As recently as December 2020, with the United States in the throes of a devastating pandemic, surveys showed trust in doctors and nurses reaching record highs. A Gallup poll at the time reported: “At the end of a year when medical workers have braved exposure to the coronavirus to provide life-saving care, Americans have become more likely to laud the honesty and ethics of nurses, medical doctors and pharmacists.” In fact, nurses received the top score ever registered for any profession, with 89 percent judging their “honesty” and “ethics” as “very high” or “high.” By way of comparison, only 12 percent of Americans gave similar approval to members of Congress.
Somehow, the faith in our health care system seemed to collapse in the half-year that followed. With the dreaded Delta variant filling hospitals and stalling any return to normal life, some 90 million eligible Americans still express either reluctance or refusal to procure an easily available, free vaccine that is ardently, all-but-unanimously recommended by medical authorities. Those who insist that inoculation against COVID-19 is actually more dangerous than the virus itself demonstrate their willingness to write off those once-admired doctors and nurses as willing participants in a conspiracy to mislead the public and destroy its health.
What changed to allow such viewpoints to survive the overwhelming evidence of the effectiveness of the major vaccines?
Many Democrats contrive to place the blame squarely on former President Trump, despite the fact that he himself got his own shot in the arm (after his brief battle with COVID) and has publicly urged supporters to follow his example. The fact that many Trumpian true believers declined to do so doesn’t make their decision political; after all, their hero claimed, and deserved, considerable public credit for developing the vaccines in the first place via Operation Warp Speed.
Yes, there has been a correlation between the ardent insistence that Democrats shamelessly stole Trump’ election victory and an unshakable skepticism about the popular preventative that President Biden so aggressively promotes. But correlation, as any sociology major can explain, does not mean causation. Doubts about our electoral process don’t necessarily produce a suspicious attitude toward our health care system, any more than distrust of Moderna and Pfizer requires similar suspicions concerning Dominion and Smartmatic.
But all the doubts, distrust and paranoia that presently poison our national discourse do originate from the same fetid source: a prevailing sense of helplessness and frustration combined with a growing certainty that one’s ideological adversaries are not merely inept or misguided, but outright evil.
In other words, it’s not enough to prove Dr. Fauci wrong about masks, double-masks or whatever the pending recommendations of the CDC might be. It becomes necessary to go much further, to smear the high priest of public health as a power-hungry mad man, determined to keep our children pliable and ignorant by closing schools, smashing capitalism by mandating lockdowns forever. The mad man’s motivation for such sweeping destruction remains a mystery in even the most elaborate conspiracy theories attempting to spin the pandemic as some sort of purposeful plot.
To some, the core conflicts involving vaccines, mask mandates or the source of the virus itself represent only the latest installments in the eternal conflict between elite overlords and suffering serfs—corrupt aristocrats and their humble, hard-working victims. The populist presumption that medical credentials mean nothing, or that a lifetime of service in protecting the public’s health counts less than outspoken commitment to one’s own ideological agenda, leads to a prevailing preference for outsiders and eccentrics with wonder-working cures (ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, anyone?).
Conspiracy theories flourish around apocalyptic events with no rational explanation; the search for a scheme that designed the disaster may just prove to be a forlorn effort to find order amid the chaos. The JFK assassination provides the most prominent example: Oswald’s crime made so little sense, and his ability to carry it out violated so many rules of logic, that attempts to place it in the context of some elaborate, high-level plot became nearly irresistible.
The surge and resurgence of COVID-19 seem similarly random in the sudden and undeserved suffering they have inflicted, so that both sides seem impelled to explain the pointless pain with references to the misdeeds and excesses of the other. To the Left, Trump’s purported mismanagement as president and widespread resistance to the vaccine have magnified the unnecessary suffering; to the populist Right, Big Pharma and its elitist allies have created a series of elaborate hoaxes to cement their control over the economy and our lives.
An old saying in sports and warfare insists that tough, painful fights don’t build character; rather, they reveal it.
By the same token, the agony of the ongoing COVID crisis didn’t produce our present polarization as much as it exposed it—forcing our attention on a sour, suspicious mood of doom and demonization that’s been festering below the surface since long before the pandemic first arrived.
Perhaps that toxic air will at long last begin to lift when the virus, in all its variants, slows its advance, or the populace embraces more widespread vaccination that provides more thorough protection. At some point in the process, we may once again honor our medical professionals with the admiration they still emphatically deserve.
Michael Medved hosts a daily radio talk show and is author, most recently, of God’s Hand On America: Divine Providence in the Modern Era. Follow him on Twitter: @MedvedSHOW.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
