logo
Why the COVID Deniers Won

Why the COVID Deniers Won

The Atlantic12-02-2025

Five years ago, the coronavirus pandemic struck a bitterly divided society.
Americans first diverged over how dangerous the disease was: just a flu (as President Donald Trump repeatedly insisted) or something much deadlier.
Then they disputed public-health measures such as lockdowns and masking; a majority complied while a passionate minority fiercely resisted.
Finally, they split—and have remained split—over the value and safety of COVID‑19 vaccines. Anti-vaccine beliefs started on the fringe, but they spread to the point where Ron DeSantis, the governor of the country's third-most-populous state, launched a campaign for president on an appeal to anti-vaccine ideology.
Five years later, one side has seemingly triumphed. The winner is not the side that initially prevailed, the side of public safety. The winner is the side that minimized the disease, then rejected public-health measures to prevent its spread, and finally refused the vaccines designed to protect against its worst effects.
David A. Graham: The noisy minority
Ahead of COVID's fifth anniversary, Trump, as president-elect, nominated the country's most outspoken vaccination opponent to head the Department of Health and Human Services. He chose a proponent of the debunked and discredited vaccines-cause-autism claim to lead the CDC. He named a strident critic of COVID‑vaccine mandates to lead the FDA. For surgeon general, he picked a believer in hydroxychloroquine, the disproven COVID‑19 remedy. His pick for director of the National Institutes of Health had advocated for letting COVID spread unchecked to encourage herd immunity. Despite having fast-tracked the development of the vaccines as president, Trump has himself trafficked in many forms of COVID‑19 denial, and has expressed his own suspicions that childhood vaccination against measles and mumps is a cause of autism.
The ascendancy of the anti-vaxxers may ultimately prove fleeting. But if the forces of science and health are to stage a comeback, it's important to understand why those forces have gone into eclipse.
From March 2020 to February 2022, about 1 million Americans died of COVID-19. Many of those deaths occurred after vaccines became available. If every adult in the United States had received two doses of a COVID vaccine by early 2022, rather than just the 64 percent of adults who had, nearly 320,000 lives would have been saved.
Why did so many Americans resist vaccines? Perhaps the biggest reason was that the pandemic coincided with a presidential-election year, and Trump instantly recognized the crisis as a threat to his chances for reelection. He responded by denying the seriousness of the pandemic, promising that the disease would rapidly disappear on its own, and promoting quack cures.
The COVID‑19 vaccines were developed while Trump was president. They could have been advertised as a Trump achievement. But by the time they became widely available, Trump was out of office. His supporters had already made up their minds to distrust the public-health authorities that promoted the vaccines. Now they had an additional incentive: Any benefit from vaccination would redound to Trump's successor, Joe Biden. Vaccine rejection became a badge of group loyalty, one that ultimately cost many lives.
We want to believe that somebody is in control, even if it's somebody we don't like. At least that way, we can blame bad events on bad people.
A summer 2023 study by Yale researchers of voters in Florida and Ohio found that during the early phase of the pandemic, self-identified Republicans died at only a slightly higher rate than self-identified Democrats in the same age range. But once vaccines were introduced, Republicans became much more likely to die than Democrats. In the spring of 2021, the excess-death rate among Florida and Ohio Republicans was 43 percent higher than among Florida and Ohio Democrats in the same age range. By the late winter of 2023, the 300-odd most pro-Trump counties in the country had a COVID‑19 death rate more than two and a half times higher than the 300 or so most anti-Trump counties.
In 2016, Trump had boasted that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. In 2021 and 2022, his most fervent supporters risked death to prove their loyalty to Trump and his cause.
Why did political fidelity express itself in such self-harming ways?
The onset of the pandemic was an unusually confusing and disorienting event. Some people who got COVID died. Others lived. Some suffered only mild symptoms. Others spent weeks on ventilators, or emerged with long COVID and never fully recovered. Some lost businesses built over a lifetime. Others refinanced their homes with 2 percent interest rates and banked the savings.
We live in an impersonal universe, indifferent to our hopes and wishes, subject to extreme randomness. We don't like this at all. We crave satisfying explanations. We want to believe that somebody is in control, even if it's somebody we don't like. At least that way, we can blame bad events on bad people. This is the eternal appeal of conspiracy theories. How did this happen? Somebody must have done it—but who? And why?
