The most important lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic is to tell the truth
Hello from rainy coastal Maine. Alex Howard here, with another civic text. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed so far – particularly the paid subscribers who made a bet on me. If you can, please upgrade to help me make this a sustainable enterprise.
Today, I'm feeling grateful that my mom is doing well after her second bout with COVID-19, due in no small part to vaccination and Paxlovid. I'm also feeling profoundly concerned about how vulnerable the United States is when the next pandemic emerges, whether it's avian flu, swine flu, or a novel pathogen.
The way to a contain a pandemic’s impacts on public health, economies, & social cohesion is to invest in state capacity, institutions, and trustworthy information to create shared facts. Denial or bullshit won’t stabilize markets or regain public trust: evidence of effective response and honest moral leadership will.
We knew politicizing science beggars public knowledge, preventing collective action against existential threats. We knew politicizing a pandemic was a recipe for panic and dysfunction and would lead to more sickness and death. But that's exactly what happened in 2020.
I remain furious that a million Americans died, more were left disabled, and millions of kids were left behind in remote schooling from March 2020 to May 2021 because of the collective failures of DC government and federal government to effectively respond to the risk from an airborne virus, and now remain behind grade level, four years on.
Anti-mask sentiment and protests about restrictions on businesses and churches were present a century ago, too, during the 1918 pandemic. So was the most corrosive dynamic: official lies.
“What proved even more deadly was the government policy toward the truth,” wrote historian John M. Berry, reflecting on the 1918 flu pandemic. “While influenza bled into American life, public health officials, determined to keep morale up, began to lie.”
“The most important lesson from 1918 is to tell the truth," Berry observed. Though that idea is incorporated into every preparedness plan I know of, its actual implementation will depend on the character and leadership of the people in charge when a crisis erupts.”
In 2020, former President Donald Trump was in charge when the novel coronavirus made landfall in the United States.
For years, I had been increasingly worried about that obvious falsehoods and dishonest denials in official briefings and presidential statements would erode public trust in the White House, with devastating effects: Should a war, natural disaster, or pandemic threaten public safety, lowered trust would put lives and security at risk.
In 2020, what proved even more deadly was the government policy towards the truth. When COVID-19 bled into American life, President Trump, determined to keep the stock market up, kept lying, and politicians and media echoed his official false statements, polarizing millions against masks and public health officials.
In early 2020, President Trump was told that a new virus had emerged in China that was transmitted through the air and was killing people.
We know this because he told Bob Woodward that the novel coronavirus was deadly and airborne, and Woodward recorded their conversation.
“This is deadly stuff,” Trump said, on February 7, 2020: “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”
We also know that Trump intentionally deceived the American public, deliberately downplaying the threat and the lethality of the virus which would go on to kill over a million of us and disable many more.
To his enduring infamy, Woodward didn't release the audio on WashingtonPost.com until September 2020, when he published his new book.
Withholding the knowledge that COVID-19 was airborne and deadly from the American people literally meant that many people died in our democracy in darkness.
Our shared history might look very different if we'd all masked up in March 2020, shifted schools outside – as we'd done a century ago to fight tuberculosis – and invested in air filtration and ventilation to improve air quality.
By January 2021, what had proved even more deadly was the government policy toward the truth.
While COVID-19 kept taking thousands of American lives daily, the President had continued to lie. An authoritarian demagogue expected US officials, politicians, & partisans to repeat his lies about widespread voter fraud & mistruths about the risk a lethal airborne virus posed to public health to show their loyalty to him over their party or Constitution.
Senators who refused to learn from the past left an unfit leader in office in 2019 and in January 2021 condemned colleagues and constituents to reap the whirlwind of not checking maladministration during a public health emerging, allowing a partisan pandemic to continue to burn across the United States into 2022. More than a million Americans had died since January 2020. Many more still lived, but were burdened or disabled by "long COVID."
In 2023, what proved to be more deadly was the government policy towards mistruth. While COVID-19 bled into American life, White House officials, determined to get back to life as it was before a highly contagious airborne virus made landfall in North America, declared the pandemic over.
The CDC continued to encourage Americans to get vaccinated, but did not take the steps required to restore public trust in federal or state public health authorities, allowing advanced truth decay to set in across our plagued nation.
Instead of standing up new centers of excellence as part of a national strategy for information resilience and increasing the communications capacity of agencies to "prebunk" emerging disinformation campaigns, conspiracies, and medical misinformation trends, the administration dissolved a governance board at DHS after being unprepared for lies about it.
The White House moved on, despite widespread disinformation about the risks of COVID-19 vaccines and growing hostility towards mandates that began to bleed into parental decisions to vaccine children against other preventable diseases and to mandate doing so in schools.
By July 2024, what proved to be more deadly were the government policies towards untruth.
While new variants of COVID-19 continued to infect Americans across public life, public health officials urged people to get vaccinated but did not send tests or masks to households or push public service announcements to phones about the risks new variants posed.
No CDC PSAs were pushed to smartphone screens or made their way onto billboards, radio, and cable news. Americans simply carried on.
The President caught one of the variants, again, and received an effective antiviral, but did not address Americans about the disease and encourage us to get vaccinated, send us respirators, urge us mask up in crowded indoor areas, test ourselves if we'd been exposed, or to find treatment using a text message.
President Biden showed his patriotism by passing the torch to the next generation, but had failed to address the profound truth decay across American society.
In 1920, the U.S. was hit by a fourth wave of the flu pandemic, but “virtually no city responded,” wrote Berry. “People were weary of influenza, and so were public officials. Newspapers were filled with frightening news about the virus, but no one cared.”
In 2024, the U.S. was hit by another wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, but virtually no city responded. People were weary of COVID, and so were public officials.
Hundreds of people continued to die each week from a preventable disease, long after widespread public access to free vaccines that had proven to be safe and highly effective against serious illness and death.
New cases kept trickling into emergency rooms, as fewer people showed they cared about it by masking or testing before they visited one another or felt sick.
Newspapers were not filled with frightening news about the risk of long-term disability from infection from an airborne virus.
Some states were even shifting from mask mandates to criminalizing wearing masks in public, despite the obvious relevance of respirators to preventing transmission of a deadly airborne disease.
In 2025, we don't know what will happen yet. We do know that the most important lesson from this pandemic is to tell the truth, and how we know it.
If the next administration does not heal truth decay and find better ways to mitigate participatory mass delusion about election fraud or vaccines, worse may be yet to come when a more virulent virus makes landfall.
