It has been five years since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic.

Remember bleach injections? That guy is running the country now. What could possibly go wrong?

The Wells-Wallace piece is exceptional in breadth and depth. (I'm not normally a fan.)

There are links in the seed.

We learned the wrong lesson from Covid-19

Exactly five years ago today, after more than 118,000 cases and more than 4,200 deaths across 114 countries had been recorded, the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic. 

 With the virus spreading rapidly around the world, the need for a vaccine was desperate — but the prior record for the fastest development of a new vaccine to a new virus was four years. 

Yet vaccines using the new technology of mRNA were developed by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech in a matter of months . mRNA — or messenger RNA, a kind of genetic script — prompted cells to produce special proteins that would allow the body to develop an immunity to the novel coronavirus.

 Scientists, who are usually not prone to crediting divine intervention, called the mRNA vaccines a miracle .

 Four in five Americans received at least one dose; when we remember less than half of Americans get their flu shot each year, the high uptake of mRNA shots signaled a willingness from the US public to trust this novel technology. And there was optimism that mRNA technology could be used to make better vaccines for other diseases . 

 Now, that embrace is fraying.

 Even as the vaccines were actively pulling the US out of the pandemic, skepticism about mRNA technology was rising. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., still a private citizen at the time and one of the country’s most vocal vaccine skeptics, urged the first Trump administration to pull the shots.  

 Now the nation’s top health official, Kennedy is reevaluating the US Health and Human Services’s contract with Moderna, which is developing mRNA flu vaccines targeting strains with high pandemic potential. 

 With Kennedy at the helm of HHS, scientists and public health experts worry that new major breakthroughs are in peril — just a few years after mRNA proved its value.

 Kennedy was just one of many influencers and politicians who turned against the Covid vaccines. By autumn 2021, less than a year after the vaccines’ debut, anti-vaccine communities were thriving , constructing an alternative narrative of the pandemic in which the disease itself was not actually that serious but the vaccine could alter your DNA or plant a chip in your body .

 As these conspiracy theories grew in popularity, uptake for the booster shots plummeted; in November 2023, only 15 percent of Americans received the latest version of the vaccines. 

 In January 2025, a KFF poll found four in 10 Republicans said it was “probably” or “definitely” true that more people had died from the Covid-19 vaccines than from Covid-19 itself, which represented a 15-point increase from a July 2023 survey. 

 Scientists have documented at most a few dozen deaths attributable to the vaccines worldwide after billions of doses were administered, and population-level analyses have detected no meaningful increase in mortality after the vaccines were introduced. 

 But those facts are too often ignored.  

Thanks to a growing climate of vaccine — especially mRNA vaccine — skepticism, we are at risk of losing out on medical innovations. Scientists are working on a universal flu shot and respiratory virus vaccines , and are showing promising results with cancer vaccines .

 Under the Trump administration, that research could be under threat. And even if breakthroughs do happen, the question is whether, after our collective experiences of the past five years, Americans will want them.

How Covid Remade America

By David Wallace-Wells
March 4, 2025

Five years after the pandemic began, Donald Trump is president again, but he’s presiding over a very different country now. America is a harsher place, more self-interested and nakedly transactional. We barely trust one another and are less sure that we owe our fellow Americans anything — let alone the rest of the world. The ascendant right is junking our institutions, and liberals have grown skeptical of them, too, though we can’t agree about how exactly they failed us. A growing health libertarianism insists on bodily autonomy, out of anger about pandemic mitigation and faith that personal behavior can ward off infection and death. And the greatest social and technological experiment of our time, artificial intelligence, promises a kind of exit from the realm of human flesh and microbes into one built by code.

We tell ourselves we’ve moved on and hardly talk about the disease or all the people who died or the way the trauma and tumult have transformed us. But Covid changed everything around us. This is how.

It turned us into hyperindividualists.

