One of the greatest scientific achievements in human history became a political liability almost overnight. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, scientists identified the virus, deciphered its secrets, concocted a vaccine, put it into production, and endered the disease manageable – all within a year. No civilization had ever moved that fast.
The response? The Trump administration jeered individual scientists, cut funds, fired specialists, and shuttered bureaus. It’s almost like we opened fire on the triumphant GIs returning from World War II. How did triumph turn into a culture war? And what can be done about it?
Where Science Failed First
Start with what the scientific establishment got wrong: first, the CDC’s testing debacle. The agency lacked the capacity to oversee the mass testing that a pandemic requires. Worse, its test technology cratered (thanks to a manufacturing glitch) and the agency — in classic bureaucratic mode — did not seek help from private industry. The FDA made things worse by refusing to approve alternatives to the test that didn’t work. Without tests, policy makers could not track the disease; they were flying blind. Here’s the first lesson: The fix: The CDC should get out of the pandemic test production business and work more closely with the nation’s biopharma companies to develop diagnostics as new infections emerge.
Second, scientists never managed to explain why their guidance kept shifting — and this bred suspicion. Simple answer: They were learning about the virus. The shifting advice on masking stirred anger because few people — in government, the media, or the public — understood where it came from. Tony Fauci was not just jerking the country around.
Early on, researchers assumed COVID behaved like influenza. Then they discovered it spreads via asymptomatic carriers — a crucial difference that demanded new guidance seemingly out of nowhere. Fauci wasn’t being evasive; science was evolving in real time. The lesson: Scientists must bring the public along as understanding changes, not just announce new conclusions.
The Untold White House Story
The attack on science has a political history that’s rarely told in full. It started with lack of White House preparation for a pandemic. The 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’s daily intelligence briefing. Even then they brushed it aside.
Everything changed in the first week of March. New York City became a death zone. President Trump was reportedly shaken by footage of refrigerator trucks backed up to the mortuary at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, not far from where he grew up. The Stock Market tanked. The NCAA cancelled March Madness. Businesses shuttered. Schools closed. Dr. Deborah Birx took over as the White House Covid coordinator and built a model (accurately) projecting unimaginable deaths: 100,000 to 240,000 over the next two months.
Against that backdrop, Donald 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—most dramatically—tossed aside normal procedures and merged science, logistics, and great piles of cash to develop a vaccination at, well, warp speed.
How Politics Poisoned the Well
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, then former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, whipped up new, friendlier projections of only 26,000 Covid deaths by Memorial Day — more people than that had already died when the model was unveiled. The new estimates made Trump deeply suspicious of his health care team.
Suspicion turned to anger when scientific leaders kept contradicting his embrace of hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and convalescent plasma. He turned on them publicly — casting the FDA, CDC, and NIH as deep state conspirators dedicated to defeating him.
In mid-April, anger turned to rebellion. Trump cheered small bands who were brandishing firearms, waving Trump flags, and denouncing the shutdowns. His tweets amplified the struggle to “liberate” America from both Covid restrictions and his enemies: the overweening elites — scientists, bureaucrats, Democrats — who had dreamt them up as expert overreach.
Trump went one tweet too far, however, when he blasted the FDA’s Covid vaccine trials for moving too slowly (“just another political hit job”). 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’ safety, FDA extended clinical trials by several weeks so that FDA approval came after election day – permanently entangling the FDA in the MAGA epic of a rigged election.
The Anti-Vax Vanguard
The turn against science got its final push when Trump mentioned his own COVID vaccination at a post-election rally — 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. — and DOGE — to “go wild” 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 hollowed out from years of budget austerity.
But scientific facts are stubborn things. As historian Richard Hofstadter once wrote, the anti-expert tradition rises and falls in waves across American history. Rising measles infection rates — and the political liability of owning a public health crisis heading into midterms — appear to be shifting the tide. Kennedy and his allies are already softening their vaccine skepticism.
What Comes Next
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.
But ultimately, protecting society demands something deeper: a nation 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’ll never do well against pandemics until we learn to channel what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. We won’t beat the next infectious threat without them.
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.
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