How the pandemic made it difficult for Americans to separate politics from public health

Amna Nawaz:

Just over 15 percent of American adults have gotten the latest COVID booster. Demand for the vaccine has dropped sharply since it was first introduced at the height of the pandemic.

That's partly because the government's response to COVID-19 has been so politically charged.

Judy Woodruff spoke to public health experts about that government response. It's part of her ongoing series America at a Crossroads.

Judy Woodruff:

In March of 2020, many Americans were united in their fear of the new unknown virus, as people grappled with the images of overwhelmed hospitals and death abroad and in the U.S.

Woman:

Hopefully, it won't be much longer.

Protestor:

We, the people, will not comply.

Judy Woodruff:

But public opinion quickly splintered, as governors issued stay-at-home orders to slow the spread of the virus.

Protestor:

It should be a choice, not a mandate.

Judy Woodruff:

People took to the streets to protest the economic and social impact of business closures, school shutdowns and mask mandates across the country.

Protestor:

This is a tool to keep us at home and on house arrest.

Protestor:

My business is being decimated as we speak.

Protestor:

The risk of spread in schools is low and the harm that we are doing to our children is high.

Judy Woodruff:

Leaders, including then-President Trump, offered conflicting information, including recommendations on masking and other prevention methods.

Donald Trump, Former President of the United States (R) and Current U.S. Presidential Candidate: The CDC is advising the use of non-medical cloth face covering as an additional voluntary public health measure. This is voluntary. I don't think I'm going to be doing it.

Jay Bose, Patient, We the People Health and Wellness Center: COVID has shaken our faith in the current medical system.

Judy Woodruff:

For Clara and Jay Bose, the pandemic marked a turning point.

Jay Bose:

We were in Nevada at that time. The kids are being forced to wear a mask for eight hours a day. And I started looking at, is there any science behind that?

Judy Woodruff:

They joined hundreds of thousands of other Americans who migrated to Florida during the pandemic drawn by the sunny weather and the state's looser COVID restrictions.

It was in sharp contrast to the pandemic tension among their extended family.

Clara Bose, Patient, We the People Health and Wellness Center: We haven't lost any relationships over it, but we definitely had some tension.

Jay Bose:

The relationships were strong. My younger brother, for example, works for a big pharma company. He thinks I'm completely nuts.

Jay Bose:

And he's my only younger brother, and we have spirited discussions one way or another. But he has not changed my thinking and I have not changed his.

Judy Woodruff:

It soon became difficult to separate the politics from medicine, according to Dr. Joshua Sharfstein of Johns Hopkins. He has worked with the state of Maryland on public health recommendations.

Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health: The pandemic was sort of like a match that lit that on fire, because it brought together people who didn't like masks and people who were upset about a particular action early in the pandemic.

Judy Woodruff:

And that had deadly consequences, according to Dr. Peter Hotez of Baylor College of Medicine.

He researched the human cost of the resistance to masks and vaccines in his new book, "The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science."

Dr. Peter Hotez, Baylor College of Medicine: The big differential in deaths was very much on states where people widely accepted vaccines and states where people did not widely accept vaccines.

Well, it's my estimate is that 200,000 Americans needlessly perished because they refused COVID vaccines after vaccines were widely available.

Judy Woodruff:

A poll out this September showed 91 percent of Democratic voters had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, compared with 66 percent of Republican voters. And Democrats were far more likely to get the latest booster.

And multiple studies show more Republican strongholds that resisted public health measures and vaccinations fared worse in terms of infection and mortality rates.

Laura Ingraham, FOX News Anchor:

Our big pharma overlords have decided that we need to get rid of these vaccines before they expire.

Man:

Why do we need an experimental mandatory vaccine for a disease, by the way, which you have a 99.997 percent chance of surviving?

Protestor:

No forced COVID vaccines for adults or children.

Judy Woodruff:

Dr. Hotez points to sharpen rhetoric in the summer of 2021, shortly before the vaccines were approved for younger children, as a turning point.

Tucker Carlson, Former FOX News Anchor:

If the vaccine is effective, there is no reason for people who have received the vaccine to wear masks or avoid physical contact. So maybe it doesn't work, and they're simply not telling you that.

Dr. Peter Hotez:

Well, there was an entire ecosystem of elected officials on the far right, together with FOX News and other news outlets. It was a predatory, organized, and deliberate disinformation campaign that convinced Americans that the vaccines didn't work or weren't safe, and they believed it, and they paid for it with their lives.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Presidential Candidate: I have got a lot of people ask questions about these new COVID mRNA…

Judy Woodruff:

Just three months ago, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, recommended against the booster for healthy people under age 65.

Their guidance directly contradicts CDC recommendations, but didn't go far enough for Vic Mellor, a former Marine, businessman, and Trump who financed the We the People Clinic in Sarasota County. He is against any COVID vaccination.

Mellor and his staff are leading the charge in what they call the medical freedom movement, skeptical of the medical establishment and their recommendations on COVID-19 prevention and treatment methods. They also promote non-traditional health care, including I.V. therapy and drugs like ivermectin, which is not approved to treat COVID.