At first, the solidarity was breathtaking. Out of concern for ourselves and one another, we suspended nearly all interpersonal activity for months, wiping our lives almost entirely clean of the very people we were trying to protect. But, perversely, that solidarity destroyed our social fabric, dividing Americans into groups of essential workers and remote ones and making briefly real Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that there was no such thing as society, only individuals and families. It was a crash course in libertarianism — and solipsism. For several months the daily lives of many Americans were reduced to the boundaries of their nuclear unit and their phones and televisions and computers.

Isolated, we saw one another first as threats and then as something less than real. Covid unfolded on screens for most Americans, and although the experience was in many ways collective, all our screens were different: Some showed overflowing morgues, others revealing a sham. Soon, we began to worry less about how our actions affected others and more about how theirs affected us — a sense of interdependence giving way to anomie, atomization and entitlement. Serious people began describing the world in terms of vibes, another sign that reality had become something to divine from a distance.

Politics started to look more like a zone of virtual reality, too, and many Americans came to see their fellow humans as mindless drones. We borrowed a term from video games — nonplayer character, or NPC — to use as a kind of slur. Over the long sweep of liberal history, our circle of empathy had expanded steadily, until it encompassed nearly the whole globe; now it snapped back, as tight as a rubber band.

We panicked over the first deaths, mourned and memorialized the first hundred thousand and then, eventually, stopped counting — and started instead to pretend it had never been that serious. When the initial emergency passed, it yielded less to survivors’ guilt than survivors’ resentment: With the pandemic minimized, all the disruptions and precautions seemed to many to have been overreactions. Today, when we retell the story of those years, we often diminish the actual disease, and in its place, everything else looms much larger: school closures, mask mandates, vaccine guidance. But at first the horizon was dominated by fear.

It inaugurated a new age of social Darwinism.

The novel virus would envelop nearly the entire planet, and though it was much more lethal for the old than the young, so is life; one way of looking at it was that getting infected roughly doubled a person’s overall risk of premature death. This might have become an object lesson in human frailty and interdependence. Instead, we pointed fingers at one another, scapegoating so as to avoid acknowledging that the threat was beyond our control. In that first year, liberals blamed Trump, by and large. Soon, conservatives blamed Dr. Anthony Fauci.

When the initial panic subsided, the blame game only intensified. On the right, those who had condemned public health guidelines started shaming those who had followed them. On the left, a pro-social ethos eventually curdled, and liberals began blaming the Covid dead for their own fates, especially after vaccination gaps opened up partisan divides in infection and death.

Survival became a measure of merit. Pandemic history is written by the survivors, after all, but what does it tell us about the dead? You still hear Covid minimizers insisting, for instance, that no healthy child died from Covid; in fact, you hear it from sitting senators. The claim isn’t true, but so what if it was? Did the unhealthy kids deserve it? Did obese adults? The unvaccinated? This was all a coping mechanism, but it turned Covid into a kind of morality tale in which your fate was ultimately your responsibility. Or, perhaps, your fault.

It broke our faith in public health.

The vaccines were miraculous, derided and dismissed. From viral genome to mRNA design in two days; from design to drug in two months; from drug to clinical trials in less than a year. By the end of 2020, when less than a quarter of the country had been infected, people were getting shots. All told, vaccines saved the lives of three million Americans, and yet hardly anyone tells the story of the pandemic in triumphant terms. Instead, conservatives turned against Trump’s vaccine and, after blaming them for not getting the shots, liberals eventually took it for granted, forgetting the terror of the months before it arrived.

After the shots, we argued much more strenuously about everything else. At the start of the pandemic, red America and blue America were following more or less the same mitigation strategy, though they began drifting apart that fall. But once vaccines were available, partisan gaps really began to open up. With risk reduced, guidance on cloth masking and face covering for toddlers, debates about the relative strength of natural immunity or about the value of boosters each started to look less like the precautionary principle and more like a safetyist outrage.

Covid minimizers now run the Department of Health and Human Services and will soon run the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. In many states, laws block future public health restrictions, and some surveys show an even larger drop in trust in government than for scientists and doctors. Routine vaccinations for children have dipped only slightly, but the country’s first measles death in a decade already shows the costs.

