It Is Well Past Time To Stop Coddling The Right’s Delusional Pandemic Narrative

The further we get away from the early days of 2020 pandemic, the more emboldened the Right has become in terms of rewriting it, and the less fervent we’ve all gotten about challenging that.

Because let’s be real — we don’t want to have to fight that fight anymore. It was exhausting at the time and it’s exhausting now, only now it’s slightly less of a life and death situation. We have other life and death situations to worry about right now. A lot of people also feel that we fucked up and ended up unintentionally radicalizing people by being too harsh on them, especially because so many people keep saying so. I don’t know that that’s true, but I do believe that allowing the Right to believe they were “correct about everything all along” is not helping.

Over the weekend, Sen. Roger Marshall went on Face the Nation to claim that RFK Jr. is out here restoring trust in the CDC, after they “lied to us” during the pandemic. This is something that keeps being repeated over and over again — so much so that for a whole lot of people it just seems true.

Transcript via Joe My God:

MARGARET BRENNAN: Okay, I just want to unpack a few things you said there, and just very- because we want to be very careful in this very heated environment. When you say you have a problem with trusting the CDC, it was just a few weeks ago a gunman walked onto the CDC campus in Atlanta and shot the place up. Do you care to respond to that? And do you think that we need to be careful when we are discussing the CDC and public health officials right now?

SEN. ROGER MARSHALL: Well, look, of course, I condemn that shooting. But the lack of confidence in the CDC goes back to what the CDC did during Covid. They misguided us, maybe lied to us, even, about the origins of Covid, and how to treat it, as well. And the vaccine, they over-promised what the vaccine could do as well. So that’s where the distrust is. And now, Bobby Kennedy is in there, trying to clean-up that distrust, and trying to give American parents and grandparents and the doctors the right information, transparent information, to make good decisions.

No.

No one lied to you about the origins of COVID. There is literally zero — zero —evidence that COVID originated in a Wuhan lab doing gain-of-function research or trying to create a bioweapon. Not one iota! It’s literally just conjecture and vibes, and whether Roger Marshall likes it or not, the scientific consensus is still that the virus was zoonotic in nature and did, in fact, originate from a bat. In fact, there is now even more evidence for that theory than there was during the pandemic.

What is it that they wanted the CDC to do? Say “Oh, well, a lot of random people are saying that this is what makes sense to them, so let’s just tell them what they want to hear”?

Let’s be clear about why this was an issue — these people wanted a reason to be shitty to Chinese people, they wanted a coherent enemy and they felt that the zoonotic-origin explanation was invented to keep them from going to that well. There was no reason to care otherwise.

Not that it helped, mind you. There was an enormous spike in the number of hate crimes against Chinese-Americans and other people of Asian origin during the pandemic.

As far as overpromising what the vaccine could do, we were still learning things about COVID at the time. It was a novel virus, so of course things were going to change regularly. It doesn’t mean anyone was “lying” to anyone, it means they were learning. Initially, it was thought people would only get COVID once and that once they got it they were immune. It wasn’t until August of 2020 that a case of reinfection was confirmed. If people had taken the vaccine in the numbers they were supposed to have taken it, it would have been far more effective. Part of the problem, frankly, is that people who didn’t take the vaccine wanted to be able to “go back to normal” with the rest of us, and they pretty much ruined it — especially in areas where there were not high vaccination rates.

To boot, they also didn’t “misguide” anyone about masks or social distancing. There was one study that people misinterpreted as saying “it turns out masks did nothing after all” and then jumped all over, when it didn’t actually say that. Social distancing absolutely worked. Neither of these things were perfect and they were never intended to be. They just made it significantly less easy for the virus to spread — which was extremely necessary at the time, not just because people were dropping like flies but because the hospitals couldn’t handle it.

It is also, mind you, not true that we kept the kids out of school for too long and for no reason. The reason was that, even if they were less susceptible to getting seriously sick, they could catch the virus and spread it to others who would not recover so easily. Duh. Yes, it was unpleasant, but people were dying and that was more important. Repeating things over and over again does not make them true.

