Donald Trump has spent most of the past week in a tizzy over his possible indictment, which he initially said he expected to come Tuesday. But when he has managed to take time off from his deranged broadsides against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his desperate efforts to stoke political violence, it has been to attack potential GOP rival Ron DeSantis—particularly over his handling of COVID-19. The Florida governor, of course, became a hero to the right for his stand against public health measures at the height of the pandemic—and has pinned his White House ambitions, in part, on winning over anti-vaxxers. However, in a series of idiotic jabs, Trump has sought to cast DeSantis as some kind of Anthony Fauci-like figure—that is, a “big Lockdown Governor” who championed what the former president is now implying to be a dangerous and untested COVID vaccine.
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The posts—which rebuked DeSantis for having “got the vaccine and the booster” and for rolling out a statewide testing operation—seem to complete Trump’s descent into anti-vax madness, and serve as yet another signpost of the GOP’s disturbing direction on public health. Indeed, Trump is just one of many Republicans to indulge in anti-vax sentiment in recent weeks: There was Josh Hawley, who implied Democrats were using the deep state to target “vaccine critics.” There was the Republican-led House subcommittee, which suggested in a letter to the Food and Drug Administration this month that the government may have improperly approved COVID vaccines to “provide cover for implementing and enforcing vaccine mandates across the country.” And then there was Rand Paul, a frequent antagonist of Fauci and other public health officials, who told the Hill on Thursday that he “wouldn’t vaccinate my children for COVID,” falsely claiming that the “risks of the vaccine are greater than the risks of the disease.”
“The risks of the disease,” Paul said, “are almost non-existent.”
While the families of the million-plus Americans who have been killed by COVID since its onset three years ago might beg to differ with Paul’s assessment, the senator is right that the danger of the pandemic has decreased dramatically. But that’s because of the very vaccines he’s trying to undermine. Thanks to the shots, which were developed under the Trump administration, the crisis has receded, and for most Americans, “COVID no longer controls our lives,” as President Joe Biden said in his State of the Union address this year. The vaccine was the one success of the Trump administration’s otherwise disastrous handling of the pandemic. But instead of taking credit for fast-tracking its development, Trump has gone the other way, following the lead of the base, whose tendency toward conspiracism was nurtured by the former president and his allies.
The danger of this kind of thing has already been made clear: It doomed the country’s response to the initial wave of the pandemic, and seems to be contributing to the higher COVID death rates among Republicans. But the peril could escalate if anti-vax sentiment gets further baked into the official party platform, as my colleague Katherine Eban wrote earlier this week. “The worst-case scenario is if it becomes a litmus test in the [presidential] primary,” Saad B. Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health who has served on numerous US government vaccine advisory committees, told Eban. Unfortunately, that already seems to be happening, based on the one-upmanship between Trump and DeSantis as well as the reckless rhetoric from some GOP lawmakers. Not only could that exacerbate the partisan gap in COVID risks; it could further compromise the country’s public health overall.