It elevated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and gave us MAHA.

The rise of D.I.Y. health doesn’t just reflect distrust of our institutions. It’s also a natural response to the way Covid made us all personally vulnerable — a search for ways to establish bodily autonomy, not just against the vaccine pushers but also against the disease itself.

It may have halted the years long decline of Christianity in America.

The histories of pandemics suggested this one might produce a spiritual revival, too, and along with the burst of woo-woo self-care Americans started reporting a strengthening of their faith. (It might have helped that, early on, many churchgoers felt singled out and demeaned by restrictions on social gatherings.)

It marked the apex and the end of a decade of protest.

More mass protests occurred between 2010 and 2020 than at any previous point in human history. And after Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd, perhaps 20 million Americans, stir-crazy and full of principle, took to the streets, pushing support for criminal justice reform and sympathy for the civil rights claims of Black Americans to new heights (and, if anything, boosting Democratic performance that fall).

To some, it revealed dishonesty on the left, which went from condemning mass gatherings to encouraging them. But it also demonstrated the tribalism and brutality of the right, which valorized both vigilantes and police officers who responded to protests by shirking their duties.

On the other side of the pandemic’s disruptions, the public seemed much less receptive to protest. Anything that disrupted the daily lives of ordinary people was now an unacceptable intrusion, whether it be a march in the street, a masking recommendation or an encampment on the campus quad.

It shattered our cities and disordered society.

Homicides jumped nearly 30 percent in just a single year, nationally, and in certain megalopolises — New York, Los Angeles — homelessness surged as the pandemic wore on. Drinking problems shot up, as did drug overdose and traffic accident deaths and a host of other antisocial behaviors. And while many of these effects were temporary, the memories stuck around — as have the politics of crime and disorder.

It sank the left’s dream of genuine political transformation.

When the first documented case of Covid-19 was announced in the United States, Bernie Sanders was neck and neck with Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination for president, at least to trust the betting markets. Over the next six weeks, Sanders would storm ahead — in traditional polling, too.

The Biden revival that followed was about much more than Covid, of course: Democrats wanted to beat Trump, more than anything, and party elders conspicuously coalesced around the safest choice. But by the time the Covid emergency had ended, Americans had come so fully to equate institutionalism with liberalism that it was much harder to believe that populist rage could find a home on the establishment left. It was also much harder to see how drastic social welfare expansion could be paid for, at least under legacy principles of fiscal responsibility. As a candidate, Sanders had proposed a $16 trillion Green New Deal; three years later, Biden produced a $369 billion version and Democrats called it a generational win.

It may have cost Trump the 2020 election.

Of all the many complicated ways that the pandemic affected Trump’s political fortunes, perhaps the most interesting is the timing of the good news that effective Covid vaccines were on the way. In September, the Food and Drug Administration asked drugmakers to extend their trials to collect more data. But the delay pushed the request for emergency use authorization past the election, which Trump lost by about 45,000 votes in three states, ultimately deferring his re-election to 2024.

It may have doomed Biden’s presidency.

In 2020, Biden declared that any president who’d presided over 220,000 American deaths did not deserve to keep the job. In office, he presided over 750,000, wielding a pandemic policy explicitly framed as a return to normal.

Biden’s approval rating took a turn for the worse in late summer 2021, and though the collapse is often chalked up to a chaotic American withdrawal from Afghanistan, which just preceded it, and sometimes to the surge at the border, which intensified earlier in the spring, this was also the period in which Covid came roaring back, killing almost 400,000 Americans in the space of nine months. All the death, on top of social disorder and inflation, looked to many like the breaking of the social compact that was promised just the November before.

It also pointed to a possible post-Trump agenda for Democrats.

During the initial pandemic emergency, technocratic Americans and policy wonks were immensely frustrated by the lack of testing, P.P.E. and disease surveillance. In the years that followed, that sense of pandemic privation grew almost to civilizational scale, with a new cohort of liberals lamenting the country’s inability to build anything — and, in the midst of a new austerity, calling for a new age of engineered abundance.