Compounding the disorientation, the coronavirus outbreak was a rapidly changing story. The scientists who researched COVID‑19 knew more in April 2020 than they did in February; more in August than in April; more in 2021 than in 2020; more in 2022 than in 2021. The official advice kept changing: Stay inside—no, go outside. Wash your hands—no, mask your face. Some Americans appreciated and accepted that knowledge improves over time, that more will be known about a new disease in month two than in month one. But not all Americans saw the world that way. They mistrusted the idea of knowledge as a developing process. Such Americans wondered: Were they lying before? Or are they lying now?
In a different era, Americans might have deferred more to medical authority. The internet has upended old ideas of what should count as authority and who possesses it.
The pandemic reduced normal human interactions. Severed from one another, Americans deepened their parasocial attachment to social-media platforms, which foment alienation and rage. Hundreds of thousands of people plunged into an alternate mental universe during COVID‑19 lockdowns. When their doors reopened, the mania did not recede. Conspiracies and mistrust of the establishment—never strangers to the American mind—had been nourished, and they grew.
The experts themselves contributed to this loss of trust.
It's now agreed that we had little to fear from going outside in dispersed groups. But that was not the state of knowledge in the spring of 2020. At the time, medical experts insisted that any kind of mass outdoor event must be sacrificed to the imperatives of the emergency. In mid-March 2020, federal public-health authorities shut down some of Florida's beaches. In California, surfers faced heavy fines for venturing into the ocean. Even the COVID‑skeptical Trump White House reluctantly canceled the April 2020 Easter-egg roll.
And then the experts abruptly reversed themselves. When George Floyd was choked to death by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020, hundreds of thousands of Americans left their homes to protest, defying three months of urgings to avoid large gatherings of all kinds, outdoor as well as indoor.
On May 29, the American Public Health Association issued a statement that proclaimed racism a public-health crisis while conspicuously refusing to condemn the sudden defiance of public-safety rules.
The next few weeks saw the largest mass protests in recent U.S. history. Approximately 15 million to 26 million people attended outdoor Black Lives Matter events in June 2020, according to a series of reputable polls. Few, if any, scientists or doctors scolded the attendees—and many politicians joined the protests, including future Vice President Kamala Harris. It all raised a suspicion: Maybe the authorities were making the rules based on politics, not science.
The politicization of health advice became even more consequential as the summer of 2020 ended. Most American public schools had closed in March. 'At their peak,' Education Week reported, 'the closures affected at least 55.1 million students in 124,000 U.S. public and private schools.' By September, it was already apparent that COVID‑19 posed relatively little risk to children and teenagers, and that remote learning did not work. At the same time, returning to the classroom before vaccines were available could pose some risk to teachers' health—and possibly also to the health of the adults to whom the children returned after school.
David Frum: I moved to Canada during the pandemic
How to balance these concerns given the imperfect information? Liberal states decided in favor of the teachers. In California, the majority of students did not return to in-person learning until the fall of 2021. New Jersey kept many of its public schools closed until then as well. Similar things happened in many other states: Illinois, Maryland, New York, and so on, through the states that voted Democratic in November 2020.
Florida, by contrast, reopened most schools in the fall of 2020. Texas soon followed, as did most other Republican-governed states. The COVID risk for students, it turned out, was minimal: According to a 2021 CDC study, less than 1 percent of Florida students contracted COVID-19 in school settings from August to December 2020 after their state restarted in-person learning. Over the 2020–21 school year, students in states that voted for Trump in the 2020 election got an average of almost twice as much in-person instruction as students in states that voted for Biden.
Any risks to teachers and school staff could have been mitigated by the universal vaccination of those groups. But deep into the fall of 2021, thousands of blue-state teachers and staff resisted vaccine mandates—including more than 5,000 in Chicago alone. By then, another school year had been interrupted by closures.
By disparaging public-health methods and discrediting vaccines, the COVID‑19 minimizers cost hundreds of thousands of people their lives. By keeping schools closed longer than absolutely necessary, the COVID maximizers hazarded the futures of young Americans.
Students from poor and troubled families, in particular, will continue to pay the cost of these learning losses for years to come. Even in liberal states, many private schools reopened for in-person instruction in the fall of 2020. The affluent and the connected could buy their children a continuing education unavailable to those who depended on public schools. Many lower-income students did not return to the classroom: Throughout the 2022–23 school year, poorer school districts reported much higher absenteeism rates than were seen before the pandemic.
