good afternoon. my name is mark schmitt. i'm the director of the political reform program here, new america. and we been navigating the shores of american politics through the pandemic era and before and kind of adjusting our thinking as we go along. and so we were really excited have this discussion of. a new book called pandemic politics but it's by three authors, one of whom will join us. and we'll also have commentary from from others that will introduce shayna, kushner, gadahn, a professor at the maxwell school of public policy at syracuse university and in the political science department, is one of the three authors of the book will be joining us. the other two are sarah wallace. goodman and tom pinsky.

shane has been a participant. our electoral reform research group here at new america and is really a leading, i think about, about current american politics. before i turn it over to shayna to talk a bit about the book, i just want to emphasize that i've been just thrilled by reading this book. just a fascinating take. extreme, seemly readable, while it also has all you know, all the apparatus of solid political science and a lot of survey research that's gone into it, but it's really it's a real reminder of how and what an intense period that was. as politics interwove with the pandemic and complex ways. and they really kind of show the state of american politics as at the point where the pandemic and the all the factors that fed in afterwards which are just you know, trump but also nature of american federalism and a lot other a lot of other challenges we faced.

so i will i will turn over shayna and we'll have a discussion that will include apoorva mandavilli, a reporter at the new york times who covered pandemic as deeply and in all its aspects as. anyone and ashley kirzinger who's the director of survey methodology at kaiser health news service. so we've got a couple different perspectives on this that will kind of flesh out the the political science. i'm not going to do more than that on biographies either person. if you hop back to our events page, there's a link where you can see more detail, one on each of the panelists. i want to thank all of for participating with that. let me turn it over to shayna. all right. so i'm going to give a kind of brief overview, the argument of the book and the data. my coauthors. sara was goodman and tom kopecky. any mistakes are are my and not theirs. but we are full coauthors on this book so i'm going to start by showing you graph which you

may have seen a version of this in a variety ways. this is the kind of cumulative u.s. death toll, death toll per capita over time from 2020 to 2020. or you could expect you can expand this over time, but what this is showing you is, looking at the share for trump 2016, comparing different counties and their death rates. and so there's a couple of things to note first is that these blue counties off with much higher death rates from covid than are what we would call red counties. these are more conservative counties, they tend to be more rural. we know that's the story of the early part of the pandemic. but as of the point where we get more and of people being vaccinated, we see this kind of shifts on the death across different counties and the most kind of trump counties are the

ones where we the highest death rates and then we see this apart where we're getting, you know, excess death in that are we're more likely to vote for donald trump in 2016. and so is just another way to see a similar kind of pattern if you look early on the pandemic since april 2020, a lot of the early outbreaks of covid and a lot of the deaths from covid are coming in places like and new york on the coast is where we're kind of moving from coasts inward with with covid, as you see more mitigation across places start to see these kind of excess in republican versus democratic state. these aren't counties either. these are and these are red lines being higher than the lines tell us that the excess death are higher in places that are more likely to vote. republic and that kind of when we get to vaccines we see again

this pulling apart of higher vaccination rates in that are more likely to vote democratic. so the question might be why? why is this? there's any number of explanations but one of the explanations that we talk about in this book is the role of partizanship as identity that shapes people's response as to the pandemic from very days. and we we show the book as early as march of 2020. we're seeing lots of differences in health behaviors, both at the individual level and policies across states that that are wound up with partizan. so we open the book by this little vignette looking at june of 2020. we are several months into the pandemic. there has been no this is a presidential year in case you forgot, this is all a blur. but in case you forgot we were in the middle of primary election then a general election in 2020 and the both the

candidates, biden and trump are off the campaign trail in person for quite a long, which is very unusual in a presidential year. in june of 2020, trump back on the campaign trail, and this is a picture of him in oklahoma at his firsrally in person, the shutdowns in march. and you see there's a couple of things to notice here. first, that it is in-person where joe biden is still, as you know, trump says, campaigning from his basement. he's wearing a mask. he goes even outdoors. trump is indoors at stadium in tulsa. he has no mask. no one in the crowd seems to be masked. even social, that even the secret service folks. so this tells you there's something about the way that trump is acting that's quite different than democratic leadership at th point. but as marc pointed out, it's not only about trump's messages. it's about broader messages

about the pandemic that are coming from the parties that are quite different that that focus down into the public. the argument we make in this book that partizanship is the most consistent in u.s. health behaviors and attitudes in the covid 19 pandemic. this partizan response is not in it was not inevitable. the partizan made the crisis worse the effects of covid 19 were all encompassing across a mostly. today we're going to talk about health behaviors. we show in the book how. covid 19 also mattered for the the election and for attitudes about democracy. attitudes about immigration and inequality and is not the case that all places had. conservative leaders were or were doing as poorly as us in the book lay out what we call america's preexisting conditions that would have made the pandemic difficult under any circumstances and then point out how partizanship makes all of this worse. we are at a time of deep

political polarization, our health care system is is both weak and deeply unequal. we economic and racial inequality that make health outcomes very different by income and race of people in the us we are also in an election year with a president who very focused on the economy is. he saw it as the key to his reelection in a reelection that was going to be built on the republican base and not reaching out across too many. we also had multiple years of a bureaucracy see, you know, not just deep state bureaucracy, but a lot of the bureaucracy that had been underfunded, that was understaffed. and we had just come through an impeachment where the president believed that he had been kind of wrongly accused of wrongdoing and was again not very interested in kind of co-op or raiding across party lines.

and so into all of that walks coronavirus. so we have this again, unequal plays, a place that does not have as much bureaucratic capacity as one might want for a huge pandemic. and then we have this on anticipated virus in the very early we see the president downplaying seriousness of the disease the spatial heterogeneity, the pandemic. like i said, it may if you remember the kind of earliest are in the coasts in, states that were not key to the reelection of donald trump. there's kind of conflicts, the cdc and executive branch that in terms of messaging and to shut down whether to suggest that people are should stay home and in this very noisy environment low and conflicting information the public starts to turn toward the people that they see as experts in this area, which is not only health experts, but now

also their political experts, because the political experts are disagreeing with each other across party lines and disagreeing with what experts are telling them. theoretically might expect that under conditions of of a disease new disease, that people's risk aversion and self-interest would have led them to be more cautious to pursue health behaviors that would keep them protected. fact i wrote a whole book about anxiety politics that suggests that that's what people do under conditions of threat threat. but that's not exactly what we saw here. we saw was instead what people, instead of taking in information about their risk from disease and changing their attitudes and their behaviors accordingly, what we see is that people are taking their cues from their trusted political leaders instead of their health leaders. and when and what know from public opinion is when. political elites are united. we should see public follow

along, but given that we saw elites across the parties are divided on. whether or not covid was a risk at all, whether it could, you know, who was risk and how to protect yourselves. what we saw was both division at the elite level that trickled down the mass level and we saw division. so how do we in book look at this? well, we did a series of surveys. we started in march of 20. we got my coauthors and i got a rapid grant from the national foundation to fund a set of two surveys. and then we just kept applying for grants. and so we have a series of. six surveys where we follow the same respondents from march of 2020 to march of 2021. we respond. we interview them six times. we start out with 3000 people. we ask, this is through yougov, it's online weighted to match the census. we have questions about health behaviors, attitudes, emotions.