It changed the geography of work, probably forever.

Compared with 2019, five times as many Americans were working from home in 2021, and, corporate exhortations aside, four times as many still do. Many white-collar workers now routinely encounter colleagues only some days of the week while mostly working as atomized nodes in a distended network.

It shackled the U.S. with debt.

The decade of populist unrest that began in the aftermath of the global financial crisis was also an era of unprecedented low interest rates, which made the cost of borrowing for public investments almost literally zero. The pandemic ushered in an end to that, as it did to longstanding liberal dreams of erecting a social welfare state — the country briefly rolled one out, as pandemic stimulus, only to roll it all quickly back. R.I.P. Z.I.R.P.

As we unleashed a flood of money to insulate us from Covid, U.S. debt grew from $22 trillion to $36 trillion.

It turned parts of our economy into a casino.

Federal estimates suggest that more than $200 billion in Covid relief loans and grants went to fraudulent actors — almost one out of every five dollars spent by the program. It wasn’t hard to believe that your neighbors were cheating or that your job, on that front, was to keep up with the Joneses.

The easiest way to spend stimulus checks, from home, was to dump the money into our computers. To many, Covid seemed to reveal that an intrepid country had been taken over by overcautious worry-warts — and that rebellion meant embracing risk. So we spent our money on meme stocks and SPACs, NFTs and crypto and smartphone gambling. From behind a laptop or through an iPhone, the economy came to look even more like a slot machine.

It helped usher the country into a new era of economic growth.

By global standards, the American economy didn’t struggle; it thrived. And in the wake of the pandemic, it grew so fast that it offset not only the losses from the shutdowns of 2020 but also the losses from the Great Recession more than a decade earlier.

It untethered happiness from the traditional barometers of the economy.

In America, economic fundamentals, like G.D.P. growth, prices, wages and employment have long been pretty good predictors of consumer sentiment. But the pandemic seems to have broken that relationship, perhaps permanently.

It redrew our border politics.

Americans might not have found their postpandemic economy attractive, but immigrants did. Asylum rules played a role in the border surge, but so did the demand for jobs. And it is probably not a coincidence that a plague gave way to panic about “invasion” and “poisoning” of the country.

It destabilized and undermined politics almost everywhere.

Covid itself created an inflation spike more clearly than the spending we responded to Covid with did. The surge in prices was global, not national, and began in the sectors of the economy we know were pinched hardest by supply shocks: used cars, electronics, housing construction. Later, there was some corporate price gouging, and the cost of living crisis was made worse by the higher cost of borrowing money.

It was only when inflation hit that voters truly turned on politicians. Other than Trump’s failed 2020 re-election bid, there were no obvious political consequences in America for several years; nearly every incumbent governor on both sides of the aisle won re-election in 2022.

No one seemed to manage the pandemic that well, in the end. The countries celebrated in 2020 for suppressing the virus endured blowback and political tumult before long, with once-popular leaders in Japan and New Zealand pushed out of office in the years that followed. There were comedowns for autocrats in China and India, as well. Incumbent parties around the world suffered losses in 2024, when more than half of the world’s population lived in countries that were holding elections. What was more universal, the last few years, than disease?

It made world powers more mercenary.

In May 2021, the International Monetary Fund calculated that the cost of vaccinating 60 percent of the population in all countries by 2022 would be just $50 billion, with a return of $9 trillion by 2025. But the failure to vaccinate the whole world showed just how few rich countries were interested in taking the deal. Instead of pulling together in the face of a global disaster, we got a turn toward lifeboat ethics, immigration panic, wolf warrior diplomacy and a politics of all against all.

It reshaped the right-wing media echo chamber.

