The great Covid bait and switch

I find it fascinating how the entire Covid epidemic has undergone some sort of almost Orwellian historical revisionism, and not merely among the right wing, although they are of course by far the worst.

This Slate piece spends most of its time covering the barking lunacy of various Republican conspiracy theories, and notes that many of the most unhinged claims about the pandemic are now being presented as established facts, and by prominent GOP politicians, not just some guy on the internet:

For the past five years, conservative influencers and right-wing news media have periodically reminded their users, in heated language, of the injustices of that time. But more than that, they’ve pushed conspiracy theories that have spun policy disagreements and health misinformation into sordid tales of sadistic health officials.

Those theories now include the claims that Fauci’s NIH funded research that created the virus. That Fauci knew this and covered it up. That he knew that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were useful treatments for COVID but suppressed them. That remdesivir, an intravenous treatment for COVID, was actually a killer and that he knew it. That his NIH ran freaky experiments involving transgenic mice and aborted baby parts. And, most catastrophic of all, that Fauci knew that the vaccines caused injury and death but forced them on the population anyway.

These conspiracy theories had circulated among the right-wing information ecosystem for a while, but somehow, lately, they have started to be treated as established facts—not just by Republican activists, but by actual members of Congress. After Wednesday’s hearing, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who said she believes that Fauci lied about the vaccines, described Fauci as “Dr. ‘Mengele’ Fauci,” in reference to the monstrous Nazi scientist who ran experiments on prisoners. Sen. Ron Johnson asserted that the “injection-injured” were committing mass suicide. Sen. Tommy Tuberville told Newsmax’s viewers, “He killed millions of people, folks.”

And now the GOP has united enough around these conspiracy theories that audiences have begun to see the question of their validity as fully settled, in part because it is a pet issue for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who wrote an entire book dedicated to disparaging Fauci. On Instagram, mommy influencers made smug posts about being proved right by the hearing. So did right-wing publications such as the Daily Wire.

All this is just nuts, but Slate gotta Slate, so Let’s Be Fair and acknowledge that some right wing criticisms of public health policy during the pandemic were at least arguably correct:

If you closely watch the hearings and the conservative talking points, though, you’ll notice that this anti-Fauci rhetoric is actually two different lines of attack. The first taps into a natural source of anger—over children at school in masks and stories of people being unable to visit dying loved ones in the hospital. These are reminders of very real hardships from that time, and in this line of attack, it was not the disease itself but liberal hysteria around the disease that ruined lives. For a certain portion of the population—mostly those who are white and not elderly—this felt true, even at the time. A 2021 poll from Pew found that some 30 percent of white Americans didn’t know anyone who had been hospitalized from COVID; if people who didn’t experience COVID in their everyday lives lost jobs or missed educational opportunities because of the public health measures, their frustration shouldn’t be entirely surprising, or even out of the realm of legitimate political debate. After all, people across the political spectrum have had to grapple with the question of whether closing schools was the right decision, and evidence has since piled up indicating that students suffered long-term consequences.

“We harmed young people in very real ways,” said David Barnes, a public health historian at the University of Pennsylvania. “And we never had a public conversation about whether it was something we were prepared to do and live with the consequences of.”

This first source of right-wing anger related to the policies of the pandemic is fairly reasonable—in those early months, the many unknowns led to decisions that look almost silly in hindsight. 

The problem with this line of argument is not that it’s wrong, exactly, but that this sort of classic on the other handing/both sides have a point/the truth lies somewhere in the middle, is completely oblivious to the reality that reasonable arguments about what the optimal response to the pandemic would have been with the benefit of hindsight have absolutely nothing to do with the current right wing/GOP orthodoxy on Covid, which consists precisely of the mishmash of frankly insane conspiracism that the author notes before starting to equivocate.

Adam Kucharski, in a review of In Covid’s Wake, a 2025 book by a couple of Princeton political scientists that got all sorts of positive reviews from people who really really really hated the massive inconveniences (and worse) of lockdown policies, highlights the bait and switch move behind so many of these arguments:

This is a classic motte-and-bailey argument: a bold, controversial claim is made (somehow vulnerable groups can be shielded, despite everyone else returning to normal, and this was the optimal strategy to take in October 2020), but when challenged, the argument shifts to a more easily defensible claim (lockdowns had negative consequences).

Other aspects of the great Covid misremembering include:

(1) 1.2 million people in America died from Covid officially speaking, but the excess death toll during the pandemic was more like 1.5 million. Much of the right wing discourse — and for that matter some of the Even the Liberal discourse that has heaped praise on In Covid’s Wake — more or less just ignores these staggering numbers. Instead, the line seems to be yes some people died, even a lot of people, but most of them were very old, very old people die all the time for all sorts of reasons, and who is to say that the vaccine didn’t actually kill quite a few of them, like RFK Jr. claims it did?

(2) Another striking piece of revisionism is that an amazing number of people seem completely unaware that Donald Trump was president for every single day in 2020, and the first twenty days of 2021, which was the period with the strictest incursions on Freedom ™ by those meddling public health authorities.

(3) Some imp of the perverse possessed me this morning to check out Ann Althouse’s blog (yes I realize I need help), and I discovered that Ann is all in on Fauci’s critics were right, see you just can’t trust the experts, and her commenters are full of insights such as the definition of a vaccine is something that stops you from getting a disease, it says that right here in the dictionary, the Fauci ouchie didn’t stop people from getting Covid, therefore it wasn’t really a vaccine, therefore it didn’t really work Q.E.D.

What seems to have happened here is that a legitimate retrospective debate about which non-pharmaceutical interventions ended up making sense from a cost-benefit perspective has been made at least for the moment impossible by a spectrum of arguments that run from bad faith based on pseudo-omniscience and disingenuous statistical argument (the Great Barrington Declaration et al), to the complete barking lunacy of Anthony Fauci helped produce a bioweapon and then fraudulently pushed a vaccine that itself subsequently killed millions.

Nothing better illustrates the power of the right wing scream machine than the transformation of such arguments into what is now simply the conventional wisdom for close to half the voting public.

I’ll give the last word to a Michigan football board friend:

It is both infuriating and painful to hear people talk in retrospect about Covid, its impact, and its management. Here’s the experience in my house: First, my mother-in-law acquired covid and was dead 4 days later. Her husband of 50 years was not permitted to see her body and there was a closed casket burial. Then, my wife, who is a Pediatric ICU nurse, and who suffers from asthma, was pulled from her unit to spend several months taking care of Covid patients. These were mainly elderly adults who were dying. Their families were not permitted to visit, the attending physicians would not enter the rooms, and the residents stayed away as much as possible. She had to double gown and triple mask. She would come home and literally undress outside to not expose any of us, and then go immediately in a shower, and cry. She had been an ICU nurse for 30+ years, had “seen it all,” including the AIDS epidemic, and nothing was nearly as impactful. She continues to experience PTSD, including nightmares, as a result of that experience. So, FUCK people who feel like they were a little inconvenienced by sincere efforts to mitigate an unknown risk.