we also have a russell sage grant and other funding to to do all this. so what showing you here? this graph is just looking over time at the cumulative death rate and those gray bars, those vertical bars are the places where we have our. so i'm going to just give you a sense the survey data just focusing on health behaviors at this point. so we asked a series of questions. i'm sure ashley is going to talk more about we measure health behaviors, attitudes, but we just asked these questions starting in march of 2020 and went over time whether or not people are doing these activities to try and keep themselves safe from covid. and this is just percentages of respondents who said, i am doing this thing, including visiting doctor, getting information, covid 19, washing your hands more. you can see lots of. people are doing things like avoiding gatherings and washing their hands more. but again are arguing and we show as early march of 2020 that

you can see differences across people's partizanship in the behaviors that they are. so this is just looking at those seem behaviors and looking by the identity of the respondent, whether they're republicans, democrats, other here is independents. don't lean toward the parties. so across all of our measures democrats who are that middle gray are reporting much higher levels of these health mitigation measures than their then republicans and democrat republicans and independents and this is just that the averages. but we can also look within the state. we can compare within the same zip code and even, you know, facing the same kinds of health risks. we see these differences across. so you might say, well, march of 2020, this is coded is just a state problem. and so maybe it's just that people like democrats are being rational, but republicans are also rational. and so that be true. and so we we look over time to see if it's the case that elites

some point come together and then we should see shifts where republicans and democrats more like each other. what we see in this time period that we're looking at, we would have required that, you know, democrats and republicans again, have the same message in order for them to look similar. and that's not what we find. in fact what we see is is moves in parallel polarization, more we see republicans and democrats starting to look like each other, even in the same states as the the risk was similar. so this is slightly fuzzy. i don't expect you to read this over time. all these little dots. but what this is showing you is this same six questions that i told you that we about washing hands, avoiding gatherings looking out by bipartisanship of the response to over all six waves of the data that we have. and so again the takeaway is that these squares, these gray

squares that are on top those are democrats. democrats report that they are doing these things more even at high levels where republicans, many like 80% of republicans, that they're their hands. more 90% of democrats are saying so we have this this difference. and at no point do we see that republicans and democrats are really coming. they either move in parallel or they're polarizing. so i'm just going to show you you may have noticed that we didn't about facemasks in march because was a lot of difference about of opinion from the cdc and others about whether or not people should be wearing masks, whether should leave them for health care workers. so we start to ask about and april 20, 20 when we asked about them over time and it's a kind of, i think, helpful case study to see why this matters, how partizanship works here. so you know, masking is a kind of major cultural shift in the united states people like their

individualism. they like their freedom. they're less likely be making decisions based on like what's good the community and very on president trump is undercutting the message from public health officials about a mask and telling people that it's wrapped up in the identity. your partizan identity about where why you wear a mask or not. right so and you know he he is in july there's like one picture of him wearing a mask. but on and later after that he says, i'm going to do it. i don't think know everyone can make their own choice, but i'm going to do it, you know, trump himself gets covid in october of 2020, he tells people in a tweet as he's leaving the hospital, don't be afraid of covid, right? it's not a risk. i great and the first thing he does when he comes home from walter reed is go to the white house and take his mask off. even it's likely that he is probably still contagious. so we see in our data as well.

right. so you ask people, have you worn a mask? democrats, republicans are very different. they're kind of different in terms of this is the percentage of democrats and republicans who say they're a mask over time. democrats are always higher and it kind you know, it becomes a marker of identity in ways that makes it very difficult to change that behavior when people and and getting people to take in information whether or not it is a risk or not to talk not to wear a mask but to not a mask when it gets wrapped up in identity like we think these health behaviors do, they're very hard to separate from what is good you from what is you. okay so again this is where we're going to stop again. how did we get here where the deaths themselves are partizan? but we saw this as early as march of 2020 in that the all of the behaviors were partizan and

the elites dividing on that are is a kind of indication of what we would what we saw for that first year of the pandemic. that was fantastic i mean, i'm continually reminded what i learned from book, but i'm also continually reminded of just how compressed and intense period was. and i think one feels that intensity as much as somebody who is a journalist to covering it day to day. so i want to turn it over to apoorva for some thoughts and perspective. thank you. yeah. as i was listening to shayna talk, i was having some pizza of covering a year of lies from the white house, which is unprecedented situation for a health reporter to be in, to have to fact check the administration on an active basis. but you know, i do want to talk a little bit beyond that. i mean, i come from the perspective of an infectious disease reporter, you know, i wrote about the first sars outbreak.

i've covered malaria, hiv, tb. and, you know, i live in a world where people expected a pandemic to happen and. so there were lots of what we call tabletop exercises trying to model what might happen if a virus like, the coronavirus came along and. in fact, the year before the pandemic, this organization, the global health security council, they sort of it's it's an international consortium of. experts rated all the countries of the world in how they could deal a pandemic. and ranked the united states number one in pretty much every except communication in which they ranked second after the united kingdom. but essentially they thought that the u.s. would do a fantastic because we have all the resources, we have all the money and the expertise and the knowledge. i think they really not take into account the kind partizanship that shane has been talking about and came as a huge shock to just about every expert i talked to. you know, everybody was, of course, aware of the anti-vaxx movement and just to sort of

divide, especially after the 2016 election of the sword partizanship that exists in this and could be a problem. but i don't think anybody the the extent of this would play out and. you know, shane talked a lot. trump and there's no doubt that if we had had a different president in power, things would have been very different. but i also think it stops there. i think a lot of it was already in even before he arrived. you know we heard, for example, after the 2016 election that he was a a symptom, not the it really is a little bit like that and you know in about the pandemic since then and writing about you know what went wrong and how we cope with pandemics in this country. what's become really clear is that are some things that are baked in to the united states of america baked into how we are structured that make it next to impossible to fight a pandemic.