Teens absent from school typically get into trouble in ways that are even more damaging than the loss of math or reading skills. New York City arrested 25 percent more minors for serious crimes in 2024 than in 2018. The national trend was similar, if less stark. The FBI reports that although crime in general declined in 2023 compared with 2022, crimes by minors rose by nearly 10 percent.
People who finish schooling during a recession tend to do worse even into middle age than those who finish in times of prosperity. They are less likely to marry, less likely to have children, and more likely to die early. The disparity between those who finish in lucky years and those who finish in unlucky years is greatest for people with the least formal education.
Will the harms of COVID prove equally enduring? We won't know for some time. But if past experience holds, the COVID‑19 years will mark their most vulnerable victims for decades.
The story of COVID can be told as one of shocks and disturbances that wrecked two presidencies. In 2020 and 2024, incumbent administrations lost elections back-to-back, something that hadn't happened since the deep economic depression of the late 1880s and early 1890s. The pandemic caused a recession as steep as any in U.S. history. The aftermath saw the worst inflation in half a century.
In truth, the story of COVID is a story of strength and resilience.
In the three years from January 2020 through December 2022, Trump and Biden both signed a series of major bills to revive and rebuild the U.S. economy. Altogether, they swelled the gross public debt from about $20 billion in January 2017 to nearly $36 billion today. The weight of that debt helped drive interest rates and mortgage rates higher. The burden of the pandemic debt, like learning losses, is likely to be with us for quite a long time.
Yet even while acknowledging all that went wrong, respecting all the lives lost or ruined, reckoning with all the lasting harms of the crisis, we do a dangerous injustice if we remember the story of COVID solely as a story of American failure. In truth, the story is one of strength and resilience.
Scientists did deliver vaccines to prevent the disease and treatments to recover from it. Economic policy did avert a global depression and did rapidly restore economic growth. Government assistance kept households afloat when the world shut down—and new remote-work practices enabled new patterns of freedom and happiness after the pandemic ended.
The virus was first detected in December 2019. Its genome was sequenced within days by scientists collaborating across international borders. Clinical trials for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine began in April 2020, and the vaccine was authorized for emergency use by the FDA in December. Additional vaccines rapidly followed, and were universally available by the spring of 2021. The weekly death toll fell by more than 90 percent from January 2021 to midsummer of that year.
The U.S. economy roared back with a strength and power that stunned the world. The initial spike of inflation has subsided. Wages are again rising faster than prices. Growth in the United States in 2023 and 2024 was faster and broader than in any peer economy.
Even more startling, the U.S. recovery outpaced China's. That nation's bounceback from COVID‑19 has been slow and faltering. America's economic lead over China, once thought to be narrowing, has suddenly widened; the gap between the two countries' GDPs grew from $5 trillion in 2021 to nearly $10 trillion in 2023. The U.S. share of world economic output is now slightly higher than it was in 1980, before China began any of its economic reforms. As he did in 2016, Trump inherits a strong and healthy economy, to which his own reckless policies—notably, his trade protectionism—are the only visible threat.
In public affairs, our bias is usually to pay most attention to disappointments and mistakes. In the pandemic, there were many errors: the partisan dogma of the COVID minimizers; the capitulation of states and municipalities to favored interest groups; the hypochondria and neuroticism of some COVID maximizers. Errors need to be studied and the lessons heeded if we are to do better next time. But if we fail to acknowledge America's successes—even partial and imperfect successes—we not only do an injustice to the American people. We also defeat in advance their confidence to collectively meet the crises of tomorrow.
Perhaps it's time for some national self-forgiveness here. Perhaps it's time to accept that despite all that went wrong, despite how much there was to learn about the disease and how little time there was to learn it, and despite polarized politics and an unruly national character— despite all of that —Americans collectively met the COVID‑19 emergency about as well as could reasonably have been hoped.
The wrong people have profited from the immediate aftermath. But if we remember the pandemic accurately, the future will belong to those who rose to the crisis when their country needed them.

