Why the COVID Deniers Won
In the March issue, David Frum considered lessons from the pandemic and its aftermath.
David Frum asks why so many Americans resisted vaccines, and finds his answer in political strife, misinformation, and irrational responses. But rational mistrust of the health-care system also lay behind that resistance.
COVID came on the heels of the opioid crisis. Many people, especially in red states, were suffering from an addiction to a class of medicines once promoted as cutting-edge science. The opioid crisis is but one example of ethical failings in American health care. The essence of the Hippocratic oath—to place patient welfare over every other motive—has been assailed by incentives to both over- and undertreat, costing citizens time, blood, and money. Although I hope, with Frum, that the future belongs to those who help their country, we need to first agree that it is dead wrong for anyone, in any way, to profit from hurting people.
Sarah M. Brownsberger
Bellingham, Wash.
I really appreciate David Frum’s writing, but I think this article brushed over valid skepticism of the government in a moment of crisis. The official advice was always presented as an edict. I didn’t appreciate being told not to ask questions. Similarly, I understood why some were nervous about receiving rushed vaccines with brand-new mRNA technology. I would love to see both sides of this debate conduct an open postmortem. That would be good for all of us.
Mike Bergman
Minneapolis, Minn.
Thank you to David Frum for his analysis of why the COVID deniers won. But as a physician, I believe Frum missed one of the major reasons denying COVID paid off for Donald Trump. This factor is medical, not social, and if we are to avoid an even bigger disaster during the next pandemic, it’s crucial that we understand it.
Trump lucked out in part because of the nature of the coronavirus, which was relatively less lethal than other viral species. Most deaths occurred in patients who were old, chronically ill, or suffering from other preexisting conditions. As a result, the pandemic, tragic as it was, lacked the element of horror that might accompany one caused by more inherently lethal viruses. No wonder people ended up sneering at masks and school closures. Right-wing media could spin COVID denial into a sensible response to what they presented as an epidemiological nonevent.
Unfortunately, Trump may not be so lucky next time. And a potential killer virus may be lurking just beyond the horizon: avian influenza, commonly known as bird flu. The World Health Organization views this virus with great alarm, because, having slashed through the poultry industry and many dairy herds, it is only a few mutations away from being able to pass from human to human. The death rate for bird flu is about 50 percent. Young people are not spared.
Any risks to the U.S. population would be magnified dramatically by President Trump’s appointments and policies. The chances of quickly developing a vaccine, should bird flu begin infecting significant numbers of humans, appear small. It’s not just the anti-vaxxers who will paralyze us: Our biomedical-research capabilities have been devastated by cuts to the National Institutes of Health’s budget.
If an avian-influenza pandemic does hit, Trump could pull out the old COVID‑19 playbook. Why not? It worked the last time. But the viral character of the next pandemic could make it difficult for him to evade responsibility for the nightmare that may follow.
Brad Stuart, M.D.
Forestville, Calif.
David Frum replies:
In the first weeks after the coronavirus struck, many decisions had to be made quickly based on imperfect information. Unsurprisingly, many of those decisions now look wrong.
But the most lethal of all the bad decisions was the effort to discourage conservative-leaning Americans from receiving COVID vaccines. Tens of thousands of people died unnecessarily because they followed advice from leaders they trusted.
Lockdowns were too draconian. Masking was mostly useless. Blue-state schools should have reopened faster. But those mistakes all shrink in gravity compared with the malicious effort to disparage vaccination. So, yes, let’s criticize the errors of the overzealous. But right now, the people who hold government power in the United States are those with the deadliest record—and no conscience.
Behold My Suit!
In the March issue, Gary Shteyngart wrote about his quest to end a lifetime of fashion misery.
Gary Shteyngart looks indescribably cool and writerly in his new suit! I’d offer to marry Gary based solely on how he looks in that suit, walking those New York streets like he owns them. Boston ladies love a man in a good suit.
Ruth Morss
Cambridge, Mass.
Reading “Behold My Suit!” was gratifying on many levels. I wholly agree that women should not have all the fun with clothes. Some people dress to impress others, and some people dress to please themselves; perfection is reached when you can do both at once. I envy Shteyngart for hitting the bull’s-eye.
Not that I would ever dream of claiming greater shoe expertise than Yohei Fukuda—but brown suede shoes with a blue suit? Brown shoes with a dark-blue suit are acceptable, but not preferred. Plus, the world’s most elegant suede shoes are still informal. I’d never drop $3,000 on a pair of suede shoes, even if they had diamonds on their soles. And one final tip to the young men out there considering upping their fashion game: You can make even a $10,000 suit irrelevant if you don’t bother to get a shave.
Allen Michie
Austin, Texas
The Last Great Yiddish Novel
In the April issue, Judith Shulevitz considered how Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daughters rescues a destroyed world.
I translated four of Chaim Grade’s books and placed them with U.S. publishers in the 1970s. I had a wonderful personal relationship with Grade, a kind of uncle-nephew bond. I’m proud to have helped put him on the map: When I finished translating Grade’s two-volume masterwork, The Yeshiva, I found a home for it with the venerable Bobbs-Merrill, a more famous publisher than those that had issued my earlier translations. It also published my first novel, The Yemenite Girl.
Many ultra-Orthodox Jews read Grade’s work, including Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the leader of the worldwide Chabad organization. Grade told me that Schneerson once called him to ask how he was feeling, somehow sensing that he was ill.
“Rebbe, how did you know I was not well?” Grade asked.
“Because for two weeks I did not see your weekly chapter of The Yeshiva in the Morgn-Journal,” the Rebbe answered. “So I thought something must be the matter.” The Morgn-Journal was a Yiddish daily to which Grade contributed fiction.
Shulevitz is right to note that, aside from his Holocaust memoir, The Seven Little Lanes, Grade did not mention the Holocaust in his work. But if you read carefully the last page of The Yeshiva, where the two protagonists stand on a platform full of people awaiting the arrival of a train, one cannot help but feel in Grade’s elegiac tone a recognition that other trains will soon be coming.
Curt Leviant
Edison, N.J.
Behind the Cover
In this month’s cover story, “Donald Trump Is Enjoying This,” Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer offer a definitive account of the president’s political comeback. They discussed with Trump how he is using his power, and drawing on the lessons of his first term, to run the country (and, in his words, “the world”). For our cover image, the illustrator Dale Stephanos rendered in pencil a photograph of Trump taken in North Las Vegas last fall.
— Paul Spella, Senior Art Director
Corrections
“Growing Up Murdoch” (April) originally stated that a line in King Lear was directed at Cordelia. In fact, it was directed at Goneril. “Turtleboy Will Not Be Stopped” (April) misstated the number of nights Karen Read has spent in jail. She has spent two nights in jail, not one. “The Cranky Visionary” (April) originally stated that the Barnes Foundation was effectively America’s first museum of modern art. In fact, it was among the first.
This article appears in the June 2025 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”
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