For those who may question any of this, allow me to point to the piles of evidence that blue states fared far better than red states in the later days of the pandemic because they followed the correct advice of the CDC. Also that even in red states, Republicans were 15 percent more likely to die of COVID than Democrats were, because even on an individual level, we were more responsible.

The only area in which the experts really “misled” the public, ironically, was in the beginning when they were worried there were not enough masks available for front line health workers and told people that they weren’t that helpful after all in order to get them to stop buying them up in bulk. After they could ensure that they had enough for those needed them most seriously, they said “Yes, you actually should wear a mask.”

Yes, they misled for a couple weeks, but it was necessary and they admitted it afterwards. People were okay with masks, however, until June of 2020 when the experts started explaining that the masks were more about source control and didn’t so much protect the wearer as they protected other people from the wearer in case they were infected. That was the exact moment when the Right went off the deep end over wearing them. I literally remember where I was sitting when I first saw that and thought “Hoo boy, this is not going to go well.”

Indeed, June was the point at which Red States began to overtake Blue states in terms of the COVID death rate.

We had a very serious virus out there that was killing people left and right and there was absolutely no good way to handle the selfish, wacky people who still wanted to go out like everything was normal, didn’t want to wear masks, kept pushing snake oil cures (before people started getting in trouble for snake oil cures, at which point they all switched to COVID not even being real).

In retrospect, I think we would have been a million times better off if we had just let the right-wing griftersphere peddle their goddamned colloidal silver and magical drinking bleach, but that is an essay for a different time.

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The discussion continued:

BRENNAN: Okay, just before we talk about other vaccines, specific to Covid, and what you just said with the CDC; it was- the pandemic was during the Trump administration. It began during the Trump administration, and Operation Warp Speed was a Presidential Directive by Trump, which some of your fellow Republicans say he deserves the Nobel Prize for because it stopped the pandemic. So, did you trust the CDC and Operation Warp Speed under President Trump, or are you saying you don’t think the President deserves the prize for that shot?

MARSHALL: Look President Trump absolutely deserves the Nobel prize. That vaccine saved millions of lives —

BRENNAN: — Okay, but you just said something that sounded very contradictory to that. —

MARSHALL: I disagree. I think it’s such a different time today than it was five years ago. Five years ago, we had a novel virus. None of us had any immunity to it. It was a strange virus made in a lab in Wuhan, China. But today, on average, Americans have had Covid five times. We now have natural immunity to it, and not everybody needs the vaccine. So both things can be true, and that’s why, when you have people who don’t understand science, that don’t understand medicine, why they don’t get it. It was a different day then than it is today.

No, both of those things cannot, in fact, be true and the “strange virus made in a lab” thing is, again, not even remotely proven. They cannot be true because Marshall is arguing that the reason people “lost their trust” in the CDC was because of their actions during the pandemic, specifically telling people to get the vaccine.

Additionally, people who understand “science” and “medicine” are aware that, like the flu, COVID mutates, which is why we still need to get immunized against it every year. It’s not a “one and done” deal. We do not have “natural immunity” to it.

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The only thing Kennedy could do to cause these people to “trust” the CDC would be to just tell them all to just follow their own instincts and “do their own research.” They believe made up things. Roger Marshall believes made up things. If Roger Marshall wants to be told that the virus “originated in a lab” in spite of the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever that this was the case, there is literally nothing the CDC could do to earn his “trust.”

How can there ever be trust when there is no shared reality? How can anyone earn someone’s trust when they are determined to believe things that are not true?

And what would even be the point? What would be the point of a CDC trusted by people who want to take Ivermectin to cure COVID and also cancer? By people who don’t believe in vaccines and, increasingly, do not even believe in germs? What good would it do anyone? They may as well just have a Department of Blowing Smoke Up People’s Asses.

What Kennedy can do is cause every other person in the country — those of us who share the same reality, do require evidence, and are not just making things up as we go along — to distrust the CDC and all other health-related institutions … which is exactly what he’s been doing the whole time.

OPEN THREAD.