It appears that COVID is not going to be a big issue in the 2024 election and perhaps we should be grateful for that. It was only three years ago that the entire world was in a health crisis the likes of which we hadn’t seen in over a hundred years. In July of 2020 tens of thousands of Americans were dying each day in the first wave of a deadly pandemic and President Donald Trump was all over television alternately telling the people that they could cure themselves with unapproved drugs like Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin or telling them that the virus was going away and the economy needed to just open up and carry on as usual. It was a terrifying time and the trauma it caused has been very deep. 1.1 million people have died from COVID in the U.S. so far leaving many more family members and friends dealing with the grief and the loss.
It’s only recently that it has felt like the country is getting back to normal with the economy fully recovering and a sense of freedom in our business and social interactions. But we 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 and a sense of mistrust in public health and science in general are having a pernicious effect on our society in ways that are going to test us in the future especially now that they have become part of the right’s tribal identity.
It’s odd that the main purveyor of vaccine misinformation today isn’t a Republican, it’s the son of one of the most beloved Democrats of the 20th century, Robert F. Kennedy. RFK 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 before congress to testify that his views have been censored for political reasons. (It was quite the show.) And it’s mostly Republicans who are financing his campaign.
Kennedy is not a serious candidate and basically serves as a performance artist for the entertainment of the right wing which thinks it’s owning the libs by promoting him. But the COVID politics of 2020 just aren’t playing in the GOP primary and it’s highly unlikely to be a big issue in the general election.
Florida Gov. DeSantis’s primary campaign is floundering for many reasons but one of them is his bet that he could successfully attack Donald Trump from the right on his pandemic response. He staked a good bit of his reputation and image on the fact that he supposedly ran the best COVID response of any state by ignoring the Trump administration’s allegedly draconian lockdown policies. The ongoing anger among Republicans over that was going to show him to be more Manly than MAGA but it isn’t working out that way.
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 against vaccine mandates. But he’s gone full-blown anti-vaxx since then. As recently as December he requested that the Supreme Court of Florida empanel a grand jury investigation “to investigate crimes and wrongdoing committed against Floridians related to the Covid-19 vaccine.” That’s right — “crimes and wrongdoing.”
And his campaign has hit Trump hard for the one thing he did right in his COVID response which was to sign off on operation Warp Speed to develop the vaccines as quickly as possible. Ironically, Trump isn’t allowed to take credit for that accomplishment because his followers are anti-vaxx so he’s had to allow DeSantis to attack him for it. The good news for Trump is that nobody cares.
The rest of the country should care, however. Both of these men are world class phonies when it comes to their leadership during the pandemic. They each claim they were heroes for forcing businesses to open up when the truth is 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 act, that any of the mitigation efforts were draconian assaults on our individual freedoms.
MSNBC’s Ari Melber hosted a special recently revisiting Trump’s COVID response based upon his taped interviews with Bob Woodward, who released them with a book called “The Trump Tapes.” Listening to the excerpts of the interviews it became clear once again just how irresponsible and reckless Trump was in his handling of the crisis. It was all about how it was affecting his re-election campaign. In an echo of his refusing to concede the election despite all the legitimate legal election experts telling him that he’d lost, he also ignored all the science and medical experts who informed that COVID was going to 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 of the tapes is when Woodward asks him if he considered the crisis his greatest test of leadership and he instantly replied, “no!” He was wrong. It was. And he failed.
Likewise Ron Desantis’ vaunted response was also a miserable failure. The NY Times analyzed the data on his state’s results and they are not good. DeSantis pushed for vaccinations for people 65 and older early on but started going the other way once they were approved for younger people and then instituted a crusade against mandates for health workers and cruise ship employees effectively undermining the accepted public health approach to a pandemic. Florida ended up with many fewer vaccinated people when the big Delta wave 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.
He too was planning for his presidential campaign and wanted to be on the side of the emerging anti-vaxx sentiments on the right, no matter how many people had to die.
Both of these men were serving as executive leaders during a time of great crisis and peril. And they both cravenly and cynically put their political ambitions ahead of their duty to protect American citizens. Whatever promises they make about the future we already know who they are and what they will do as leaders. They failed their test and disqualified themselves for high office ever in the future.