Next year marks a grim anniversary, five years since COVID reached the U.S. A half decade of mass death has political consequences that are just becoming clear. No one disputes that the pandemic was the site of injustice, but they disagree on who the victims were. To the left, the pandemic exacerbated disparities that the U.S. has long refused to address. To the right, lockdowns, mask requirements and vaccine mandates represented a kind of tyranny. The former conclusion is more accurate, but the latter is ascendant.
Donald Trump has nominated a handful of figures who shared a basic hostility toward public health interventions during the height of the pandemic, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who opposed the COVID vaccine and claimed in 2023 that the virus had been “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” while sparing Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. Dr. Mehmet Oz, chosen to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, even hawked quack treatments for COVID. Their rise, like Trump’s return to power, reveals hostility towards the mainstream, and with it, a sharp breakdown in public trust.
Certain public health interventions ask people to change their behaviors – to wear masks, or get vaccinated, or drink fluoridated water — predicated on the conviction that the government is protecting their interests. Trump often said they couldn’t, even when meant undermining members of his own administration. In April 2020, as the virus raged through the country, Trump said of the CDC’s masking guidance that “You don’t have to do it…I don’t think I’m going to be doing it.” Later, in August, he equivocated, saying, “We have urged Americans to wear masks, and I emphasized this is a patriotic thing to do. Maybe they’re great, and maybe they’re just good. Maybe they’re not so good.” (There is now significant evidence that wearing masks can reduce the spread of COVID.)
Though Trump is often credited for the success of Operation Warp Speed, which produced several COVID vaccines for use in the U.S., the rollout of the shots was flawed and resulted in chaos for medical providers. ProPublica reported in January 2021 that hospitals and clinics often had to cancel vaccination appointments because vaccine availability fluctuated from week to week and sometimes from day to day. Meanwhile, advisors close to Trump denounced masks and promoted a herd immunity-first strategy, though it has been widely discredited by the scientific community.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s selection to run the National Institutes of Health, suggested in a March 2020 editorial for The Wall Street Journal that COVID wouldn’t be as deadly as the flu. The virus would quickly prove him wrong, but months later, he would co-author the Great Barrington Declaration, which promoted safeguarding only high-risk people and urged a quick return to “normal life” for low-risk people, even though vaccines were not yet available. There was and remains little scientific evidence to support the declaration’s conclusions, as its critics pointed out at the time. In fact it seemed overtly partisan rather than scientific: As the New York Times reported not long after the declaration’s publication, it “grew out” of a meeting organized by the right-leaning American Institute for Economic Research.
Another Trump pick, Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon and cancer specialist, is a vocal critic of masking and wrote in February 2021 that “COVID will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.” Makary wasn’t alone in that prediction, but some experts did fault his view at the time, and subsequent omicron and delta variants would go on to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans, as CBS News pointed out in a piece on Makary’s nomination to lead the Food and Drug Administration. Both physicians could work closely with Kennedy if they are all confirmed by the Senate. Their potential collaboration signals trouble ahead for science and public health, as Kennedy denies mainstream science outright. In a 2020 speech resurfaced by The Bulwark earlier this year, Kennedy said that much of the pandemic “feels very planned to me” and added, “I don’t know. I will tell you this: If you create these mechanisms for control, they become weapons of obedience for authoritarian regimes no matter how beneficial or innocent the people who created them.”
Kennedy doesn’t have a popular mandate for his conspiracies. Most Americans complied with public health advice while the pandemic was at its worst, while Kennedy’s presidential campaign flamed out quickly. At the same time, anti-vaccine sentiment appears to be rising within the GOP and its base. A 2023 poll from Politico/Morning Consult found that “Republican voters are less likely than Democrats or independents to say vaccines are safe for children,” a change from pre-COVID polling which found little partisan difference in attitudes toward vaccination.
Why the shift? The columnist Jeet Heer has spoken of a reconfiguration in American politics, and a divide between pro- and anti-system ways of thinking. The left can tap into anti-system politics to great effect, as Sen. Bernie Sanders did during his campaigns for president. Liberals are less inclined to subvert that system and the political economy it represents, and we see the consequences now. President Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020 because he pledged a return to normal, and then a subsequent cost of living crisis proved that normal wasn’t working for millions. To many, Trump seemed like an anti-system candidate, a champion who could shake up Washington and fix what’s broken. This isn’t amnesia or mass delusion, but something else: a legible reaction to real political dysfunction. Although the system was failing long before COVID appeared, mass death brought its problems to the fore.
The pandemic ushered in a revelatory period in public life, and it is still reshaping American politics. In the absence of a truthful narrative about who is failing the public and why, people are vulnerable to alternative stories and may invent their own villains. They could blame vaccines, and the experts who promote them; they could believe a demagogue like Trump over the average defender of science. The base will justify whatever Trump does, but others will be disappointed. Trump is a servant of capital, not the people, and if his administration successfully weakens public health and its institutions, there will be more suffering. The solution is not a yard sign which proclaims that in this house we believe science is real. People need a new system, one that works for them. Until then, our pain will fester.