so, you know, i think you mentioned federalism, mark, when you were giving your introduction, and that's a huge part. it you know, it's a big strength of the united states that we have this much diversity and there are some very good reasons why certain states make the choices they do, you know, in health, for example, if you have a small state like vermont or alaska, they may not want to share their health because it makes people really easily identify able. so there are reasons for why there blockades in place but. what it does mean is that when you have a pandemic. the the government just can't move fast as it needs to. they don't have access to information. they don't have access to all of the they don't know what's happening even with doctors. and there's also a massive divide between, what we call, you know, public health community and medicine in this country, because we don't have a national health care system, pretty much all of our medical care is privatized. and so there's not a lot of communication between the government structures that to a pandemic and the medical that

actually sees the patients with the disease and all of those things played into this pandemic so yes partizanship but also all of these other things i think now you don't delving into sort of disinformation and misinformation, looking at it it's startling how much how far we've come and will ever be able to turn back. my colleagues actually published story a couple of weeks ago, sort of tracing the path of misinformation. and, you know, they said on july 8th, president trump on social and he said that he won the election in wisconsin, 8000 people. so i read social, but then it went on to all other social media platforms. you know, parler gab, facebook, twitter, tiktok, you name it and. within 48 hours, a million people had seen it. and then, of course, you have talk radio, your podcast, your tv. and before you know it, a very significant chunk of the country that he did win the election in

wisconsin. and we're seeing something very similar play out even with health. so, you know, when monkeypox along, it became really obvious that this not covid specific this now actually baked into how we look at infectious diseases how we might react to any pandemic that comes along almost immediately there was misinformation and you know on on social media i anecdotally saw tons of people saying oh, look, you're done fearmongering about covid. so now you're going to use monkeypox control us. and what's next? lockdowns for monkeypox, etc. . and actually, there was this team of researchers at the university of alberta scraped tick tock, you know, has a billion monthly users and in may before monkeypox was even really a big thing in the united they scraped 800 videos with misinformation in one day. so we are just looking at a completely different landscape. we were, you know, five years ago. and i think that has to play into every single pandemic plan we put into place.

and, you know, i have a feeling that if shayna wrote another book after the next pandemic it would not be all that different probably would be much worse. last week there was a pew research center poll that said that 70% of republicans think that scientists stay out of public policy decisions. and democrats, the numbers were almost exactly flipped. 66% of democrats thought that scientists should play a very active role in public policy. so i think we are at a place we have a very divided country, and i'm not sure where we go from here. thank you, apoorva. and, of course, all of that will also to climate and a host of other issues that that we're facing. boris all kinds of things. ashley yeah, thank you so much. i'm happy to be here with you today and share some of what we have learned about politics and covid for, our own public opinion research. so geoff has been conducting regular of the us public on health care and policy for over 20 years and normally we focus a

lot about health care affordability and access. and as you can imagine, as a survey researcher who regularly the public about their views of health policy, i am well versed on partizanship and its impact on the public's attitudes and reported experiences. but i think it's especially important and this book does is to think about how the party partizan divides in public play out with this unimpressive effort in an unprecedented pandemic effort to vaccinate americans against covid in late 2020. like other survey researchers, my organization had launched a big effort to track the public's views and experiences with vaccinations through our covid 19 vaccine monitor. the monitor, still active, is a nationally survey run by my team to. initially, it was used track vaccine uptake and hesitancy and is now tracking everything booster uptake to vaccine options among kids and as a poor, i mentioned the prevalence of misinformation in similar to

others reading book. it was a little triggering for me because it reminded me of such moments during the pandemic and china alluded to some of them. but you know, what's the so influential was the early, consistent rhetoric from president as early as. january 2020 on the former president was saying things like it's under control, it's going to fine. by february, he was blaming democrats for politicizing the virus and perpetuating a hoax his tone was really consistent throughout his term. right. that churches were going to be full by easter. we're going to back to normal. it's going to disappear. and given this early messaging, president trump, it's perhaps not surprising that the response to pandemic was characterized by at least some partizan divide the start. but across variety of measures. as shane mentioned, we saw those trends in the gaps getting larger over time. and so i'm thinking back to spring 2020 when we were thinking, we were asking the

public. how worried they worry about sick from covid 19. we saw only slight gap between democrat and republicans was 11 percentage points. 56% said a democrat said they were worried to 45% of republican hands by october of that same year, just a few months before the vaccines were becoming available, that gap had ballooned to more than 40% in port personnage points, so more than tripled. and by november 2021, we saw democrats about twice as likely as republicans to say they're worried about in their family getting sick from covid and our own data. i'm just going to add a little of our own data to continue the narrative where the data in the book kind of ends by april 2021. democrats were already outpacing republicans vaccine uptake and now it's about nine in ten democrats have reported at least one shot compared to about just

half a little bit more than of republicans. these differences are magnified. it comes to boosters. our latest survey finds that about three fourths of democrats compared to fourth of republicans, report being both vaccinated and boosted. it means that democrats are almost three times as likely as republicans to be up to date with vaccinations. according to the cdc guidelines. and i should note that partizanship is not the only thing that predicts whether someone will get a covid 19 vaccine. in fact, we developed our measure, our of measuring vaccine uptake. we designed in order to measure both uptake and resistance. so we asked people whether they would get vaccinated soon as possible, whether they wanted wait and see, whether they would only get vaccinated required, or if they would definitely not get vaccinated. and if you remember back to when the vaccines were first available, there was a considerable of adults who were in that wait and see group. this is especially among black

and hispanic adults who had legitimate questions and concerns about the safety of, the vaccines. this may stem from distrust in the medical system or that the vaccines were developed something use something called operation speed which was a little alarming to some people. but by the end of the summer, we found that those populations had become less less vaccine hesitant. they saw friends and family members get vaccinated. they talked to a health care provider. they their concerns dissipated. what we didn't see shift was the share of republicans in that definitely not category. right. so they were they were not vaccine hesitant. they were resistant. so, yes, vaccine uptake is by demographic differences like age, education, race, ethnicity. but when we like the good political scientist that i am in are all of those into a multivariate model. we find that partizanship turned out to be the strongest predictor of any the other demographic variables and in vaccine uptake and now booster

uptake as well. i just want add a little bit to what was talked about about misinformed. and before we get to the conversation and i it's something that we are paying a lot of attention to and several of our surveys we've been testing people's beliefs and different false or misleading statements around the safety of vaccines and the risk of covid for almost every piece of misinformation that we're looking at. republicans are substantially likely to believe it compared to democrats. this includes the false belief that vaccines can cause infertility change, your dna and that covid is not really that deadly. and the government is inflating the number of deaths. in fact, we find that such a strong correlation between belief in this type of misinformation and being unvaccinated. so it's a lesson for all of us going forward, figuring out how to do a better job of misinformation early on during a public health emergency and trying to do a better job of the role that partizanship be

playing and belief information and misinformation and disinformation. and i think with that, i'll stop and. let us get to the conversation. and i'm looking forward to it. great. you very much, ashley. first, i want to update. i think i identified you, ashley, as being affiliated with kaiser health news, which we're familiar with because they're right around the corner. us but you're with kaiser family, it's all one organization working that's what i figured. shayna, do you want to comment on any comment on i mean, i think this is really the the on misinformation is one that we take up very much in the book. but i think that's a huge part of this story and that some of my in communication do a really good job thinking about about you know i hadn't thought much about tick tock i prefer to think about tick tock if possible, but but i do think, you know, the smart people who are working on social media platforms, are really here.

