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THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAS BEEN MAINTAINING an informational website at COVID.gov since early 2022. The page has been a centralized successor to several government sites put up by the first Trump administration and the early Biden administration. And while it has gone through numerous iterations, the purpose has always been to provide one trustworthy, convenient source of basic, health-oriented information—what the disease is and how it presents, how the vaccine works, where to get tests and treatment, and so on.
Until last week.
Go to COVID.gov now and the phrase “LAB LEAK” will fade in from an ominously dark background, with a photo of Donald Trump positioned between the two words and an explanatory phrase in the corner: “The true origins of COVID-19.”
Below that is a point-by-point brief for the theory that the pandemic began not through natural transmission but with the virus escaping from a Chinese lab, where scientists had engineered it for study or perhaps use as a bioweapon. Scroll down and you’ll see satellite imagery of Wuhan, location of the lab, along with a photo of an anguished Dr. Anthony Fauci—who, according to this version of the lab leak theory, signed off on U.S. funding for the Wuhan research and then tried to cover it up after the fact.
Scroll down further on the page and you’ll read more about alleged pandemic failures by the Biden administration, state and local officials who were in charge at the time, and the public health establishment more generally. The list includes mask mandates (“no conclusive evidence . . . flipped-flopped . . . causing a massive uptick in public distrust”), lockdowns (“immeasurable harm to not only the American economy, but also to the mental and physical health of Americans”), and social distancing (“arbitrary and not based on science”).
And then, after a section singling out a lone former Democratic governor—New York’s Andrew Cuomo—for ordering nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients, the page has an item about “COVID-19 Misinformation” that states:
Public health officials often mislead the American people through conflicting messaging, knee-jerk reactions, and a lack of transparency. Most egregiously, the federal government demonized alternative treatments and disfavored narratives, such as the lab leak theory, in a shameful effort to coerce and control the American people’s health decisions.
The website says its source material is an “After Action Review” published in December by a Republican-led House subcommittee investigating COVID-19. The webpage also makes clear that its content is now coming from the White House, not the Department of Health and Human Services, which had posted and maintained COVID.gov previously.
That explains a lot, starting with the tendentious content. The lab leak theory has gained credibility even among some former skeptics, which speaks to its plausibility. But it is still just a theory.
And some of the evidence the new website cites as proof of the theory is wrong. Among the inaccuracies, as a recent New York Times analysis noted, is a claim that the COVID-19 virus contains “a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.” That’s a reference to a surface feature on the virus that scientists have since determined really does occur naturally.
As Amesh Adalja, a Johns Hopkins University infectious disease physician, told the Washington Post after seeing the redesigned website, “The Trump administration is rewriting some of history and making covid-19 out to be a political event rather than a biological event that happened.”
AT A TIME WHEN THE ADMINISTRATION is purging online references to everything from HIV to adolescent mental health from online government platforms—and when the White House routinely uses its official social media feeds to wage partisan warfare—it seems almost beside the point to dwell on this one instance of the administration turning a dot-gov website into propaganda.
But the new website is also an unusually vivid example of how Trump and his allies are trying to rewrite the history of COVID, in a way that not only erases their own role in the pandemic’s harms but seems likely to leave America more vulnerable to the next one.
In the version of history Trump and his allies have been telling, even long before this website appeared, all of the pandemic’s big mistakes came from Democratic officials and their allies—and all of the awful consequences flowed from those mistakes. And there’s good reason to think that argument has won over large swaths of the public, or at least has not alienated large swaths of the public.
After all, Trump’s management of the pandemic during its first year was a non-issue in the 2024 presidential election. And he seems to have suffered no political consequences from having tapped for top health positions a vocal critic of COVID-19 vaccines (Health and Human Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) and an equally vocal critic of the public health mitigation measures (National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya).
One reason for that is that many decisions Democrats and their allies made, especially in 2021, now look like mistakes in retrospect—even to many Democrats. That is especially true when it comes to schools and the strong evidence that closures have caused widespread, long-term learning loss, even though children were mostly not vulnerable to the pandemic’s most serious medical effects.
As you may recall, one of the early warnings against that path came in a document called the Great Barrington Declaration, which stated that “keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.” Bhattacharya was one of the document’s authors. The dismissal by government authorities and the media of Bhattacharya and his colleagues as “fringe”—and the rejection of their advice—is among the many grievances opponents of lockdowns carry to this day.
Those feelings go a long way to explaining the new website, and the general decline of trust in public health authorities to which it plays.
But the record of Trump’s allies includes plenty of blemishes too, starting with Bhattacharya’s prediction early in the pandemic that the disease would ultimately kill just 20,000 to 40,000 Americans.
