Francis Wilkinson
Of all the dangers that Donald Trump both threatens and embodies, from seedy criminality to sprawling authoritarianism, perhaps no threat is more acute than the one he poses to public health. “I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate,” Trump said at a rally in Minnesota recently. The former president used the same language — not “one penny” for schools that require vaccines or masks — at a rally in May.
Trump’s contempt for public health has already contributed to thousands of deaths; it’s the most durable legacy of his presidency. In a taped conversation with reporter Bob Woodward on Feb. 7, 2020, Trump described COVID as “deadly stuff” that was “more deadly than even your strenuous flus.” Within weeks, Trump told the public the opposite — that COVID was “like the regular flu.” Two days after that, before a crowd in South Carolina, Trump began calling COVID a Democratic “hoax.” His idiotic jabber about miracle disinfectants and healing light soon followed.
Those who believed Trump’s lies suffered disproportionately. A study of more than a half million deaths in Florida and Ohio between March 2020 and December 2021 concluded that “excess mortality was significantly higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults, but not before.” The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the blueprint for the next Trump administration written by his allies and former staff, includes vaccine mandates among a list of “overreaching policies” and claims, without evidence, that excess COVID deaths were due to lockdowns, “vaccine-related mass firings” and other causes.
Trump is now promising to enable parents to opt out of herd immunity, placing their own children and others at risk. Between October 2019 (pre-COVID) and March 2023, Republican support for requiring vaccinations for public school children plummeted from 79% to 57%. The Democratic decline, from 86% to 85%, was statistically insignificant.
“Vaccines are the key tool we, as a community, have to fight many infectious diseases,” Harold Pollack, professor of public health sciences at the University of Chicago, said in an email. “Vaccines are also a key tool that we, as individual citizens, have to meet our obligations to our fellow citizens.”
Trump and his party have taken aim at both facets of vaccines — their efficacy against disease and their role in the social compact. Republicans such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wage war on the imaginary “woke mind virus,” banning books to limit the spread of knowledge and enforcing gender conformity to restrict the spread of individual freedom, while actual viruses get a free pass. Gun violence has for years been an epidemic in the US and is now the No. 1 cause of death among children. The GOP response is to make it easier to arm more mentally and emotionally unbalanced people and permit them to carry semi-automatic firearms in more places.
The Republican Party is increasingly dedicated to spreading biological weapons as recklessly as it spreads ballistic ones. With millions of Americans pledging allegiance to an anti-science cult, public health officials are reduced to making arguments against disease.
“Measles can be particularly serious for children and potentially deadly,” reads a February statement from the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. “At least 1 in 5 unvaccinated people in the United States who contract measles is hospitalized. Nearly 1 out of 20 children develop pneumonia, the most frequent cause of measles-related death in young children.”
The US declared measles eliminated in 2000 due to what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called “high national 2-dose coverage with the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine.” That vaccine, however, has proved ineffective against viral propaganda.
Just as executives at Fox News made a conscious decision to lie to viewers about the 2020 election, concluding that Fox risked losing its audience to right-wing programming even more dishonest than standard Fox fare, Trump’s lies about vaccines, echoed by cranks and opportunists, have saturated MAGA precincts and outdistanced even Trump.
Trump has said that he can no longer afford to take credit for the COVID-19 vaccine developed under his administration. In an interview last year with Fox’s Bret Baier, Trump said, “I really don’t want to talk about it because, as a Republican, it’s not a great thing to talk about.” He has been booed for noting that vaccines are beneficial.
“In getting vaccinated, we not only protect ourselves, but we reduce the risk that we will require the use of scarce hospital and emergency care resources that might be required to assist others,” Harold Pollack told me.
That expression of personal and social responsibility is the essence of citizenship. It seems likely to be a long wait before it finds a purchase again in the GOP.
(Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US politics and policy.)