i also think i, i love that i'm just like a super fan of the kaiser family foundation, the polling. and so i'm so happy to hear about you know that there's still thinking and and asking about boosters and kids vaccines. and one of the things that i think maybe we we can talk about is that the the uptake kids vaccines is very low, especially for kids under the age five. and that i don't that is only explainable bipartisanship because it's much lower than you would expect given the kind of the breakdown of partizanship. and in the u.s.. so i think one of the things we might want to think in terms of vaccination are other things is we why that is why. it's why we're seeing these very low levels of booster. children's vaccines and and how

much of that is about a lack of communication and from the cdc other and kind of local health and how much of that is people just wanting to believe that this is over. i don't know if either one of you have a sense of that. yeah. i mean, definitely i think a lot of people want to believe that it's over and i also do think that the government did not take all the opportunities that it could have to get the message across vaccines. ashley you mentioned that, you know, they didn't talk about this early enough in the pandemic. i think they didn't talk about it early enough in. the tech, the technology's development. i mean, you know, many vaccines were being developed for 20 years at the nih and were a lot of opportunities that were missed be able to say this is actually your tax dollars at work. this is not new technology. this is you know, you put money into that is your doing and should benefit from it. and you know we're not the only country that saw vaccine hesitancy. there was a lot of vaccine hesitancy in germany and in other countries.

but what they did differently was they sort of did very targeted campaigns. they had they figured who the people trusted and they put people in front and they had them say, you know, you this is the medical benefit for you from, you know, getting a vaccine. and you shouldn't not get it for these other reasons. here's some information. and i think it's important to reach people where they are. you know, whether that's religious leaders, whether that's community leaders. you know, about 70 million people are members, social media platforms like, you know, parler and gab and truth social that build themselves as, you know, alternatives to the the usual, you know, the big facebook, twitter. and so that's those are the places that information needs to go. but if you look at the cdc, the fda, you know, one of my big criticisms during the pandemic was that i could barely get information out of them, you know, and i worked the new york times. it was kind of insane to me that how hard i had to work to get the most basic information out of them. and i was getting emails from tons, tons of readers saying,

i'm going to a wedding i'm doing this, i'm doing that. you know, how can i be? and there was no place for those people to go. there was no place for people to be able to go. ask very simple. they were autobots. a lot of these social media accounts from government agencies and even when there were people, it was so stiff and, stilted and not interactive, not that you people didn't have anywhere to go. and i think we do things like that. again, it has to be so much more easy to get information for everybody, not just for reporters. apoorva how much of that was a function? the trump era, cdc? you know, that's kind of changed bit. and how much is it just the nature of a an agency that's not very good at interfacing with the public. yeah it's it's i mean was definitely a different kind of secrecy during the trump era. there was a lot of active obfuscation, lying and doctoring of documents. that's not always the case but i will say the cdc is almost always secretive.

this is not new. i mean, they are really, really not great at communicating with people is such a shame, right. when you think about so much could have been improved letting reporters actually behind the scenes saying this is what we do, look, this is who we are, because they individual cdc scientists. i know are, for the most part, amazing they are so hardworking. they mean so well. and instead of showing us what did they they had this sort of faceless institution that didn't seem to care about average person. and that, i think, really worked against all of us. let me just put some numbers. the children vaccination, because i think it's it's really striking. when we first started tracking this among adults, we had about one in five adults that were in that, definitely not category. and that's actually where vaccination when we asked parents what vaccinating their kids that's where most like that's about the share for parents and about their kids too. and what we saw is as there was lack of information, the rollout

of vaccinating for especially for the youngest kiddos was really tough. we saw that number increase and now it's about asked of parents of kids less than five say that they definitely will not get their their youngest kiddos vaccinated. i think that's really striking to show you know where vaccine hesitancy was and where it increased too because of the rollout and the confusion and when we asked them you know why why don't you want to get your kids vaccinated? they talk about lack of research. they talk that the vaccines are too new. they're tested enough. they're worried about effects. so all of the same concerns that existed for adults, too, but that then we're able to address using public health, it hasn't been effective among those youngest. six months to five under five. so i think it's really striking. you know, if i can add to that for a second, it's also i think that the the the cdc and other agencies didn't really talk

about the importance of getting vaccinated, even if you were infected by the time the vaccines came for kids. just about everybody infected already. and people had this perception of kids as not being at high risk. and i don't think that the messaging was nuanced enough to be able to say. yeah i know we got you got infected already but here's why you might still need a booster i think it was just all know get vaccinated get vaccinated and there was no subtlety about that message people just turned away from it because they they didn't hear themselves in it. i was infected. why should i still get one? they didn't hear a satisfying response to that. what's the relationship? actually, you might have a sense that this from your surveys or china between the overall movement of hesitancy about kids which has been going on for like 20 years now and the specific hesitancy covid, we are either one driving the other or you know or is the bigger one irrelevant? so i think maybe you can speak to this about numbers. my sense from reading the literature on on kids

vaccination and jennifer reich's work on childhood vaccine is that it's a pretty small number of parents who don't vaccinate broadly. they have their reasons but schools are such a mechanism to to basically get kids vaccinated because everybody. there are very few exceptions in in a handful of states that would allow you to be fully unvaccinated to go to schools. and so i think that kobani i think there is this anti-vax that has spread and has misinformation through, covid 19. but i think this this hesitancy about that kobane 19 vaccines is is something than a general anti-vax movement because there's school that requires you to have it to be there. so there's no state to actually force parents this point. there's just recommendation. yeah, i think that's absolutely

true. and you know, going back to role that partizanship is playing in this, what we're finding is this increased distrust in science that came along during the pandemic especially among republicans it has led these parents to call into question the legitimacy of other vaccines in a way that we hadn't seen prior to the pandemic that they be quite troubling. yes, there mechanisms in schools and that that get kids vaccinated but this overall mistrust distrust in science i think could play out in lots of different ways you know, taking their child to the doctor to see a health care provider, to take the health care providers advice on on medications. you know all of that could be playing out and then that in a way that we hadn't seen prior to the pandemic. so we have some questions from the audience. but before we go to that, i want to loop back little bit because

i was really struck that both of you actually imperva use the words misinformation and disinformation. and chaney, you really didn't. and i want to just like dig into that a little bit more because i'm really i'm sort of hesitant beginning to hesitate myself about using, you know, glibly using words and disinformation. and i wonder if if you can disagree we get a little bit, you know, mission formation, legitimate uncertainty and maybe you know, there's kind of cultivated uncertainty. there's people you know so the sowers doubt theory that like about like election denial you know, which supports you know, can support and spread misinformation. obviously, i'm probably a little influenced by having read this morning emily oster's piece about how, you know, we should sort of have general amnesty for everybody who screwed up and which has infuriated a lot of people. i'm not sure i quite as infuriated about the piece, but wonder if you could think about, you know, not just