All the research that's gone into the vaccines, you still believe that it's harmful?

Vic Mellor, Co-Founder, We the People Health and Wellness Center: Absolutely harmful, yes. I don't believe their research at all.

Judy Woodruff:

His skepticism goes beyond COVID. In the same building that houses the clinic, he set up a political operation, what he calls a guard the vote war room. He says it will help monitor potential election fraud in 2024.

Vic Mellor:

But it's going to be a training program for law enforcement and poll workers and precinct workers to identify when something is — when a law is being broken.

Judy Woodruff:

Down the hall, a podcast studio for Michael Flynn, who denies the results of the 2020 election. He served as President Trump's national security adviser, before facing various criminal charges, which Mr. Trump then pardoned him for.

Mellor told me, while there were no federal mandates requiring vaccination, he felt state mandates and unofficial mandates by employers or doctor's offices threatened people's freedom to make their own medical decisions.

Clara Bose:

The nurse was so caring.

Judy Woodruff:

Clara and Jay Bose, like other patients we met here, say they felt a huge sense of relief when they found the clinic and the alternative it offers to the government's messaging.

Clara Bose:

We didn't feel like they had done enough testing in order to merit our faith in it.

Jay Bose:

None of the claims that were being made, the big ones, safe, effective, doesn't let you get COVID, you don't transmit if you get the shot…

Clara Bose:

And if you care about your mom, you will get it.

Jay Bose:

… you don't die if you get the shot, yes, if you care about your mom, there's a lot of — it felt like…

Clara Bose:

It seemed pretty manipulative.

Jay Bose:

Yes.

Judy Woodruff:

The Boses rejects public health guidance for themselves and their young children.

Jay Bose:

We did not get the COVID vaccine shots for our kids or for ourselves. And we had COVID, two days, three days of some coughing and like a flu.

Jay Bose:

And that was it.

Judy Woodruff:

Their pediatrician at the We the People Clinic, Dr. Renata Moon, shares their doubts about the vaccine.

Dr. Renata Moon, We the People Health and Wellness Center: I have supported traditional childhood vaccines for my whole career. But as time went on, I was crunching numbers just like everybody. And it became clear to me from the data that we had from our government that this COVID infection really wasn't a threat to our nation's children in terms of fatalities.

Judy Woodruff:

Just under 1,900 children have died from COVID in the U.S. since the pandemic began.

But for this mRNA vaccine, Dr. Moon says her greatest worry lies in what she called deadly side effects, including inflammation of the heart muscle, or myocarditis. The Centers for Disease Control maintains it is a very rare occurrence, that, in fact, cases occurring after vaccination have generally been less severe than myocarditis caused by a viral COVID infection.

The CDC adds that it and the Food and Drug Administration will continue to monitor for and evaluate reports of myocarditis. But Dr. Moon says, when she raised these concerns, she was fired from her job in Washington state, where she previously practiced.

Dr. Renata Moon:

The medical school that terminated my employment sent the message that, if you dare question anything related to COVID, if you dare color outside the lines of what is allowed, what the main narrative is, then you will be punished, right?

And this is a dangerous place for us to be right now in America with this idea that we can't question anything and that our own physicians can't question what they're seeing right in front of their eyes.

Judy Woodruff:

Are there things that the government, that public health officials could have done differently that would have changed the outcome here?

Dr. Joshua Sharfstein:

One of the key things that can help people come together is transparency, transparency about what's being considered and an open discussion of the pros and cons.

And, oftentimes, I think public health officials, and not just public health officials, but also elected officials, just announce things. Like, today, here's what we're going to do. If, instead, you say, here's what we're thinking, we could do this or we could do that, then people respond to that by appreciating the bind that government is in.

There's often no perfect answer. Personally, I think one misstep was not doing more proposing and listening before acting.

Judy Woodruff:

Dr. Joshua Sharfstein said that this initial lack of transparency and conflicting advice may have contributed to the skepticism of the vaccines.

In a recent move toward greater transparency, an open difference of views has arisen among scientists over at what age otherwise healthy individuals need the latest COVID vaccine shot, with the CDC recommending it for everyone 6 months of age and up, while several European countries, the World Health Organization, and a prominent U.S. pediatrician say it's not necessary for young people.

For his part, Dr. Peter Hotez worries that our experience with the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing questioning and even threatening of scientists and public health officials will thwart the U.S. response to the next health emergency.

Dr. Peter Hotez:

I don't see things getting better anytime soon.

And the evidence for that is, if you look at the percentage of Americans who took the bivalent booster last September in 2022, when it was made available, only about 20 percent of eligible Americans took it. And in terms of this new annual immunization, I took it and about six other people.

So I'm really concerned we're going to start the next pandemic with two strikes. So I think it's going to be much tougher now to convince Americans to take vaccines because of the damage done from this predatory anti-vaccine campaign.

Judy Woodruff:

One more potential divide in an already divided nation.

For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Judy Woodruff in Baltimore, Maryland, and Sarasota County, Florida.