COVID is different now. America is done listening to public health

Apr 11, 2024

“We’re at an inflection point,” CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta said.

More and more public-health officials are dusting off their old face masks and encouraging Americans to do the same for the new BA.2.86 variant of COVID-19, he explained.

Hearing that, Meghan McCain went to social media and spoke for an entire nation:

“Uh no, we ain’t starting this s--- again.”

McCain isn’t some right-wing reactionary. She’s not QAnon. She’s not a wrapped-in-the-flag freedom marcher. On this issue she is very much mainstream.

Her point is that the COVID endemic will be much different than the pandemic. Americans are a lot wiser now about this pathogen and the people who tried to manage it the last time around.

That’s important information if you’re a doctor or public health official or epidemiologist.

We’re not starting at the same place we did when COVID arrived on our shores in January 2020.

The American people don’t trust you.

Not the way we once did. Americans barely trust any of our institutions anymore, so health care is not alone on the bottom rungs in our society.

But in the past two years, confidence in health-care officials has dropped 10 points from 44% to 34%, according to a Gallup tracking poll.

In terms of trust, doctors and nurses used to occupy a high place in our society. But that’s over and probably gone for a generation.

As the son of a pediatric radiologist, I say that with sadness, because I’ve long believed in the medical profession. Such faith was weaved into our family fabric.

No more. Not after what happened with COVID.

I also say this as someone not interested in settling scores over the pandemic. All of us went through this 100-year event together. We all got stuff right, and we all got stuff wrong, because these are complicated once-in-a-generation disruptors that are not easily understood in real time.

Public health officials, however, got so much wrong during the COVID-19 pandemic and asserted it with such confidence that they will not soon restore the trust they once enjoyed.

You can begin with Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, who began the pandemic telling the general public not to wear face masks.

Fauci was trying to preserve the short supply of surgical masks for health care professionals, but he would soon change his tune and advise Americans to mask up.

He did the same on herd immunity, changing his estimates throughout the pandemic. He began saying herd immunity would begin at about 60% to 70%, but by the end was saying 90%.

As reported in The New York Times in December 2020, Fauci admitted he fudged the truth:

“Dr. Fauci said that weeks ago, he had hesitated to publicly raise his estimate because many Americans seemed hesitant about vaccines, which they would need to accept almost universally in order for the country to achieve herd immunity.

“Now that some polls are showing that many more Americans are ready, even eager, for vaccines, he said he felt he could deliver the tough message that the return to normal might take longer than anticipated.”

Even as western Europe began to reopen its public schools, backed with new studies that public-school children were far less susceptible to COVID and its most harmful effects, the United States resisted.

Teachers unions in America stonewalled and delayed the return. When students did come back, they demanded students be masked.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was “file drawering” their own data showing face masks mandates for students had no statistically significant benefit, reported New York Magazine, hardly a vessel of the MAGA right.

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But it was the George Floyd protests of 2020 that really damaged the credibility of public health officials.

After spending weeks condemning conservative “freedom marchers” for causing super-spreader events with their outdoor protests, the greater portion of the medical establishment gave its blessing to left-wing political marchers protesting police brutality.

Some 1,300 epidemiologists and health workers signed a letter saying the social-justice protests “must be supported,” The Times reported.

“As public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health.”

Some epidemiologists wrestled with the contradiction afterwards:

“I certainly condemned the anti-lockdown protests at the time, and I’m not condemning the protests now, and I struggle with that,” said Catherine Troisi, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. “I have a hard time articulating why that is OK.”

Mark Lurie, a professor of epidemiology at Brown University, said, “Instinctively, many of us in public health feel a strong desire to act against accumulated generations of racial injustice. But we have to be honest: A few weeks before, we were criticizing protesters for arguing to open up the economy and saying that was dangerous behavior.”

Like so many of our institutions, American public health had been captured by ideology. It was putting politics before the best evidence at the time.

As we came to understand later, the threat to both sets of marchers was not particularly great.

“The C.D.C. vastly overstated the risks of outdoor spread of the virus, which (at least until the emergence of the Delta variant) appears to be closer to 0.1 percent than as high as 10 percent,” noted New York Times columnist Bret Stephens in his July 27, 2021, column “COVID misinformation comes from the top, too.”

As the BA.2.86 variant rears itself in America, public health is at a new starting point.

Without the trust of the American people, it is more important than ever that medical professionals tell the truth and not twist it to produce desired outcomes.

Don’t try to censor pushback. Meet it with your best evidence.

Be honest. Be transparent.

That’s the approach Meghan McCain’s father used to call “straight talk.”

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic. Email him at [email protected].