It appears that the COVID pandemic will not be a big issue in the 2024 election and perhaps we should be grateful for that. Just three years ago, the entire world was in the grip of a health crisis the likes of which we hadn't seen in over a century. In July of 2020 thousands of Americans were dying each day in the first wave of a deadly pandemic and Donald Trump was all over television alternately telling the people that they could cure themselves with unapproved drugs and bright light, or telling them that the virus was going away and we just needed to open up the economy and carry on as usual. It was a terrifying time and the trauma it caused has been very deep. More than a million people have died from COVID in the U.S. so far, leaving a much larger number of people dealing with grief, loss, financial hardship and the consequences of long-term illness.
It's only recently that it has started to feel like the country is getting back to normal: The economy has fully recovered and there's far more sense of freedom in our business and social interactions. But America may have changed permanently in some respects, and not necessarily for the better. The conspiracy theories that sprang up during the pandemic about vaccines and masks, along with a sense of mistrust in public health and science in general, were not entirely new. But they are having a powerful pernicious effect on our society in ways that will test us severely, especially now that such beliefs have become part of the right's tribal identity.
It's odd that the main purveyor of vaccine misinformation today isn't a Republican, but rather the son of one of the most beloved Democratic political leaders of the last century. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s perverse Democratic primary campaign is based almost entirely on the same anti-science, anti-government conspiracy theories that are being pushed by Republicans. Slick operators like Steve Bannon are advocating for Kennedy and he's been featured all over right-wing media for months now. Congressional Republicans even called him in to testify that his views have been censored for political reasons. (That was quite the show.) And his campaign appears to be largely financed by Republicans.
Kennedy is not a serious candidate. He basically serves as a performance artist for the entertainment of the right, which hopes or believes it can own the libs on a grand scale by promoting him. But it turns out that the COVID politics of 2020 just isn't playing in the Republican primary so far, and is not likely to be a major issue in next year's general election.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' campaign is floundering for many reasons, but one of those is his bad bet that he could successfully attack Trump from the right based on his pandemic response. DeSantis has staked his reputation and image on the fact that he supposedly managed the pandemic better than any other governor by ignoring the Trump administration's supposedly draconian lockdown policies. The idea here was that lingering anger among Republicans over being masked, jabbed and otherwise emasculated was going to make DeSantis seem more manly than the MAGA cult leader. Somehow it isn't working out that way. Rolling Stone reports:
Six different Republican operatives, campaign officials, and pollsters described or shared with Rolling Stone internal data and surveys they'd conducted or reviewed last and this year. ... Across the board in the surveys, Covid-related policy — including vaccines and vaccine mandates — did not rank as an item of high concern for voters. That held true even when voters were specifically given the option of Covid policy when asked about their concerns.
DeSantis' rise was predicated on his alleged refusal to order lockdowns and his defiance of vaccine mandates. But in fact, like almost every other governor he tried to distribute the vaccines as widely as possible once they became available, and has only gone full-blown anti-vaxxer since then. Last December he requested that the Florida Supreme Court empanel a grand jury investigation "to investigate crimes and wrongdoing committed against Floridians related to the Covid-19 vaccine."
And his campaign has tried to hit Trump for the one thing the then-president got right in his COVID response, which was to sign off on Operation Warp Speed to develop the vaccines as quickly as possible. Ironically, Trump can't take credit for that accomplishment because so many of his followers are vaccine conspiracy theorists, so he's just had to let DeSantis blast away at him for it. The good news for Trump is that nobody seems to care.
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The rest of us should care, however. Both of these men are world-class phonies when it comes to their leadership during the pandemic. Each of them claims to be a hero for ordering businesses to reopen when in most cases they were never really closed down. It's only in the fevered minds of those intent upon seeing the pandemic as some kind of political power play that any of the efforts to mitigate the spread of a deadly virus were police-state assaults on our individual freedoms.
MSNBC's Ari Melber hosted a special recently revisiting Trump's COVID response based on his recorded interviews with Bob Woodward, who released them along with his book "The Trump Tapes." When you listen to excerpts from those interviews it became clear once again just how irresponsible and reckless Trump was in his handling of the crisis. His only concern, the whole way through, was how it would affecting his re-election campaign. In an echo of his refusal to concede the election despite all the legitimate legal experts and campaign officials telling him that he'd lost, he also ignored all the science and medical experts who told him that COVID would kill vast numbers of people unless he mustered a rapid federal response. Trump just refuses to listen to anyone or hear anything he doesn't want to hear.
Perhaps the most telling moment on those tapes is when Woodward asks him if he considered the crisis his greatest test of leadership and he instantly replied, "No!" But it was. And he failed the test.
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Likewise, DeSantis' vaunted response was also a miserable failure. The New York Times analyzed the data on Florida and it's not good. DeSantis pushed for vaccinations for older people early on but started to reverse himself once they were approved for younger adults and then instituted a crusade against mandates for health workers and cruise ship employees, effectively undermining the accepted public health approach. Florida had many fewer vaccinated people when the big wave of the delta variant hit, and the consequences were severe:
Floridians died at a higher rate, adjusted for age, than residents of almost any other state during the Delta wave, according to the Times analysis. With less than 7 percent of the nation's population, Florida accounted for 14 percent of deaths between the start of July and the end of October.
The Sunshine State's leader was also planning for his presidential campaign and wanted to be on the side of emerging anti-vaxxer sentiment on the right, no matter how many people had to die.
Both of these men held positions of major responsibility during a time of great crisis and peril — and both of them cravenly and cynically put their political ambitions ahead of their duty to protect American citizens. Whatever promises they make now about the future, we already know who they are and what they will do as leaders. They failed their test in spectacular fashion, and have disqualified themselves from holding high office ever again.
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