On this Memorial Day, Remember the Over One Million Who Died in Our Lost “War” on Covid
...what this era will be remembered for is the rise of a retooled anti-modernism, conspiracy theories, and what might best be called rightwing nihilism.
By Jim Miller
The last several Memorial Days I have devoted column space here and elsewhere to remembering the dead in the “war” on Covid-19 that Trump declared and then promptly mismanaged so horrendously that it will go down in history as a disaster of epic proportions. We declared a war on Covid and Covid won, hands down.
As Michael Hiltzak noted last week in an excellent piece in the LA Times:
Today, more than three years after COVID first appeared, the U.S. still has not achieved herd immunity although it is nearing the goal, in the view of Robert Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at UC San Francisco. The disease’s trajectory has been cataclysmic—the U.S. death toll stands at 1.13 million, hundreds of children have died, and an estimated 245,000 children have lost one or both parents to COVID. The U.S. leads the world in COVID deaths; its death rate of 3,478 per million population is worse than that of Britain, Spain, France, the Nordic countries, Canada and Israel.
Not only does the United States lead the world in Covid deaths, but our even deeper shame lies in the fact that scores of those deaths were easily preventable if we had a saner approach to the threat. Now that the pandemic is officially “over,” historians with an eye toward fact will clearly record that it lasted longer and took a much greater toll than need be, and, disturbingly, we are in no better shape now to deal with similar threats in the future.
Indeed, rather than the heroic work of scientists and medical professionals, what this era will be remembered for is the rise of a retooled anti-modernism, conspiracy theories, and what might best be called rightwing nihilism. We see this at the national level in likes of Trump’s and DeSantis’ weaponization of revanchist know-nothingism, and at the local level as anti-vaccination warriors have declared victory and continue to push into new territory in their jihads against school boards and municipal governments.
Outside of the political implications, Hiltzak observes that the public health dangers continue to be very real:
At this moment, anti-science ideology on the right appears to be in the ascendance. Agitation against the COVID vaccine is metastasizing into an opposition movement against all childhood vaccinations, a trend that threatens to produce a surge in other vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles and polio.
What is truly remarkable about this sad situation is that those who sold the pubic on disastrous ideas like “herd immunity” were never held accountable. Even Democratic politicians who knew better eventually punted on engaging in the public discourse, which essentially surrendered the field to a malicious minority. While the pervasive Covid fatigue was and is understandable on a personal and political level, the long-term consequences of abandoning the debate to the lunatic fringe will have pernicious consequences moving forward.
It has entrenched, empowered, and (on the right) mainstreamed an irrational political discourse that will infect a wide range of other public policy debates on things like climate, education, and economics with a similar fact-resistant strain of reactionary politics that feeds on the information chaos that has become our most immediate environment.
We may finally and far-too-late be moving out of the pandemic, but the costs of that lost “war” will be with us for a long time to come.
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Lead photo: Ted Eytan / This material is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Good article!