By David Frumm
Wednesday, February 12, 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.
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.
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.
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 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
trillion in January 2017 to more than $36 trillion 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.
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