The American right sacrificed its supporters to its COVID-era delusions and lies. Right-wing politicians and media influencers disparaged masking. They derided safety advice against indoor gatherings. They spread crazy lies about COVID vaccines once those became generally available. Many conservative Americans who made the mistake of trusting their political and media leaders paid with their life.
Pew Research Center compared the 20 percent of the U.S. population who lived in the country’s most pro-Trump counties with the 20 percent who lived in the most pro-Biden counties. The most pro-Trump counties suffered nearly 70,000 more COVID deaths than the most pro-Biden counties did.
In the face of right-wing resistance, the United States fully vaccinated only about 66 percent of the population by the end of April 2022. Had the U.S. achieved full vaccination within the first 16 months that the shots were available—as was materially feasible—the death rate from COVID could have been cut in half, according to some estimates, and more than 300,000 lives could have been saved.
If you are hunting for a COVID villain or villains, then, there are many beckoning targets. Investigate the crooks who promoted quack remedies such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for profit or plain crackpot mania. Investigate the sources and pathways of anti-vaccine disinformation. Investigate the pattern and funding of Russian support for anti-vaccine disinformation by following the map already provided by the U.S. State Department’s work on the subject. Investigate the response by U.S. public-health agencies, including the CDC, to better prepare for the next pandemic.
But the present Congress is investigating none of that. Instead, a Senate committee has fixed on Anthony Fauci, the physician and pandemic-era chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The Senate obtained his diary—reportedly from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who claims to have found it on a government server—and then, outrageously and gratuitously, published 1,100 pages of it for the world to see.
[Read: The unmaking of Anthony Fauci]
Regarding the many accusations and insinuations hurled at Fauci, the first thing to be said is this: Even if any of them were true, none would have made the slightest difference to the immediate and urgent problem—what to do to save lives from a deadly new virus.
Senator Rand Paul and others want Americans to believe that Fauci was aware of the possibility that the coronavirus was intentionally created in a Chinese lab, even as he insisted in public comments that the virus had a natural origin. He may not have been forthcoming; the scientific verdict remains uncertain. But whatever its origin, the virus really killed people. The U.S. scientific community’s first and supreme job was to protect people. It did. Scientists discovered and developed the COVID vaccines that brought the pandemic to an end. It’s the anti-vaxxers, not the scientific community, who should stand indicted in the light of 2026.
Did scientists, including Fauci, sometimes speak with excessive certainty about the extent of their knowledge in the early weeks of the pandemic? Perhaps. That seems a lesser offense, however, than the president putting American lives at risk by consciously telling lies for personal advantage.
When the pandemic struck, President Trump’s immediate concern was that it might depress the stock market. Trump had started a trade war with China in February 2018. That trade war tumbled U.S. capital markets; at the end of that year, The Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. stock indexes had suffered their steepest annual drop since the global economic crisis of 2008. Trump’s priority in 2019 was to negotiate a face-saving exit from his failing trade war. That December, Trump unveiled a “Phase One” deal —but markets remained nervous and skeptical. When reports spread about a lethal outbreak in China, Trump appointed himself chief international cheerleader for the Chinese government. CNN counted 37 separate compliments by Trump to Chinese leaders in the opening months of 2020. That February 7, for example, Trump tweeted: “Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation.” Nothing must interrupt Trump’s hopes for a trade deal that would boost the stock market and thus—he assumed—get him reelected in 2020.
As it became apparent that the virus had escaped China and reached the United States, Trump minimized the danger—although in private conversations with the reporter Bob Woodward, the president revealed that he expected a mass-casualty catastrophe for the United States as early as February 2020. He admitted to Woodward that his deception was intentional: “To be honest with you, I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic.” In early March that year, Trump resisted allowing passengers to disembark from a virus-stricken cruise ship because once the people were on U.S. soil, their cases would augment the number of recorded infections. He said he would rather not let them off, because “I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”
Trump allies made it explicit that to recognize the danger of COVID was to commit a thought-crime against Trump. Rush Limbaugh said on his radio program on February 24, 2020: “Folks, this coronavirus thing, I want to try to put this in perspective for you. It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus.” He continued, “Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.” Trump declared at a White House event at the end of the month that the virus would soon disappear on its own. (Trump reasserted his prediction of spontaneous disappearance repeatedly through the spring and early summer of 2020.) In early March, Trump dismissed COVID as far less deadly than the common flu.
As infections and deaths surged in March and April, two imperatives gripped the MAGA world. The first was to fix blame for the mounting disaster on an external hate object. Far-right websites introduced claims that COVID had originated as a Chinese “bioweapon” in January. By late February, the bioweapon language spread among Republican members of Congress. On March 16, Trump tried to rebrand the coronavirus as “the Chinese virus.”
