{"id":2263,"date":"2026-03-25T04:55:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-25T04:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/?p=2263"},"modified":"2026-03-25T04:55:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T04:55:09","slug":"how-covid-turned-america-against-science-and-what-it-will-take-to-win-it-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/?p=2263","title":{"rendered":"How COVID turned America against science \u2014 and what it will take to win it back"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

One of the greatest scientific achievements in human history became a political liability almost overnight.\u00a0When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, scientists identified the virus, deciphered its secrets, concocted a vaccine, put it into production, and rendered the disease manageable \u2013 all within a year.\u00a0No\u00a0civilization had ever moved that fast.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The response? The Trump administration jeered individual scientists, cut funds, fired specialists, and shuttered bureaus. It\u2019s almost like we opened fire on the triumphant GIs returning from World War II.\u00a0How did triumph turn into a culture war? And what can be done about it?<\/p>\n

Where Science Failed First<\/p>\n

Start with what the scientific establishment got wrong: first, the\u00a0CDC\u2019s testing debacle.\u00a0The agency lacked\u00a0the capacity to oversee the mass testing that a pandemic requires. Worse, its test technology cratered (thanks to a manufacturing glitch) and the agency \u2014 in classic bureaucratic mode \u2014 did not seek help from private industry. The FDA made things worse by refusing to approve alternatives to the test that didn\u2019t work. Without tests, policy makers could not track the disease; they were flying blind.\u00a0Here\u2019s the first lesson:\u00a0The fix:\u00a0The CDC should get out of the pandemic test production business and work more closely with the nation\u2019s biopharma companies to develop diagnostics as new infections emerge.<\/p>\n

Second, scientists never managed\u00a0to explain\u00a0why\u00a0their guidance kept shifting \u2014 and this bred suspicion.\u00a0Simple answer: They were learning about the virus.\u00a0The\u00a0shifting advice on masking stirred anger because few people \u2014 in government, the media, or the public \u2014 understood where it came from.\u00a0Tony Fauci was not just jerking the country around.<\/p>\n

Early on, researchers assumed COVID behaved like influenza. Then they discovered it spreads via asymptomatic carriers \u2014 a crucial difference that demanded new guidance seemingly out of nowhere. Fauci wasn\u2019t being evasive; science was evolving in real time. The lesson: Scientists must bring the public along as understanding changes, not just announce new conclusions.<\/p>\n

The Untold White House Story<\/p>\n

The attack on science has a political history that\u2019s rarely told in full.\u00a0It started with lack of White House preparation for a pandemic.\u00a0The National Security Council had disbanded its unit devoted to biological threats, and the intelligence community took more than a month to get Covid on the President\u2019s daily intelligence briefing. Even then they brushed it aside.<\/p>\n

Everything changed in the first week of March. New York City became a death zone. President Trump\u00a0was reportedly shaken by\u00a0footage of refrigerator trucks backed up to the mortuary at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, not far from where he grew up.\u00a0The Stock Market tanked. The NCAA cancelled March Madness. Businesses shuttered. Schools closed.\u00a0Dr. Deborah Birx took over as the White House Covid coordinator and built a model (accurately) projecting\u00a0unimaginable\u00a0deaths: 100,000 to 240,000 over the next two months.<\/p>\n

Against that backdrop,\u00a0Donald Trump, after denial and equivocation, responded sensibly. Off camera and off Twitter, he made tough decisions. He listened to his health advisors, weighed their advice against challenges from the economists, closed borders, endorsed shutdowns, and\u2014most dramatically\u2014tossed aside normal procedures and merged science, logistics, and great piles of cash to develop a vaccination at, well, warp speed.<\/p>\n

How Politics Poisoned the Well<\/p>\n

But by April, the shutdowns were taking a toll, the presidential election was heating up, and Trump was getting earfuls from his business associates. The economic team, led by Kevin Hassett,\u00a0then former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, whipped up new, friendlier projections of only 26,000 Covid deaths by Memorial Day\u00a0\u2014 more\u00a0people than that had\u00a0already\u00a0died when the model was unveiled. The new estimates made Trump deeply suspicious of his health care team.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Suspicion turned to anger when scientific leaders kept contradicting his embrace of hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and convalescent plasma. He\u00a0turned on them publicly \u2014\u00a0casting the FDA, CDC, and NIH\u00a0as\u00a0deep state conspirators dedicated to defeating him.<\/p>\n

In mid-April, anger turned to rebellion.\u00a0Trump cheered small bands who were brandishing firearms, waving Trump flags, and denouncing the shutdowns. His tweets\u00a0amplified the struggle to \u201cliberate\u201d\u00a0\u00a0America from both Covid restrictions\u00a0and his enemies: the overweening elites \u2014\u00a0scientists, bureaucrats, Democrats \u2014 who had dreamt them up\u00a0as\u00a0expert\u00a0overreach.<\/p>\n

Trump went one tweet too far, however, when he blasted the FDA\u2019s Covid vaccine trials for moving too slowly (\u201cjust another political hit job\u201d). That moved nine pharmaceutical companies to buy newspaper ads pledging not to release any vaccines before they were proved safe and effective. To prove vaccines\u2019 safety, FDA extended clinical trials by\u00a0several weeks so that FDA approval \u00a0came after election day \u2013\u00a0permanently entangling\u00a0the FDA in the MAGA epic of a rigged election.<\/p>\n

The Anti-Vax Vanguard<\/p>\n

The turn against science got\u00a0its final push when\u00a0Trump\u00a0mentioned his own COVID vaccination at a post-election rally \u2014 and heard boos. He pivoted immediately, joining the anti-vax movement he had inadvertently helped create. No surprise that a second term Trump should tap Robert F Kennedy, Jr. \u2014\u00a0and DOGE \u2014 to \u201cgo wild\u201d on health and science. A rebellion against vaccinations and public health raced through conservative precincts. Twenty-six states enacted new and stringent limits on long-standing public health authorities that were already\u00a0hollowed out\u00a0from years of budget austerity.<\/p>\n

But scientific facts are stubborn things. As historian Richard Hofstadter once wrote, the anti-expert tradition rises and falls in waves across American history.\u00a0Rising\u00a0measles infection rates \u2014 and the political liability of owning a public health crisis heading into midterms \u2014 appear to be shifting the tide. Kennedy and his allies are already softening their vaccine skepticism.<\/p>\n

What Comes Next<\/p>\n

The path forward requires more than policy fixes, though those matter. Scientists need to communicate evolving knowledge in real time. Politicians need to resist weaponizing uncertainty. Agencies need the funding and flexibility to respond at scale.<\/p>\n

But ultimately, protecting society demands\u00a0something deeper:\u00a0a\u00a0nation of people who pull together, who care for one another, who reach across their divisions and mind the health and safety of their neighbors. We\u2019ll never do well against pandemics until we learn to channel what Abraham Lincoln\u00a0called the better angels of our nature.\u00a0We won\u2019t beat the next infectious threat without them.<\/p>\n

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.<\/p>\n

#COVID #turned #America #science #win<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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