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Trump seeks removal from a New Hampshire lawsuit challenging his order on transgender athletes
Trump seeks removal from a New Hampshire lawsuit challenging his order on transgender athletes

Yahoo

time34 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

Trump seeks removal from a New Hampshire lawsuit challenging his order on transgender athletes

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — President Donald Trump's administration wants to be dropped from a lawsuit in which two New Hampshire teens are challenging their state's ban on transgender athletes in girls' sports and the president's executive order on the same topic. Parker Tirrell, 16, and Iris Turmelle, 14, became first to challenge Trump's 'Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports' order when they added him to their ongoing lawsuit over New Hampshire's ban in February. A federal judge has ruled that they can try out and play on girls sports teams while the case proceeds. In a motion filed Friday, attorneys for the government say the teens are trying to 'drag the federal government into a lawsuit well under way not because of an imminent injury, but because of a generalized grievance with polices set by the President of the United States.' Deputy Associate Attorney General Richard Lawson argued that the government has done nothing yet to enforce the executive orders in New Hampshire and may never do so. 'Plaintiffs lack constitutional standing and their stated speculative risk of future injury is not close to imminent and may never become ripe,' wrote Lawson, who asked the judge to dismiss claims against Trump, the justice and education departments, and their leaders, Trump's executive order gives federal agencies wide latitude to ensure entities that receive federal funding abide by Title IX — which prohibits sexual discrimination in schools -- in alignment with the Trump administration's view a person's sex as the gender assigned at birth. Lawyers for the teens say the order, along with parts of a Jan. 20 executive order that forbids federal money from being used to 'promote gender ideology,' subjects the teens and all transgender girls to discrimination in violation of federal equal protection guarantees and their rights under Title IX. In its response, the government argues that the order does not discriminate based on sex because males and females are not similarly situated when it comes to sports. Transgender people represent a very small part of the nation's youth population – about 1.4% of teens ages 13 to 17, or around 300,000 people. But about half of the states have adopted similar measures to New Hampshire's sports ban, with supporters arguing that allowing transgender girls to play is unfair and dangerous. In interviews earlier this year, neither New Hampshire teen said they feel they hold any advantage over other players. Tirrell says she's less muscular than other girls on her soccer team, and Turmelle said she doesn't see herself as a major athlete. 'To the argument that it's not fair, I'd just like to point out that I did not get on the softball team,' Turmelle recalled of her tryout last year. 'If that wasn't fair, then I don't know what you want from me.'

L.A. immigration protests: California to sue Trump admin over National Guard deployment after dozens arrested, Waymos set on fire, freeways blocked
L.A. immigration protests: California to sue Trump admin over National Guard deployment after dozens arrested, Waymos set on fire, freeways blocked

Yahoo

time34 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

L.A. immigration protests: California to sue Trump admin over National Guard deployment after dozens arrested, Waymos set on fire, freeways blocked

The Los Angeles Police Department has declared all of downtown L.A. an unlawful assembly area after protests erupted over the weekend in response to the Trump administration's intensified immigration crackdown. President Trump sent National Guard troops into California without the consent of the governor, inflaming tensions between demonstrators and law enforcement that has led to dozens of arrests. At least 44 people were arrested by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents during a raid at several locations around Los Angeles on Friday, including Ambiance Apparel in the garment district and a Home Depot in the Westlake District. These areas are known to have significant migrant populations and labor-focused industries. Protests then erupted in Los Angeles in response to Trump's immigration crackdown that has seen federal agents arrest a student on his way to volleyball practice and erroneously deport a man to El Salvador. Sunday marked the third straight day of protests over the wave of immigration raids. Crowds gathered in downtown Los Angeles and Boyle Heights. Protesters marched from Boyle Heights to the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal building, in downtown L.A. This led to the LAPD declaring the area an unlawful assembly. Protesters moved from outside the federal building and walked onto the 101 Freeway, blocking it, around 3:30 p.m. local time. Police fired tear gas and other projectiles into the crowd and cleared the crowd by 5 p.m. Meanwhile, another protest started Sunday outside of Los Angeles City Hall Protesters outside the city's prison in Alameda were arrested, according to the LAPD. Around 300 National Guard troops arrived in Los Angeles County on Sunday after Trump deployed them to protect federal property and personnel, without the consent of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat with whom he often spars. As governor, Newsom would normally retain control and command over California's National Guard. The White House said the deployment was necessary to 'address the lawlessness' in the state, and initially stated that 2,000 troops were being deployed. About 500 Marines are also prepared to deploy to the area, the Northern Command said. It's the first time in nearly 60 years that a president has called in the National Guard without a state's request or consent. The last time was when President Lyndon Johnson sent the Guard to protect a 1965 civil rights march in Alabama. Newsom said California is suing the Trump administration over the federal mobilization of the National Guard. Newsom told MSNBC that Trump's federal mobilization of the National Guard was 'an illegal act, an immoral act, an unconstitutional act.' The governor also alleged that Trump is the one to blame for the escalation in California, saying, 'He's exacerbated the conditions. He's lit the proverbial match. He's putting fuel on this fire.' Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, told NBC News that anyone who obstructs immigration enforcement would be arrested. When asked if that would include Newsom or Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, he replied, 'I'll say it about anybody. … You cross that line, it's a felony to knowingly harbor and conceal an illegal alien. It's a felony to impede law enforcement doing their job.' Newsom responded to Homan's NBC interview on Sunday by saying: 'He knows where to find me.' Homan later clarified those remarks in an interview with Fox News. 'The reporter asked me, well, could Gov. Newsom or Mayor Bass be arrested? I said, 'Well no one's above the law — if they cross the line and commit a crime, absolutely they can.'' He added: 'There was no discussion about arresting Newsom.' The peaceful protests escalated into vandalism, autonomous cars set ablaze, fireworks and other objects thrown at law enforcement, police firing rubber bullets (including at an Australian journalist), and dozens of arrests by the LAPD. 'In recent days, many protests across the city have been peaceful and we thank the community for expressing their views and their frustration in a responsible manner,' LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell said in a Sunday news conference. 'However, when peaceful demonstrations devolve into acts of vandalism or violence, especially violence directed at innocent people, law enforcement officers and others, we must respond firmly.' McDonnell said that a total of 39 people had been arrested — 29 on Saturday and 10 on Sunday. He also said the LAPD was not given advance notice that federal operations would occur in the area. On Sunday, several Waymo driverless vehicles were vandalized and set on fire in downtown Los Angeles. A Waymo spokesperson told USA Today Monday morning that its autonomous vehicles have been removed from the area and the company has temporarily suspended its ride-hailing service 'out of an abundance of caution.' Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass told CNN on Monday that the situation has since calmed in the city. 'If you dial back time and go to Friday, if immigration raids had not happened here, we would not have had the disorder that went on last night,' Bass said. 'We do not know where and when the next raids will be. That is the concern because people in this city have a rapid response network.' 'If they see ICE, they go out, and they protest, and so it's just a recipe for pandemonium that is completely unnecessary,' Bass added.