But “blame China” took MAGA only so far. If China was to blame, whether because of malice or accident, then Trump looked all the greater a fool for having courted China so hard through 2019 and into 2020. And “blame China” did not offer any exit from the shock that was killing Americans, had shut down the U.S. economy, and was threatening to defeat Trump in November.
Thus, the second imperative: Find a fast-and-easy miracle cure. The first candidate was an antimalarial drug, hydroxychloroquine, touted on Fox News nearly 300 times in March and April—and cautiously endorsed by Trump at a press conference on March 19. When hydroxychloroquine flopped, it was replaced as the great right-wing hope by a deworming drug, ivermectin. After the podcaster Joe Rogan contracted COVID in the fall of 2021, he told his fans that ivermectin, vitamins, and other home remedies had cured him.
Trump lost the presidency and—after the failure of his attempted coup d’état—left office in January 2021. By then, vaccines had been developed. Now two new imperatives gripped right-wing America.
The first was to sabotage COVID recovery to do to Joe Biden’s new presidency what someone (but who?) had done to Trump’s. The second was to profit financially and politically from the reservoir of COVID paranoia that had accumulated on the American right.
If the vaccine rollout could be stalled or thwarted altogether, the Biden presidency would be blighted. At the same time, influencers and Republican politicians bidding for followers could use vaccine hesitancy to their personal and career advantage.
The arc of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s COVID response is illustrative. DeSantis began as a highly responsible actor on vaccines. Through the first half of 2021, he promoted vaccination in his state. He argued—correctly, in hindsight—that the state could combine a vaccination program with the abolition of lockdown mandates and an early return to in-person classroom teaching. Florida children went back to school in August 2020—and soon were outperforming their peers in Democrat-governed states that deferred to teacher-union wishes to postpone classroom reopenings.
Sometime over the course of 2021, however, DeSantis seemed to have decided that he could exploit COVID conspiracy thinking to win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. In September 2021, DeSantis appointed the vaccine opponent Joseph Ladapo as Florida’s surgeon general. Although DeSantis prudently accepted the first-round COVID vaccination in spring 2021, he turned evasive when asked months later whether he had taken the recommended booster. “I’m not going to let that be a weapon for people to be able to use. I think it’s a private matter.” DeSantis never quite repudiated his past support for vaccination. But he aligned himself with the ever wilder ideas of vaccination adversaries. In December 2022, DeSantis called for a state grand jury to investigate harms allegedly caused by COVID vaccines.
[Read: What Anthony Fauci didn’t say]
The gathering anti-vaccination movement battened on anti-Semitism, racism, and general looniness. Viral TikTok campaigns in the fall of 2021 promoted the label “pure blood,” implicitly associating unvaccinated status with white-nationalist identity. Republican officeholders generally refrained from endorsing these more extreme fantasies. But Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, among others, still traffics in the false claim that thousands of people have died because of injuries from COVID vaccines.
This is the route that has brought Fauci to the Senate hearing.
Democrats and liberals have their own post-COVID soul-searching to do. Blue states kept schools closed too long. They showed hypocrisy when they pivoted from demanding lockdowns in the spring of 2020 to welcoming mass George Floyd protests in the summer. Their analysis of lockdowns may have underweighted harms, especially to small businesses and otherwise healthy schoolchildren. Continued masking after the advent of vaccines could have enabled anti-social and even criminal behavior. The Biden administration in 2021 and 2022 exploited the genuine need for post-pandemic recovery to pass lavish spending bills that probably accelerated inflation. Americans should, as best as they can, delve deep into the exact degree of Chinese-government culpability for the coronavirus—not because it makes (or would have made) any actionable difference to the COVID response, but because it may serve as guidance for future dealings with China. The fullest obtainable history of COVID will reveal much that Americans need to know about the truthfulness, competence, and danger of the Chinese regime.
Fauci may have misjudged, mishandled, or misstated many particulars. He was a scientist and bureaucrat unaccustomed to—and dazzled by—celebrity. History will judge his actions with more dispassion than the present day can or will. One thing that people should keep in mind, however, is that Fauci was thrust into his pandemic-leadership role because of Trump’s shameful and deadly dereliction of duty. Trump’s record of dishonesty, callousness, and selfishness during the pandemic is a documented reality. The imputations against Fauci are mostly fantasies.
No mistakes by blue America or by the scientific community begin to compare with the brutal indifference to the well-being of Americans—and the betrayal of their own cruelly deceived supporters—that disgraced MAGA and the broader right wing in the pandemic years. Their consciences should be heavy. They seek now to transfer their own burden of guilt onto Fauci. The reckoning is a lie. The transfer is a fraud.