misinformation. but actual or cultivated on certainty as institute tried to grapple with this. i mean, i think that's what's new in what we're facing now. you know, before i joined the times, i ran an autism news website was very familiar with the kind of anti-vax messaging you see among parents. and a lot of that is what we would call misinform people who are anxious for various and have just heard the wrong information. they want to do the right thing, but genuinely believe that giving the vaccine to their kids is going harm them in some way, that think has existed for quite a while now, since you know, andrew wakefield in the late eighties, but the the kind of thing that we're seeing now where, you know we're figures respect figures in the community are spreading information on a previously respected i should say some of them have genuinely swallowed the misinformation themselves and they also think that they're doing the right thing. but then there is a whole segment now of disinformation, information that is actively,

maliciously being placed to cause. and i think that is a new that you know, it was it was there before, but now it's a huge monster. we're not we're not really sure how to get rid of that. i to take a slightly different not different position like a slightly different angle is that i worry i don't think disinformation then is something to scoff. i worry a lot more that most people pay little attention. most of the time and that for them any amount of information might be helpful. and but we don't have a great to think about both general uncertainty as mark but also statistical uncertain. right. and so i think that is so when people start to think about like what is the risk from taking a vaccine or masking versus not. right, we don't have a great way explain to people how they should think about counteract

trolls. we don't have a great way to think about uncertainty and what it means that. sometimes you're going to get the vaccine and you're still going to get covid and i think the kind there's a general discomfort that people have with the way that we have to think in these these terms of that confidence intervals and thinking about uncertainty that that more my concern and that's partially why we also in the book we don't talk very much about misinformation or disinformation because there's lots of really smart people doing that work also because so of politics is like not paying any attention and then having like being forced to pay attention and then thinking about how do we grapple with this, this information that we don't know what to with. so that's kind of a slightly different angle on this. i think it's a good insight about politics, general. i think a lot of it is about how you manage attention and the fact that people are not, you know, so we often think of

politics in terms of people having certain beliefs. it's often more a matter of what they're paying attention to when, which is often very little really, really interesting actually, to do. but i was just going to, you know, adding on to that is like as she started with like they're taking their their cues from political leaders right and and thinking about political leaders passing on disinformation on to the public and how really troubling that can that can be for our democracy in terms of elections or in public health emergencies. and so i'm thinking about the role of politicians in perpetuating disinformation, misinformation. if if we, you know, we can't put the burden entirely the public, you know, we have working moms and dads and, you know, people just trying to get by and, you know, they they're not supposed to be experts. they're supposed to be able to trust their leaders. and so thinking about how we can

do a better job of making sure politicians are are sharing factual information. so, i mean, this is really playing out in the midterms right now. right. with that leading up to that, you know, you see dr. oz spouting misinformation, disinformation or however we want to categorize that don't know his intentions but you know the democrats the democratic candidates are not really countering it with information. the best way to counter myths, disinformation writers with good information to be able to point out what's wrong. and and i think most of the democratic candidates right now are don't want to bring up health it don't want to talk about the pandemic. so there's not counter to these myths. that's actually the first question from the audience. so let me just do that. which is which about the midterms? and the question as many people are still experiencing the aftermath of the inequalities created by covid and the response. yet covid seems to be far from voters minds in the midterm election. why is that. i'm not sure it is actually, but

that's the that's the question i i would say i think it is, you know, considering we are coming up to a point, there is going to be most likely a winter wave. we don't know how big, but there probably will one. and we have influenza and rsv, everything else you would expect the government to be talking more about covid and they're not really. i mean, we had president biden say in september that the pandemic is over, which, you know, they walked back, but basically that seems to be the approach. i think they're afraid. talk about the pandemic. it seems like nobody wants to touch it with a ten foot pole. i mean, if you just ask voters, you know, what they're thinking about, right? you know, covid not in the top five, right i mean, it's the economy, it's inflation. it's i think even maybe ukraine might be above the pandemic this point. and that's partially because rate the people in charge here want to talk about it it's a one you don't want to get blamed for mismanagement and two you're not getting very much credit it at this point.

and you also want to be like, don't look at the fact that 800 people a day are still dying. right. like there's you know, it's a fine line and they you know, biden wants to talk what he thinks is going to help the democrats who are running and it's and they've made a calculation it's not covid at this point. no, i think it's pretty clear that they made the calculation that the supreme court overturning roe was going to be a more winning issue for democratic than talking about covid. i think even i think climate change is even above covid in terms of voters top issues, which i think is really striking because that at the climate change rarely comes up in the top. top issues. yeah, i think that's absolutely true. but cheney, as somebody who's written a book about anxiety and politics i wonder, like i often have the i have a little bit of a theory that kind of traumatic events kind of affect voters, you know, years on as they do people in our in our lives. so i like i think part of the

story behind trump was just the trauma of the financial crisis that the really long unemployment that ensued that's just a theory in my head because obviously it was finally over by then. do you think any kind of underlying, you know, this experience having your kids out, you know, all the all the disruption of of covid, even if it doesn't show up in polls as the most important issue. so i think that's that's very true. right. i think there's, echo, there's going to be echoes in cobr about covid and the whole experience. right. because it's not just about the disease. it's about all that you said, the disruption. it's about the educational effects, about that there's a million more than a million less people now. there were in 2020, and that's over and above what we expect, a life span. many of our, you know, in the united states is drops now the life span of native americans

has dropped by six years and since 20. i mean, there are absolutely going to be after effects, the kind of undercutting of democratic norms and and the election that's all part parcel of this moment in time, not just about the pandemic, but all wrapped up in it, whether or not people actually ascribe it like that, that that to the pandemic, i think would take some work from from elites. i'm not sure that people know like the long tail of the effects, but they're certainly going to be felt. but they may think, oh, it's just about inflation because, you know, elites talk, you know, leaders talking to your increments and four year increments. but like the effects public policy are long right just think about the last time you went to an airport and had to take your shoes off right that's a 20 year tale from one, you know, from an in time. so there there are long tales from events although i think

voters don't always ascribe that to particular events unless kind of politicians make that connection for them. you know we just wrapped up a big survey with cnn and looking mental health and i think the mental health impacts of the pandemic are going to be long lasting especially among young adults. you know the group 18 to 29 year olds that were really informative ages during this pandemic. i think it's going to be really troubling to watch the share of them that suffer from anxiety, depression and don't the resources to access. but they don't really even attribute it to. the pandemic. they they, you know, it's it's much bigger than that for. them they kind of think of the pandemic as an isolated event and not really thinking about the lasting impacts of it one thing. i'm really curious about is how the perception the pandemic will change over time as some of these longer term effects become

