme and to offer his prayers instead.

Focus instead on the fact that Pence has been appointed over the head of the health secretary, Alex Azar, whom Trump deemed too “alarmist”. In that same spirit, Trump has gutted the very agencies that the US will now desperately rely on. In 2018, he slashed health spending by $15bn, binning the Obama-era programmes and teams established for the express purpose of leading the US response to a pandemic. Among those cut: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – now in the frontline against coronavirus – which was forced to reduce by 80% its efforts to prevent global disease outbreak. The consequences are clear enough: only eight of the US’s 100 public-health labs are now even able to test for Covid-19.

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This onslaught against the health agencies is of a piece with Trump’s entire approach to data, science and truth. You might remember “Sharpiegate”, when the president all but got out a black marker pen and amended a map issued by the key US meteorological agency so that it appeared to support his tweeted, and false, claim that Alabama was about to get hit by a hurricane. Trump has installed cronies and business pals at the helm of a raft of agencies previously respected as providers of neutral, factual data, the better to ensure those bodies say only what he wants them to say. He has moved to shrink their budgets – whether at the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps or the Census Bureau – and allowed experts with deep knowledge to retire and not be replaced.

We can’t say we weren’t warned. On Trump’s first full day in office, he telephoned the head of the National Park Service, angered by photographs showing that crowds that had gathered for his inauguration the previous day were smaller than those for Barack Obama. The head of the NPS duly passed on the instruction from the president, and new, more flattering images appeared.

We laughed about it at the time because it was so petty, so vain and so trivial. But the mindset was clear. The US president is a man who does not want the facts or the truth. He wants only what makes him look good. That impulse might not have mattered much in January 2017. But it matters gravely now.

• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist