How The Hell Did We All Get It So Wrong?

COVID-19 spotlighted political polarization and how you can't trust 'reliable sources' or even 'the science' when even the scientists were biased and censorship-crazed

CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 photo by Joe Zachs on Flickr

A few years ago a subscriber challenged me to learn more about the COVID pandemic and response when I asked for 'convincing evidence' re conservative skepticism. She sent me a 1,600-word missive covering The Great Barrington Declaration, lockdowns, masks, vaccines, censorship, and crappy media coverage. I pinned her response (thanks, N.S. Austin! No, I never forgot you!) to my desktop knowing I'd get to it 'wunna deze daze' since I wanted to investigate, but not right at that moment. Then, last Christmas, I got something from my wish list: The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind by Free Press columnist Joe Nocera and journalist Bethany McLean.

Gotta warn ya: This is a lengthy article. Skim over what you already know and focus on what you don’t.

The Big Fail covers a broad range of pandemic issues, but my primary curiosity was about what we got right, what we got wrong, and when we simply didn't have enough information, versus when we were acting like Neolithic tribalist dumbasses.

And we were. Often.

How did scientists screw up the science so badly?

How do you not trust a guy like Anthony Fauci?

He was a physician, an immunologist, and had worked for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. His work was relentlessly cited by scientists around the globe. He’d worked with the then near-impeccable National Institutes of Health. He received the highest civilian award available in the United States, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, given by George W. Bush for his work on an AIDS relief program.

The man knew his infectious diseases.

So when he was attacked and criticized by Republicans, the left defended him, well-versed in Fauci’s adversaries’ historical allergy to science.

There was growing evidence the left wasn’t always so keen on science either—but in 2020, we were only just beginning to take note of, for example, woke progressives’ hostility to well-established biology-based immutable sex differences. Had we been more cognizant of a ‘progressive’ political position with about as much scientific evidence as Creationism, we might have responded more knowledgeably and critically when this killer virus began spreading around the world and doctors warned it could kill millions. (The firm scientific consensus that, for example, ‘gender-affirming’ care for children had little scientific basis, wasn’t yet available). Ignorantly, but understandably, liberals panicked, because not only was there a Republican president, but he was pretty demonstrably the most intellectually-challenged man Republican voters could find.

We had good reason to fear conservative ideologues. Especially when Trump pushed, to no one’s surprise, junk fixes like hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. The man asked his coronavirus task force whether people could inject bleach, FFS! Trump did get a few things right, including a successful, fast-tracked vaccine, but he otherwise made the facts-challenged George W. Bush look like Jonas Salk. Fauci was this old, calming, and immeasurably more knowledgeable scientist. And yet, the man who exemplified ‘Follow the science’, confessed to Congress in 2024 that there was none behind multiple COVID rules, which arguably killed many more Americans and resulted in an incredible learning loss for children who couldn’t attend school. Even though kids were the least likely to suffer adverse effects or die from COVID infection. Americans masked, shut down, social distanced, enforced vaccinations—and led the world in COVID infections and deaths.

How did Fauci get it so wrong?

Science and politics are a bad mix, one based on evidence, the other on ideology (although that can be based in evidence as well). Fauci admitted to fudging the facts sometimes to manipulate Americans, like to get vaccinated. First he said masks weren’t effective in preventing transmission, then he said they were, and then claimed he never said that. He made honest mistakes—he said, with the best available information at the time, that it would take a year and a half to develop a vaccine, then the Trump administration put it into production by the end of 2020—successfully. He pish-poshed the Wuhan lab leak theory, despite knowing early on that experts suspected the virus hadn’t developed naturally. As of today, science points now to a natural origin although that still hasn’t been established, but it looked very bad when it was revealed that the lab may or may not have been involved in virus-altering research (also still unclear).

Fauci played the media like a harp, seducing progressives and liberals to ‘follow the science’ and we thought we were. We clutched the man with undeniable credentials to our bosoms while checking in with Reddit’s Herman Cain Death List, named in honor of the failed Republican mask-shunning presidential candidate who died of COVID-19 in July 2020. The list stood as a testament to those who, as one nurse put it, ‘refused to believe COVID was real’ until it killed them.

How did the left screw it up so badly?

The left smartly embraced N95 surgical masks, which were highly effective and provided the most protection. But it also failed to challenge certain policies or ask enough questions of what the experts claimed. Our biggest fail was on lockdowns and school closings, since it made perfect sense when you consider how contagious the common cold and influenza were. The support for lockdowns in a politically polarized world is one I still can’t completely damn the left for, at least initially and for those who weren’t epidemiologists. The right knee-jerked the opposite response of anything the left supported, and the far right’s famous lack of compassion for their fellow humans made it more believable that they were just being contrary, tantrumming children.

What we libs didn’t question enough was the insanity of what stayed open and what was forced to close. Schools were the worst. The initial rationale was that children and teenagers were particularly susceptible to influenza, and who wanted to take a chance with a virus that was already killing thousands? The school closure plan had been strategized by the U.S.’s response plan originator, George W. Bush—whose well-thought-out pandemic prep strategy unfortunately proved useless in an actual pandemic. It became clear early that old people and those with existing co-morbidities like diabetes and obesity were most at risk. Fauci never considered many lockdown/closedown ancillary risks, like denying children an education, when hastily-assembled Zoom classrooms quickly degenerated into no-shows. It didn’t help that the media focused on the few hundred children who did die of COVID, failing to provide the perspective that they all had extenuating circumstances and that the total number of children who died from COVID—a very tiny fraction of 1%—were dwarfed by the way the virus ripped through senior homes like Elon Musk on a DEI tear.

Fauci’s and others’ COVID-19 pandemic response unfortunately reversed traditional, established, outbreak strategy—it isolated the healthy rather than the sick. Blue city San Francisco, on the other hand, got it right—they were several leaps ahead of the rest of the country by applying their decades-old AIDS control strategy. In the ‘80s, when the city became ground zero for the mysterious new STD, San Francisco responded by targeting communities where the disease clustered—like Hispanic neighborhoods, where they moved quickly to isolate the ill, rather than the healthy.

Fauci didn’t take note of adversarial successes, blue or red—another huge mistake.

Rhode Island was the only blue state to respond like pros. Governor Gina Raimondo, who paid attention to the data and followed the actual science, was able to force schools open in Providence where the state controlled the school system. But other cities insisted on closing the schools, which drove her crazy. She told parents who were frustrated with closed schools that if they wanted to sue the district, the state would help them.

Raimondo noted the serious risks of leaving children behind to force them to go virtual, that it would irreparably harm them academically, threaten the kids with food insecurity getting free meals at school, and suffer further mental health declines. She worried about those for whom school offered a daily respite from abuse and neglect.

But most other blue states and cities refused to reopen. Today, kids who suffered school shutdowns lag in math and literacy worldwide, while child suicide attempts and depression rose sharply.

How did the right screw it up so badly?

The right wasn’t always killing it on the facts, either. Trump’s administration teamwork was hobbled by the enduring feuds and loyalties that characterized his first term. They, too, fell prey to ‘Whatever the left believes and does, we must do the opposite’. Some red state governors curried favor with Trump by refusing to instigate sensible mitigation measures. Others parroted his aforementioned junk fixes.

Then there was Florida governor Ronald DeSantis, who provided a somewhat better example than his fellow red-state leaders. DeSantis actually did follow the correct science initially, but in the latter half of the pandemic appeared more driven by conservative politics.

DeSantis annoyed many conservatives by supporting vaccines, correctly observing that “The data is showing us that you are much less likely to be hospitalized or die if you are vaccinated.” This is correct; one early misunderstanding is that the vaccines prevented infection.

He didn’t support, however, vaccine mandates, and his reasons appeared much more political than scientific. Whether the mandates were justified or not is still a matter of debate, clouded further by stands taken by formerly highly scientific organizations like the National Institutes of Health whose reputation has since fallen somewhat in disrepute. To those of us on the left, right-wing opposition to vaccine mandates looked rather a lot like little resistant children who’d rather put their families’ and neighbors’ lives in danger than get the Fauci Ouchie. I won’t judge DeSantis yet on his mandates resistance because we may not understand their reality for some time to come. But he did abrogate attention later in the pandemic by focusing more on the politics—‘rights’ and ‘freedoms’—than he did on the public health benefits and consequences. Nor was he always respectful of municipal agency itself. Earlier on, he supported allowing Floridian municipalities to instigate their own mitigation rules if they deemed it necessary. Later, he docked salaries of school board members who defied his edict against instituting mask mandates. (It sure did look awfully cancel-culturish to us libs!)

Where the right really got it wrong was on vaccines. The American resistance to them, which were almost universally regarded a generation ago as one of the modern world’s greatest successes, was a joint effort by celebrities on both political sides who unscientifically pushed notions like that they cause autism. Many religious conservative sects have also historically resisted vaccines. While many issues still remain unaddressed, like the health problems some claimed and which were sometimes valid, the overall consensus today among health professionals is that the COVID vaccines were effective at doing what they were supposed to do.

The cost of vaccine refusal in red states was predictably high. According to The Big Fail, “an ABC news analysis of federal data found that the excess death rates in states that voted for Trump were more than 38 percent higher than in states that voted for Biden.” The highest vaccination states voted for Biden, and the lowest for Trump, except for Georgia.

I remember checking the Microsoft Bing COVID infection map daily and nodding sagely as the red states reddened faster than the blue states—and how the U.S. remained at the global apex with the highest infection rates throughout the pandemic. Early on, I wondered if Trump was going to ruin his own chances at a second 2020 term by killing off his voters. I still wonder today if he did.

One of the most famous Herman Cain Death List casualties was the Republican ex-rock musician Meat Loaf, a high-risk individual who was elderly (74 years old) and obese. He refused to vaccinate. We libs shook our heads and tsk-tsked at the sheer stupidity.

No, vaccines didn’t prevent infection all that well, but the N95 masks that might have saved Meat Loaf’s life did, and vaccines kept you out of the hospital—and the morgue. These are the big fails of the right. When I finally got COVID, in January 2023, it lasted only a few days, with a nastier but not life-threatening cough than I got from colds. I was a virtuous, compassionate liberal and stayed inside for five days, with my neighbor helping with my laundry and grocery shopping. For five days after, I masked when I went outside, in accordance with Health Canada recommendations. No, I didn’t want to accidentally kill anybody, and even today I feel disgust at those political children—right or left—who may have.

Still, under DeSantis the Florida economy did much better than those who obeyed the government and shut down. He took a lot of blowback from allowing the beaches to remain open. Florida closed far fewer businesses and as a result became an attractive state for startups. DeSantis focused, correctly, on the elderly who were the prime victims of COVID and most likely to die from it. Young people in bars and on beaches might contract it but almost no one died.

As for Trump, he appointed a team led by a project-capable Jared Kushner, fast-tracked vaccine development with Operation WarpSpeed, and pushed out the first vaccines by Christmas 2020. The Big Fail offers a fascinating look into how they pulled it off.

How did censorship hobble our response?

Many raised their voices, challenging and questioning the draconian policies imposed by governments around the world, and those speaking truth to power were shut down and censored, much of it fuelled by political polarization. Too many politically knee-jerked, because if the other side was in favor, or not, of a particular policy, response, or vaccine, they themselves opposed it.