The actual death toll to date? More than 1.2 million.
And the Great Barrington Declaration didn’t simply argue for opening schools more quickly. It called for a completely different pandemic strategy of “focused protection” for the elderly and other vulnerable groups while allowing the virus to burn through the rest of the population, which could withstand it and quickly develop immunity.
As New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci pointed out earlier this year, upon news of Bhattacharya’s appointment, a strategy of “protecting older people alone while everyone else, including their caregivers, got infected was never going to be feasible. Additionally, those who were not older or obviously vulnerable could still be harmed from infections.”
TUFEKCI IS HARDLY AN APOLOGIST for the public health establishment. She wrote a widely discussed article in March excoriating scholars and officials who dismissed or tried to squelch the lab leak theory. In that same item about Bhattacharya she pointed out several times where history proved him right.
It’s just one instance of voices from the mainstream media and the political left looking back at COVID and the responses to identify big mistakes and ideally to learn from them. But that self-examination has largely been one-sided, as Jonathan Chait pointed out in the Atlantic, with virtually no reckoning on the right for Trump’s downplaying of COVID’s severity or for his spread of grossly unscientific, potentially dangerous information.
Remember, this is the president who suggested injecting ultraviolet light or disinfectants might prove an effective strategy for stopping the disease.
And while it’s hard to say how much Trump’s statements from the White House press room affected the course and toll of the pandemic, it’s easy to assess the impact of vaccine skepticism, which Trump’s allies fueled. Once the vaccine became widely available, deaths from COVID-19 took on a decidedly partisan character, with self-identified Republicans both less likely to get the shots and more likely to die.
Vaccine refusals increased the COVID death toll in the United States by as many as a few hundred thousand, researchers later concluded, and in the process helped push the overall death rate here higher than it was in peer countries where the pandemic had hit harder initially.
“We shouldn’t whitewash that,” Ezekiel Emanuel, the University of Pennsylvania oncologist and former Obama administration official, told me in a recent interview. Like Tufekci, Emanuel is critical of Democrats and public health leaders on many counts. But he says Trump and the Republicans need to own up to their mistakes too.
“People died—and this is hundreds of thousands of people, not one or two or fifteen,” Emanuel said. “I’m a doctor. That is the worst thing you can do, right? It’s like oncology. How do we measure our success? Five-year survival rate? How many people don’t you save, how many lives do you lose? It’s the same thing here: How many people whose lives could have been saved did we not save?”
Keep in mind that there’s more than just political accountability at stake here. Attacks on the public health establishment over COVID have softened the ground for the dramatic downsizing of HHS, including both the NIH and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—and for Kennedy’s determination, evidently supported by Trump, to shift CDC’s focus away from infectious disease and onto chronic disease.
And just now, as we’ve been preparing to publish this edition of The Breakdown, Politico has reported that Kennedy is considering removing the COVID-19 vaccine from the list that the federal government officially recommends. That could affect everything from the advice physicians give their patients to decisions insurers make about what to cover.
A true reckoning for the mistakes on COVID-19, one that casts a critical light on all of the involved parties and allowed time for research to produce more definitive insights, could do a lot of good—and ideally help prepare the United States for whenever the next such threat appears. Trump’s COVID website seems like a pretty clear sign that’s not going to happen, at least as long as he’s in charge.
● In addition to rewriting pandemic history, the MAGA right has declared a war on empathy, which it believes is undermining Western civilization. The Bulwark’s Cathy Young has a few things to say about that, including the observation that “if a political movement spends a lot of energy trashing human kindness, it’s bad.” And speaking of empathy, I recommend going back to read JVL’s rant (his word, not mine!) about the “bullying of trans people” if you haven’t already.
● The focus of JVL’s essay was trans women in sports, a subject that has generated a great deal of controversy but precious little in the way of sober, careful reporting. That’s why I also recommend making time for Sunday’s New York Times Magazine article on a college volleyball player in California whose presence ripped apart her team and her sport, and eventually became a talking point in the 2024 presidential campaign. The article is by Jason Zengerle, one of the best narrative reporters I know. He brings to the article the attention to detail and nuance—and, yes, the empathy—that the topic demands.
● I imagine that few people in the trans community have confronted more public hostility than Sarah McBride, the first-term Democratic House member from Delaware. Evidently the online abuse she gets includes messages advising “KYS”—i.e., kill yourself. I learned that by listening to McBride on a recent Atlantic podcast, in which I was blown away by her grace, patience, and thoughtfulness in the face of so much hate. You might be too.
Great Job Jonathan Cohn & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.