Before Covid, free speech activists were primarily concerned with noxious conservatives getting accosted on or disinvited from college campuses. But the cone of complaint quickly expanded — to suppression of debate over ivermectin and mRNA, fatality rate and death tolls, school closures and masking. And so did the list of villains: from social-justice warriors and their faculty enablers to public health officials and federal institutions, broadcast media and print media and, ultimately, social media as well.

It led Elon Musk to buy Twitter. It was telling that, to explain the existential importance of this acquisition, he compared the threat of leftist thinking to a virus — then illustrated the depth of the supposed rot, first and foremost, with the release of some of Twitter’s internal documents.

It gave billionaires an excuse to support Trump.

One explanation for the rightward shift of America’s prominent oligarchs since 2020 is that the brief intrusions on their freedoms as entrepreneurs — having to close factories and furlough workers, follow social guidance that interrupted service-sector business — looked to them like a show of force, by the state, against the power of the American capitalist.

It revived reactionary ideas about race and gender.

The backlash against D.E.I. — diversity, equity and inclusion — and the return of standardized testing to college admissions have long back stories, but they also reflect how the pandemic’s emphasis on behavioral virtue quickly expanded beyond health, creating a fight over the meaning of merit — leading, in some quarters, to an embrace of a “natural” social hierarchy. It’s no surprise that this should coincide with a turn toward traditional gender roles and the return of I.Q. and race science on the respectable right.

It scarred children.

More than 1,600 American children have died of Covid — nearly 80 percent of them after in-person learning resumed in fall 2021 — but we talk about their experience of Covid, now, primarily in terms of school closures and learning loss. Measured by test scores, the pandemic damaged learning, though international comparisons show America persevered better than many peers, including places with much shorter closures. Other feared side effects, like teen suicide, didn’t materialize.

But the cultural effects, outside of school, appear generationally significant. There was a pandemic dating recession that may linger, and a stark political divide appears to have opened up between those members of Gen Z who were already in college during the pandemic peak and who more closely resembled the social-justice stereotype of the prepandemic years and those who were still in high school, who look much more like a lasting reactionary counterculture. The rightward swing of Covid teenagers, too, appears global.

It left us sicker.

Long Covid proved real but less catastrophic than once feared. Over time, most sufferers eventually recovered, but as recently as 2023, as many as one million American children suffered from it — at least for a time.

But there are about four million more newly disabled Americans now than there were before the pandemic, and the number reporting cognitive disabilities alone has grown by 43 percent since 2019 — an increase significantly larger than in the five years before Covid.

Perhaps the biggest shock was realizing we still live in history — and at the mercy of biology.

We’d taken for granted that health emergencies like this one were a thing of the past. It was deeply unsettling to realize that our modern, wealthy world was no fortress against contagion, mass death and pandemic hysteria of various kinds. The end of the end of history has been declared countless times since 2001, but no event punctuated the point as clearly as Covid-19.

The emergency began at a time of geopolitical uncertainty, but it ended in an unmistakable polycrisis: beyond Covid, its supply shocks and inflation surge, there was a debt crisis and an ongoing climate emergency, wars in Europe and soon the Middle East and renewed great-power conflict with China.

At home the horizon flickered with the digital shimmer of an A.I. future, and accelerationists set about bringing it into being rather than succumb to pandemic privation or postpandemic stagnation.

It looks like we finally got those Roaring Twenties we were promised. In 2020, the phrase was used to suggest an age of parties and sex and social recklessness was on the way, as 330 million cooped-up Americans let off some steam. In 2025 the analogy looks more expansive. A century ago, the United States retreated from global institutions and alliances, when Woodrow Wilson left the stage. There came, after a generation of governance known as the Progressive era, a right-wing electoral surge that lasted until the most spectacular bust in American history. In the meantime, there was a legendarily American decade, defined by a hands-off approach to regulation and a hands-on embrace of conspicuous consumption and material excess and a blurring line between criminality and legitimate power, temperance and promiscuity.

Yet, the world does not seem now more buoyant or full of hope, but abrasive and rapacious and shaped nearly everywhere by a barely suppressed rage. We have still not reckoned with all we have lost.