Scientists censored, too. Those with dissident views watched their tweets, posts, and YouTube videos taken down. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist and biostatistician, wasn’t just censored on LinkedIn for an article criticizing national pandemic response, his profile was removed, too. He was fired from his job at Harvard Medical School for the crime of being right. Others described his and Jay Battarcharya’s similar theories as ‘pixie dust and pseudo science’. Scientists attacked one another for following science rather than official party diktat. Many kept quiet, knowing nothing good could come out of telling the truth.

The Great Barrington Declaration

In October 2020, a think tank convened in the lovely Massachusetts Berkshires to debate pandemic strategies. Luminaries included Kulldorf, Battarcharya, and Sunetra Gupta from Oxford University, who disliked the lockdowns. They spent a weekend discussing mitigation strategies, and all agreed that, big surprise, the elderly should be the prime focus until vaccines became available. In this way everyone could get back to their lives and the economy could start rolling again.

They summarized their findings in a one-pager they named the Great Barrington Declaration and published it on social media. And of course, all hell broke loose. The GBDers criticized lockdown policies and noted their horrific impacts on mental health. They also named “lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health—leading to greater excess in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden.” (The Big Fail’s theme is who, how and why some Americans got left behind.) Their goal, they stated, was to “minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity,” along with recommendations for nursing homes, where the virus decimated so many seniors. It also called for opening the schools again.

Long story short, it went viral, a few hundred thousand people signed it, and—the critics drowned it out who claimed relying on herd immunity was unethical and questioned whether it was possible to protect seniors and the immunocompromised since together they comprised 30% of the US population.

The British medical publication The Lancet, the medical sparkies who ironically linked childhood vaccines to autism, arrogantly called the GBD’s strategy “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.”

And once again, the Fauci gang criticized the Declaration as well.

This is only one of many reasons why today, in 2025, it’s become much more difficult to ‘follow the science’, especially with how far scientific journal reputations have fallen.

Dr. Anthony Fauci: The Seymour Hersh of the healthcare world. Both men with sterling careers that ended in nuttiness.

Are we set to screw it up again next time?

I don’t usually write articles this long and if I gave the amount of detail I’d like to in this one it would probably be two or three times longer. The Big Fail is an engaging read that both criticizes and praises the left, right, and scientists for their reactions to the pandemic and the government/healthcare response. There’s a whole chapter on how American healthcare began to privatize in 1968 and how it’s led to better healthcare for the rich and less for the poor, who were disproportionately disabled and killed by COVID. (It doubled poverty.)

We could take a closer look at the problems surrounding WHO and the CDC, and the pandemic scams that multiplied faster than COVID, it seemed, skimming billions off the response as America scrambled to source enough N95 masks for healthcare workers, let alone the public. Their prime supplier was China, from whom there were far fewer available now as they took care of, understandably, their own population as well as supply all other China-dependent countries with them. There’s plenty more about the politics, the polarization, and how countries fail when they don’t trust their government (Sweden was an uncommon success story; guess what, because they trusted their trustworthy government). If you don’t trust yours, or the last one, ask yourself why, and whether America is producing leadership candidates of appropriate calibre.

In the end, for me anyway, I find the uneven COVID response to be a case study in how politics and polarization don’t mix with science. Have we learned our lessons? Probably some, but not others. And now we have a government only 39% of Americans trust, and scientists who must now fight for open science, rather than the social justice-infused pseudoscience that has led to so many ruined lives.

It took me as long as I did to embrace N.S.’s challenge to delve deeper into COVID because I wanted a source that was unbiased and factual; in the olden days you knew to avoid opinion factories like podcasts and social media influencers, and stick with the respectable journals. Five years ago that was a viable option; today, six years after I began regularly consulting Media Bias Fact Check and Snopes to check bias and factualism, I find even the best sources like the AP and Reuters infected with social justice nonsense and bias.

It’s something we should all be thinking about when the Next Big Pandemic hits. I’m not sure how I’m going to follow the science. Or who. But I will listen to conservatives more.

And I hope they will listen to liberals more, too. Because no one got it all right, or all wrong.

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