apparent. you know, if you hear a lot of the rhetoric around learning, it's just the pandemic wasn't actually big a deal. we did a lot of harm trying to counter this little thing. that could have been fine and over time, as more people are diagnosed with having long covid, you know, a lot of the people have long covid now hopefully resolved. but even it's a very small percent that continue to have long term problems. that will be a significant number of people. and everyone will probably know somebody with debilitating symptoms and wonder, you know, when's the the sort of partizan rhetoric behind them and the anger and the, you know, the sort of the instant instinct sort of survival mode, how much people will look back and realize, know what? it actually was pretty terrible a lot of people i knew died. a lot of people i know have long covid and how that might change the perception long term. for the plenty of us who know them right mean i'm going to go to another another question from the from the audience which is what lessons can we learn to

help the country better navigate the next national threat? what systems in place do we need to have to ensure safety? so that's not quite any of your focus. but i'm curious, i mean, partly suppose my insight i don't think i have any answers. you know, i wrote about this really recently actually what why we may not be able to do so well with handling pandemics and what we need to change. and of course money is a big part of it. we need to fund public health in a big way, need better data systems. we need coordination between federal and state. but some of those things, as we were talking about earlier, are baked into the country. and unless are some real legal changes, not clear that those are going to go away. and in terms of just countering, you know, getting ahead of the misinformation, i think that we've been talking here about how to get, you know, do it early and do it often and do it clearly. if a pandemic wasn't going to isn't going to make the public support more funding for public health. i don't know what will right and and we haven't seen that to be the case it doesn't seem like

one of the lessons learned among public or even among politicians is there's more financial support for, the public health system. so unfortunately, i don't have any answers either. but korva, you were talking earlier, i think you alluded the kind of a disconnect between, public health and doctors who are working with patients. is there something there that you suggests a solution there? there be. i mean, so one of the things that has happened is, you know, doctors are the ones who are on the front. they see the patients. they know when there's a new coming along, some cluster of cases and the lines of communication, medicine and public health are just not clear. like there's not a good way for the cdc to know when doctors starting to see those. you know, there's steps have to happen in between. so if we had sort of better data systems that are connected. if we, for example made it sort of mandatory for hospitals to report data into public health agencies in return for, say, you know, medicaid, whatever it is, some if you receive dollars, you

must contribute data that kind of sort of legal binding agreements. and then maybe we see better data flow and might be able to respond a little faster. so that's one potential solution, you know, and i think also as electronic medical records get better, they're just a mess. right. they're huge, huge mass. but the ones that the ones that we have start to look similar and work out the bugs and figure out, you know, how they can communicate with each other and there will be data hopefully i'm going to make a completely self-serving recommendation which which we do in the book as well, which is that social should be part of the discussion about pandemics and and public health and there was just not much engagement on the government side. so people who work in areas of science and humanities right it's very much like the doctors and the public health folks and not the sociology and the

political scientists and the folks who are kind, understand decision theory, understand how people, think about issues and consider and i don't think the social sciences going to fix this entirely, but i do think that there's there needs to be places of discussion and thinking about, you know, a lot of my colleagues, these kind of op eds science and in jama about like here's the messages that we know might be most effective and i just don't know how much uptake there was on the government side from that right. like i think a lot of us were kind of like shouting about this, but i'm not sure how much engagement there was from kind of formal. formal, you institutions of of folks who do work in social sciences. yeah 100% agree actually in the cdc there people there are economists social scientists behavioral psychologists the kinds of people you would need to make a sort of more holistic decision about things. and my understanding from reporting i've done is that even

though those people exist, they were often not in the room. they were not actually being asked for specific things. and i think that's we saw a lot of the this is based on science kind of language when really was based appropriately on science but also on some other economic considerations and all of those things. and if they had said look, we considered the science, but we also looked at economics of it. we looked the social science, we looked at those psychology, blah, blah, blah. we had all these people put, their input in and this is where we've arrived as the best thing for our country that would have gone over a lot better then this is all based on science when it's not not. i mean, i don't even know what mean when they they say like that they trust in science or like i use those questions, but i'm not sure what people are thinking about, like when they're thinking, i mean as well. do you have a sense from either a kind of open ended or qualitative like what are people thinking about? is it like kind of white jacket with a beaker? is that like exactly. exactly. i mean, that that's and you

know, i alluded to this like operation warp speed, right? they're thinking about like, you know, labs and secrecy and all of all of that when they're about like science and and we all know that science is in companies. a campus is much more than that. right. it involves economists social scientists, you know, behavioral scientists as well as those that are they actually conducting physical lab experiment. it's yeah, that's a really a really persuasive point. i'm sorry. dropped off there for a minute. another question from audience which i'm going to restate a little bit. covid forced people to pay attention to state and local government. did this have any notable effects were views towards state and local government just as polarized? and i wonder if you can comment a little bit on i mean, i feel like as we went through the experience, we saw different states highlight, you know, some states which seem good and, then they then they would you know,

they were obviously the cuomo andrew cuomo press conferences and all that. there was ohio seemed different from florida. you know, they kind of popped up and down how did how how should we see in retrospect the role of state government and attitudes towards state and local government, which are traditionally more trusted than the federal government? yeah. i mean, i think, you know, in a federal system in the way, you know, as of course as the way our our health systems set up, they're both private, but also they're at the state level. right. and all of the regulation on health or almost all the regulation on health is at the state level, states decide whether they're going take you know, they're going to expand for the affordable care act and whether they're going to sign for medicaid expansion. and so there's so much variation by states which also lines up on partizanship of the state. but, you know, those state level decisions are really important in helping to structure health more broadly. and they have this big impact life span and access to health

care and access, drug treatment and all sorts of things. colleague in sociology, jennifer has does really fabulous work at state legislatures and health. i think generally in our we find that the kind of health like the local leaders are seen like you said as more trustworthy. i think the difficulty on the state level is just the lack of information that people have, of the lack of local news, local newspapers are dying. a lot of the local television and stations are owned by the same national companies. and so you get kind of a a national message rather than these more you these as more than you get the tailored state and local kinds of information, i think. i mean, i'm i don't have much to say about the performance of the states much as that people, i think, trust their state health agencies more, but they don't have as much access information about what they're doing or to

get information about them because local newspapers are hard to find and also state agencies, terrible websites generally. yeah, just adding on to that. absolutely find the same thing in our data that the public is more likely to trust their local health agencies. they're much more likely to put faith in local leaders. but if you really want to see the way that partizanship played out in this is democrats living republican led states and. how angry they became when mandates got lifted or any of those requirements got lifted. or on the flip side, republicans living in democrat led areas and still having masks in place. so you could really see the partizanship out in the data in that way as well. we saw a lot of this play out in schools. locals in school districts going a certain way and then the people that district rebelling, the states deciding to sue them

