NY.- Former President Donald Trump’s chaotic, denialism-filled response to the Covid-19 pandemic discouraged independent voters and arguably cost him the 2020 presidential election.
Four years later, another aspect of his management of the pandemic has become a sensitive issue for another sector of the electorate: his staunchest supporters.
Over the past year, as I have listened to Trump devotees sing his praises across the country, I have noticed that they have shown a rare willingness to criticize Trump for the rapid development of Covid-19 vaccines, which he had celebrated. as one of the greatest successes of his administration. The vaccines, a scientific breakthrough, have been administered to 270 million Americans and are estimated to have saved millions of lives.
“I’m not very excited about the accelerated rollout of the vaccine,” said Amaris Angell, owner of a recently shuttered food truck business, who went to see Trump in Las Vegas on Sunday. “He seems to still be proud of himself for it.”
“It’s poison,” Nanette Finazzo said of the Covid vaccine.
“I don’t believe in vaccines,” Jeanette Reineck said as she waited for Trump to take the stage on Sunday. “I’ve never done”.
The anti-vaccine sentiment running through Trump’s base of supporters has not yet emerged as a major political liability for the former president. Most voters I’ve spoken to are quick to excuse Trump for listening to the people around him at a time when no one understood much about Covid. And the attempts by Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, to attack him for his management of the pandemic during the primary and caucus season never caught on.
However, this dynamic is worth understanding, because it is an example of how Trump draws inspiration from his base. Anti-vaccine sentiment has shaped his campaign, as well as the type of president his supporters would like him to be if he wins. Right now, Trump appears to be taking careful steps to ensure he doesn’t lose any of them to the staunchly anti-vaccine Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who runs as an independent and has attacked Trump for his handling of the pandemic.
“His signature achievement (for which he deserves credit), Operation Warp Speed, is something he is now running away from, seeing it as a liability to the group he wants to please,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in an email.
A long and complicated history with vaccines
Trump has long had an uneasy relationship with vaccines, as my colleague Jan Hoffman wrote in March 2020. In 2007, he wrote, he suggested there is a link between autism and childhood vaccines, an idea that scientists have vigorously debunked. . And in 2015, he told an interviewer that he had never gotten a flu shot.
“I don’t like the idea of injecting bad things into your body, which is basically what they do,” Trump said then.
However, as president of a country mired in a pandemic, who infected himself with Covid, Trump supported the rapid development of a Covid-19 vaccine, while promoting scientifically unproven anti-Covid remedies, such as hydroxychloroquine, and once suggested bleach injections. He celebrated when the vaccines were approved, and spoke about them after leaving office.
“I delivered to the new administration what everyone is now calling a modern medical miracle,” Trump said in February 2021. “Some say it’s the greatest thing that’s happened in hundreds of years.”
That August, in a sign of how anti-vaccine sentiment was hardening on the right, his boasts about the vaccine were met with boos at a rally in Alabama.
“I recommend getting vaccinated. I did it, it’s good. Get vaccinated,” Trump said, to boos from the crowd.
“You have your freedoms,” he replied, “but it turns out that I got vaccinated.”
Politics at play
Trump has since stopped praising vaccines, a change that appears to have been determined by politics.
In early 2023, DeSantis was preparing to run in the presidential election. He downplayed the public health measures Florida instituted in the early days of the pandemic.
He consistently chided Trump for not firing Dr. Anthony Fauci as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who spent much of 2020 urging people to stop the spread of Covid by taking precautions like wearing masks. Moving to neutralize those attacks, Trump began to portray DeSantis as a false vaccine skeptic.
“Wake me up when DeSantis apologizes for vaccinating more people than Trump and Fauci combined,” read a social media post written by another person who amplified on his Truth Social account that August.
In September 2023, he told Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News host who now hosts a show on SiriusXM, that he was not proud of the vaccine and did not intend to talk much about it, despite some people telling him. They had suggested that I do so.
“I’m not going to talk about it,” he said. “But what I have done is get something done for that specific thing.”
As Kennedy’s presidential candidacy has gained steam, Trump has sought to paint him as inauthentic on this issue as well.
“He said ‘No vaccine is safe and effective,’ and then he said ‘I would never say that, I’m not anti-vaccine! Where did that come from?’ Trump wrote in Truth Social in April.
These days, when Trump mentions vaccines, it’s usually to express his opposition to vaccine mandates.
“I will not give a dime to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate,” he said in Waukesha, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, in May.
A fight for mandates
Public health experts are concerned about how anti-vaccine sentiment could shape a second Trump administration, whether by limiting vaccine investments or appointing vaccine skeptics to public health agencies.
“You have to worry that you’re not going to try to think about who is the most scientifically competent person and who is going to adhere most closely to the scientific evidence,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the School of Public Health at the Brown University, which spent more than a year working on President Biden’s Covid response. That work involved the creation of a White House pandemic preparedness office, which he worries Trump will try to dismantle.
Jha said vaccination requirements have helped reduce childhood illnesses across the country, including in Republican-led states like Mississippi.
“We are increasingly tying political identity to vaccine mandates for our children, and that is a bad thing for our country,” Jha said.
Joe Grogan, who led the Domestic Policy Council in the Trump administration, said Trump had “moved heaven and earth” to get vaccines developed and approved quickly, and blamed the Biden administration for instituting federal mandates that had made them politically toxic.
“We’ve squandered so much trust over the last few years that it’s going to be very difficult to earn it back,” Grogan said in an interview, specifying that he was not speaking on behalf of the Trump campaign.
A Trump campaign spokesperson did not respond to a query about the former president’s public health plans for a second term.
‘We didn’t know’
Trump is also receiving outside political pressure on vaccines. Podcaster Joe Rogan, who has been outspoken against vaccines, said this week that Trump has not “course corrected” on the issue.
Supporters I spoke to in Las Vegas, however, were disinclined to punish Trump for the vaccine and his handling of the pandemic, but suggested it’s something they’ll pay attention to in the future.
“I wish he would have fired Fauci,” said Ashley Wehner, 35, a stay-at-home mom who schools her children at home. “With everyone scared, we didn’t know.”
Wehner, whose husband is a waiter and whose job was affected by the closures, said the pandemic had eroded her trust in pharmaceutical companies and the government. As a result, he said, he now pays much more attention to politics.
“During Covid our eyes were opened a lot,” he said. Since then, he has voted in every election.
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