Five years ago, the World Health Organization had just declared Covid-19 a global pandemic. By this point in 2020, many of us were starting to become aware that this was a problem problem, though of course we couldn’t have known then just to what extent. March 14 was the first recorded Covid death in NYC, and both schools and bars and restaurants would be ordered shut down within three days.
We’d go on to become the global locus of the virus, which would kill some 47,000 people in NYC. Now, this specter haunts us again, as it becomes clear that we’ll be doomed to repeat the history that we’ve refused to learn from.
You know the story– hell, that story was the genesis of this very website, as it grew out from a sort of community Covid clearinghouse to a fuller local news and information source. There are plenty of lessons to be taken from the Covid era, some that we indeed learned and some we plainly did not. The consequences, I have always maintained, will be lasting in ways that we can’t quite wrap our heads around yet, even a few years on.
There are the obvious ones, the people who were here and are no longer, the lingering health effects that are still the subject of intense study, the political repercussions. I think there’s a good argument to be made that Covid cost Trump the 2020 election, but also set up or at least bolstered a social and political attitude and identity that helped to bring him back. People, I think, are a little coarser and less public-minded after the social contractions of lockdown.
Where one can imagine a public that was made more open and more aware of its collective vulnerabilities, I fear that we’ve moved in the other direction, closer to the endpoint of the United States’ self-image of rugged individualism, which at its apex is every person for themself. Children at pivotal points of development during the pandemic might never quite recover from the isolation and the turbo-charging of the trend of living social lives predominantly online, where their vision is mediated by massive companies that have increasingly cozied up to reactionary right-wing interests.
These reactionaries, as embodied neatly by the mutating MAGA movement — which, despite its aging figurehead, has increasingly tried to mold itself to appeal to younger crowds, revoltingly exemplified by the “ASMR” video of shackled immigrants put out by the official White House account on X — are now meaningfully in control of every branch of government, and they seem happy to memory-hole the Covid lessons. In doing so, they have made the prospect of another pandemic both likelier and less likely to be dealt with efficiently or expeditiously. And we will have the sparks of another pandemic sooner or later, not even necessarily with a novel pathogen but diseases that vaccination had made endemic or otherwise less of a public health concern.
The “Make America Healthy Again” is now at the levers of the country’s public health infrastructure in the form of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who no matter how much he tried to downplay it during his confirmation hearings and interviews, is defined by being a longtime anti-vaccine crusader. The political scion built his name on this, so much so that he is credited with having contributed directly to a deadly measles outbreak in American Samoa just six years ago.
This week, as a Texas-based outbreak of the same disease spread around the country, including to New York, RFK Jr. was at a Steak N’ Shake restaurant with Fox News’ Sean Hannity — a publicity giveaway to the restaurant after it announced it would stop frying its fries in vegetable oils and use beef tallow instead — where he told the right-wing broadcaster that getting measles “gave you lifetime protection against measles infection. The vaccine doesn’t do that.” He added that “there are adverse events from the vaccine. It does cause deaths every year.”
This is, of course, a widely debunked tripe. The vaccine can have some side effects, as does every potential therapeutic, but these pale in comparison to the severe, sometimes deadly, and much more common consequences of getting the highly virulent measles virus, which was declared eradicated in the U.S. a quarter-century ago but which has come back as a direct consequence of the movement RFK stoked. Now at the helm of the national public health apparatus, the secretary has spurred the CDC to once more study the long-disproven supposed link between vaccines and autism, announced a panel to examine the childhood vaccination schedule, and presided over the Food and Drug Administration cancellation of a panel that was to determine the strains for next season’s flu vaccines.
In effect, his anti-vaccine agitation has gone from advocacy and propaganda to real power, the authority to practically and operationally interfere with our ability to take on disease. In tandem, public attitudes towards both public health agencies and vaccines have shifted to the point where just about half the public say they trust the FDA, and a fifth of parents of children under 18 say they are not keeping their children up to date with recommended childhood vaccines. This shift is going to make it more difficult for state and local governments to step in where the federal government is stepping back, though this is probably what will broadly need to happen to head off some of the worst of it.
All of this is pretty bad, no sugarcoating it. But that doesn’t mean it’s time to throw in the towel. If you can get vaccinated — Covid booster, flu shot, measles booster, hep C, whatever is recommended and available to you — do so. Visible and intense public pressure, while it can sometimes feel futile, is one of the only things that has had some track record of moving the needle in countering Trump’s and his allies’ attempted power grabs and authoritarian abuses.
The danger we face here in part is that the nation’s public health systems have suffered from what we could call the “Y2K effect”: the diligent and long-running behind-the-scenes efforts to prevent catastrophe were so effective that people thought the risks were always overblown. Ask people even today whether Y2K was a real issue and most laugh it off, because teams spent months patching things up so that nothing really happened when we hit the threshold.
Similarly, people don’t seem to really understand the impact of these public health systems running under the hood, or what happens when they’re no longer there. We have a couple of ways of finding this out — mass public education and attention, or the hard way. Let’s try not to have it be the hard way.
Read more of our Covid stories here.