California Lt. Governor says Los Angeles riots are 'generated by Donald Trump'
California Lt. Governor says Los Angeles riots are 'generated by Donald Trump'

Yahoo

time34 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

California Lt. Governor says Los Angeles riots are 'generated by Donald Trump'

California Lieutenant Gov. Eleni Kounalakis insisted the ongoing anti-ICE riots happening in Los Angeles on Sunday were a direct result of President Donald Trump's actions. Riots broke out in Los Angeles on Friday and Saturday as immigration officials carried out raids to remove individuals illegally residing in the city. On Saturday, Trump deployed the National Guard to quell the violence, though California Gov. Gavin Newsom accused the president of simply wanting a "spectacle." Kounalakis, a Democrat, echoed Newsom's sentiment on "CNN Newsroom" by suggesting the demonstrations were peaceful and manageable before Trump was involved. Sen. Cory Booker Calls Los Angeles Riots 'Peaceful,' Slams Trump For Deploying National Guard "What started yesterday was about 400 protesters in two separate locations. 400 altogether, and local law enforcement was absolutely capable of managing those kinds of protests," Kounalakis said. "So bringing in the National Guard, threatening now to bring in the Marines, this is a crisis that is being ginned up and generated by Donald Trump for more of his political theater. It's deeply concerning that he is attempting to rile people up in this way." Kounalakis added that the "biggest concern" was the ongoing raids conducted by the Trump administration in major cities like Los Angeles. She claimed people who are only being "profiled" as undocumented immigrants were "being swept up in them." Read On The Fox News App "It is not what I think most people thought when the president said that he was going to go after violent criminals, going into kitchens and rounding people up and asking for their papers, detaining them. That's really the precursor to it all." She continued, "But even as people are voicing their disagreement with that, calling in the National Guard in the way that he did was not necessary. Absolutely overkill and seems to now be escalating the problem because of Donald Trump's actions." Click Here For More Coverage Of Media And Culture Kounalakis also revealed a lawsuit will likely be filed against the Trump administration for the deployment. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the president sending in the National Guard in an X post on Monday, saying, "Gavin Newsom did nothing as violent riots erupted in Los Angeles for days." She went on to say that the governor "was too weak to protect the city." The riots entered their third day in California on Sunday, forcing officials to shut down the 101 Freeway. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said 500 Marines are on a "prepared to deploy" status and 2,000 California Army National Guard soldiers have been placed under federal command and control. There are currently 300 members of the California Army National Guard's combat team deployed in several article source: California Lt. Governor says Los Angeles riots are 'generated by Donald Trump'

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store