or pass a law saying, no, you can't do that. i mean, it was there was so much conflict at every level, which is just incredibly confusing to people. do you listen to your local leader? do you listen to governor? do you listen to the president? do you listen to the cdc? you know, one cdc official i talked to said it's not just the lack of information. i at times there was also too much information like that. some of their guidance was sold. like if you looked at some of the guidance for schools, it was like a school superintendent was supposed to be able interpret this incredibly complicated information and this. official basically said, you know, i think we a bad job we should be gave way, too much information. we should have you know, we gave it at the level of like what a would need to know instead of what the average person would need to know. that's really interesting to know. and there's also a good amount like the section on federalism in the book is really valuable in playing with. i mean we we've looked a little bit at preemption of local initiatives across a lot areas really, you know, state preempting labor laws, lgbt

protections, environmental laws that local communities have have passed as a like. that's a real right now american politics and also played a role in some in covid response and in the in the schools i mean it's also playing a role now you know with their overturning of roe now with abortion policy being set on a state. and so i think we're seeing that play out in a way that, you know, people living in states where abortion is no long no longer. and while their across the county lines living in a different state to have access to abortion in play. i think it's going to be really interesting to see how, you know, when we have all of these health decisions being made and at the nonfederal level, how it all plays out for the people living in these different states. yeah including how do people who live in where the abortion rights have not changed? you know react to the changes in

other states states. that's a pretty broad question, but i think we can put it on the table. how has the pandemic shifted, the way people view the role of health and government institutions and service delivery, i mean i guess again to recede a little bit, is there anything that's happened that changes permanently, changes the relationship with those institutions in either a good or bad way? so more mistrust, so much less confidence mean i think we're going to see that reverberate for a really long time. you know, i've never reported on something where mistrusted the cdc to this extent, and i count myself among those people. you know, even reporters, i think, are really wary of what comes out of these federal agencies. it's just a very different environment. yeah, i mean, i think this is a i had a project where i was looking at trusts trust in different federal agencies and the cdc always ranked pretty high.

it was like a it was a kind of well agency. now, we might wonder, like, what does it matter if the public trust the cdc well, you know, you need the public to to understand that what they're being asked to do and comply with that. and so the cdc was pretty high. but like you can see like i like it's just cratered and that that's how agencies start to rebuild that. i mean, i think the biden administration has tried i'm not sure they've been particularly successful this this new team at the cdc. so i think that is of those things is that like the agencies that deal with health were always the ones that people turn to, particularly in a crisis then. now it's you know, if you can't what government is telling you, where you going to turn? you're going to turn to alternative sources, which are much less regulated. they're much more likely to have misinformation as we've talked about. and so that's a a real problem. you may be you know you may not know how to kind of weigh risks

versus. and so i think that's that's a long term problem. and the agencies have to think about how they maybe are more transparent, maybe they're, you know, thinking about doing town halls or something. i'm i kind of laugh at the idea the cdc coming to do a town hall, but it's probably not a bad idea to try and work with people where they are. they need something, right? i mean, one of the big sorry one of the big problems i think has been that, you know, city cdc is in atlanta. and they were always seen as sort of separate from white politics and that really worked to their advantage because it's like, okay, this is about public health, it's not about politics. and one of the things they have not done yet is to separate that, you know, dr. walensky is still part of the white house briefings. it still sort of all mixed up in there. it doesn't as separate as it needs to. and the cdc still isn't doing as many briefings of its own as it used to. and so it's just, you know, until we separate those, there's no republican that's going to watch a white house briefing

know and say okay i believe everything coming out of that briefing. i think if they really want everybody to listen to what the cdc has to say, the cdc has to say not just the white house and the cdc mixing. i love it when i can just bring the data points to the further back of everyone's point. so we actually asked how much trust people had in the cdc and 2020 and the share of republicans and, democrats who said they had a great deal or, a fair amount of trust was equal. about nine in ten, two years later, it's still about nine in ten. among democrats, less than half of republicans. so i think, you know, and we also look at drops even lower among. so i think it's really striking that that prior to this, there was seemingly high level of trust of the cdc that has really and and the cdc is going have to do work in order to regain that trust. what was the what what's the level of recognition of the cdc mean name recognition or like understanding of what it does

the average scientists in, the cdc huge, hugely demoralized ized understanding that they were once seen as heroes. now they're basically villains in people's eyes, really, really like depression, wanting retire, wanting to quit, feeling just so upset. i've had scientists tell me, you know, that somebody through a glass of water their face because they you know, they said were from the cdc that would never have happened before. and so you just there is a level of sadness think and and and there is some acknowledgment that they need to change but maybe not as much as there needs to be that super useful. i actually think i must have misstated question a little bit because i was just i just wondering when you look at approval and trust in the cdc, like how many people have actually heard of the cdc or know what it does, you know why 2020? i'm not actually sure that the public needs to know exactly what the cdc to see does on

every different level because the cdc does so much. right but it's just that they don't know they are the organization that makes recommendations in the safety and health right and and a large share of the public is aware of that aspect of the cdc. now whether they understand the nuances know probably not not half as well as apoorva that's right so right okay. are there other countries that we can learn from that their responses or experiences i mean you do something you know one of your coauthors has that more comparative perspective or there and and it's woven through the book are countries that that we look to in the future for i. i think we can think about you know what are kind of cases that look like the u.s. and did better and some that look like the u.s. then did just as poorly. right so yes, both both tom and

sara are so sara mostly in europe and tom works political economy in asia. and so throughout the book, we kind of think about the uk as a potential or moderate. we can think about, you know, it's very different in that it has national health care system, but it also has is highly polarized like the u.s. had, a kind of conservative leader throughout and in their performance on all the metrics in terms of excess deaths and r is much better right. and part of that is, you know, boris johnson never makes it you know, this an issue of like conservatives do this everyone else does this other thing right? there was much less. there was much more kind of consistency in terms of the messaging. obviously know that he was kind of partying while, you know, during lockdowns and that kind of thing. at least the kind of messaging was much more consistent about masking and lockdowns and and

vaccination. brazil is another kind of case study that we look at with a very of a right wing populist leader, deep inequality, racial inequality in and you historic ways like in the u.s. and you know the excess deaths look a lot like the u.s. on the kind of polarized on kind of ideological in ways that we are or more similar to the u.s. than other places in latin america. so those are the kinds of things, you know, do we want to take lessons from? i don't know. i mean, probably national health care system would have been better in then in the u.s., more general access to medical care and, less inequality. but even in that are deeply polarized. we didn't see same kinds of we didn't see the same of challenges in, terms of getting people vaccinated and, getting them, you know, wearing masks and all that, as we did in the u.s.. so i think a lot of that is about leadership, even if the

