Why the COVID Deniers Won
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.
[From the January/February 2021 issue: Ed Yong on how science beat the virus]
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.
[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 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.
This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “Why the COVID Deniers Won.”