preconditions are pretty similar. yeah. your point about john's about johnson and the parties and all that made me think about something in the book because obviously it took a while, but there were consequences for action by johnson and one there's one section earlier in your book where you talk about you know there fewer consequent there didn't seem to be quite the same level of consequence for the early mismanagement of covid as that were for it like we think there were consequences for george w bush's handling of katrina for example, like other disasters have seemed to have immediate political consequences. do you i mean, yeah. i mean, there's an overall, you know, because of polarization, a kind of lack of consequence for mismanagement, political. yeah. i mean, i think this is one of the downstream effects of a polarization in and the kind of rolling all of our identities together that like your team you

have to believe in your team and believe they're doing a good job regardless of whether they are, in fact doing a good job or not. and so that kind of accountability like breaks the accountability mechanism. that's not to say that. no, i mean, donald trump didn't get reelected. so that's a pretty big consequence. but but it's not. but but ron desantis is still in office and we'll probably get and you know a lot of the folks where we're seeing you know kristi noem the other folks where we see like what is quite bad management of public health are still in office. rising stars in the party. and there seems to be not a of accountability for covid itself right that you know trump it's kind of it's wrapped up in lots of other things so polarization means that and the deep polarization and kind of

trumpian way of like taking little accountability also means that voters are free to kind of discount things they that even that that are in fact bad like that we have had a million excess deaths right from. but i do think that the the lack of trust in even that statistic is playing a role here too right it's the the republicans perhaps. don't feel the need to hold accountable because they think the death toll has been inflated and it's not as bad as it was portrayed in the media. and so if anything, they are favoring their politicians for standing up scientists and not requiring vaccines. and for state workers, whatever it may be. right. so i think i think all of this so wrapped up in all of these topics we've been talking about so yeah, the poor.

you have any thoughts on that? oh, i mean, i agree. i think it's we've seen sort of both of it people being punished, so to speak, for going a certain way, but also a lot of people saying, oh, i'm so glad that you went this way. and, you know really called the bluff on these scientist because covid was nothing. and so it's going to be, i think, a longer term. you know, space to see how it happens over the longer term. because i really do believe, as i said earlier, that things are going to look very different in a couple of years in terms of how people view the pandemic at least i think so. we'll see. i do want to just make a point that was related to something apoorva said earlier about the cdc. is that one of the i think, consequences that's not about accountability, but is about wrong and blame and wrong accountability is that there has been an increase in threats and assaults on health care workers in in the last two years, both to people who run these systems, but also like just people who

are working as and doctors and a lot of that is partially about misinform. but part of it is if you can't your accountability like you blame you know the doctor not saving you know your family member from covid or know that there's just a lot of there's a lot of misplaced blame about who actually, you know, messed up in this terrible pandemic that i think it's being taken on people who are lower down and who are probably have not no responsibility for the outcomes, but are to get to essentially. right. so that we've seen increases in political violence generally in the last decade but specifically on health care workers and i think that is relatively new. yeah i think the last question here kind of goes directly to that issue of blame and credit. the the question says that the

book shows the relationship blame and credit blame credit and the actual understanding of the problem itself and the information and i get and the question i think is, is there ways we could use or you know, of manipulate, blame and credit in the future, like for example, if you named all the vaccines after trump or, you know, really did more to, you know, identify him with with vaccines, you know, i think it probably doesn't examples of of that about how you could sort of create understandings of blame and credit if you want to. yeah. no, i this is a great point. and tom and i have talked about this a lot like it's actually puzzling in some sense that trump didn't take more credit for the vaccine. right. he doesn't write like this guy. he loves branding. just called the trump vaccine. right. i don't think you would have necessarily you know, that's one of the things this administration. right, they put all this money and they into the vaccine development and they did it

quickly and they got a safe vaccine within less than a year, which is i know that's pretty stunning right. and they got it in people's arms in less than like take some credit for that. that's what politicians do and it's a little bit surprising in some ways that that was not the choice that they made because i think it would have made a difference right, too. i don't think it would have necessarily depressed democrats willingness to get vaccinated and it may have on the margins increase as well. what has happened is that, you know, trump has has advocated for the vaccine publicly, but not while he but in rallies and he gets booed. right it now. right. but have they done it earlier. had they taken it had he taken more credit, i think it would have mattered a. great deal in terms of vaccine uptake. but yeah, i mean, a of what politicians do right is they try and take credit for good things and put the blame on other people. and so i think that certainly is the case that there could have been ways that his

administration and also i mean biden takes credit all that for the vaccines he took he took office after the vaccines were developed. i mean got them in people's arms but you know like that's what he's been doing since he got in office was taking credit for the vaccines now. yeah i think it's it was difficult for the trump administration to embrace the vaccine publicly after framing the virus as not as big of a health risk. you don't need to be worried about it that then. it's very hard to be like. but you should get vaccinated right. so i think that was he had had they not done that framing from the beginning, then i think we would have seen them. the vaccines in the way that you're to. but i think because they were trying to frame the pandemic early on, as you know, not something that they needed that the public to be worried about, that that they then not embrace the vaccines. yeah, i agree with that. i think there was a choice had

to make. either the virus is a big deal and you need vaccines or it's not and you can just, you know, don't have to do it. i mean, he never really got photograph of getting the vaccine right. he didn't kind of want visual proof of that. even if he was going to talk about it. i think that was a very conscious choice. and i actually i wonder if some democrats would actually have wanted to get the vaccine if it was called trump vaccine. the warp speed was making everybody nervous not just republicans. you the idea that this thing was developed in the year miraculous as we know it to be now at the time it was like did they cut corners? i mean, i myself was also like, well, the fda really pushed things under pressure from the white house, perhaps there were so many questions about it that if you then on top of it called the trump vaccine. i don't know maybe there would have been some some hesitation. right. i mean, they also dramatically he always wanted to overstate cures rather than vaccines, including, you know, including like when he got sick and he announced that everybody get whatever the experimental antibody monoclonal antibodies

want was a weird away reaction. all right. any of this is going to really wonderful conversation. any last thoughts from china or were just thank you so much for engaging this has been so so great to i mean i'm sorry to give you all ptsd and relive the first year that pandemic but it's really helpful to you know think through it with other with other people people. yeah. i mean i hope that this book is a one off and it doesn't apply to other pandemics that come our way. that's my closing. but you'll have to find other topics for the future for future books. yeah, yeah, yeah. and you know, as much as said that this was tricky, it's really an excellent book and really excellent research. so thank you for for taking the time to. write it and and having it as of the public history is really wonderful book and you know for those watching on the event page there's a link to to purchase the book which i totally recommend i think it's really one of the best it's not just a

book about the pandemic or public health, but as a snapshot of american or not, not even a snapshot, a kind of moving picture of american politics over the last five years, really. i think it's just just amazing. thank you. so i'm proud to have been able to be to host this conversation. i really appreciate of you beino