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PROPAGANDA, RATHER THAN PANDEMIC POLICIES, CAUSED THE WAR ON PUBLIC
HEALTH  
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Zeb Larson
November 10, 2025
LIberal Currents
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_ The backlash narrative ignores basic facts of the case. _

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Gage Skidmore

 

There’s a war on public health happening in the United States right
now. In a few short months, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Elon Musk, and the
rest of the Trump Administration have caused incalculable harm to the
country’s public health and biomedical apparatus. Leadership in the
CDC and NIH have been replaced with flunkies loyal to RFK; staff
members are leaving in droves or being forced out
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through DOGE cuts.

But the damage to public health isn’t solely coming from budget
cuts: there’s a highly motivated conservative machine working to
undermine the whole premise of public health. Well-meaning but overly
credulous pundits such as Ezra Klein have claimed that far-right
backlash was catalyzed by Covid mitigation measures or over promising
for the efficacy of the Covid vaccine. The shaming and the
restrictions over social activities allegedly radicalized people into
becoming Trump supporters, according to Klein
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The notion that public health officials “went too far” has gone
mainstream, best evidenced through books such as _In Covid’s Wake_,
which criticizes non-pharmaceutical measures as ineffective and claims
that it fostered a whole backlash undermining public health. _The
Guardian_
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ate it up. Democratic elected officials have bought into this: Brian
Schatz, sitting in a safe seat in Hawaii nevertheless is going around
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public health officials went too far. Perversely, some have even used
the response to the Covid-19 pandemic to claim that it was public
health advocates who had illiberal or even authoritarian impulses:
this is the crux of Sandro Galea’s _Within Reason_
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This notion only makes sense if you think that the right and far-right
were perfect blank slates prior to the year 2020, andwere only
reactive and responding to what liberals and elites said, with no
information ecosystem of their own. You also have to pretend that
public health officials somehow ran roughshod over the wishes of
politicians. This is of course pure nonsense. As Gregg Gonsalves
shared with me, “Public health is the least funded, least
well-resourced part of any state or local government. The idea that
there are these martinets with power and resources telling people what
to do is just absolutely insane.” Moreover, vaccine skeptics had
been active for years, and the tide of Covid misinformation happened
as the pandemic was unfolding. The far-right had already embraced an
anti-intellectual, anti-expertise position and were able to mobilize
against public health, which Covid thrust into public awareness. 

Understanding the Covid-19 pandemic as a catalyst for right-wing
backlash is misleading because it’s too passive: it’s more
appropriate to see it as a battle that those on the right set out in
order to undermine liberal democracy.

To be sure, there’s a lively debate about balancing liberalism and
individual rights with public health. Public health places limits on
individual freedom in a variety of different ways: smoking bans in
public places, lockdowns, and of course vaccine mandates. One can
point to any number of illiberal, anti-authoritarian, and immoral
campaigns carried out in the name of public health, such as mass
sterilization
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But while this tension exists, it is insurmountable only if you
believe that individual freedom is the sole guiding principle of
liberalism. Rousseau or Locke would be aghast at the idea that
individuals have no obligation to work on behalf of the common good.
If there is an inalienable right to life, it should follow that I have
an obligation to take reasonable steps to minimize disease that could
harm or kill my peers. But a careful propaganda campaign by
conservatives has tried to transform public health into a boogeyman
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that is perpetually on the verge of trampling people’s rights. 

And our would-be authoritarians weaponized public discontent
(warranted or not) over Covid not because they want to improve it for
the future or have a debate about specific interventions that were
carried out during Covid. They’ve made it very clear they want to
smash the whole concept of public health and leave little standing in
its wake. Project 2025
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made this clear from the outset: the goal was to strip the CDC of any
ability to make effective recommendations or prescriptions for public
health.

Authoritarianism can’t abide the concept of public health, for a few
different reasons. It proposes limits on both government and
individual activity, and the rationale for those limitations is
grounded in the scientific process—it quite literally can appeal to
an authority greater than whoever leads the state. Scientific
authority is transnational; it crosses borders that authoritarians
cannot control, and scientific authority is not an institution that
can be controlled in the same way as a government agency or even a
university. Facing something like this, the authoritarian’s only
choice is to attack the whole of scientific inquiry and undermine it.
RFK’s attacks on expertise and established science are a way to
force people into accepting simplistic pseudoscience: there are no
pesky doctors or researchers who can contradict you about vaccines or
seed oils or exercise, no people on the sidelines who can undermine
you. 

Philosophically, public health also means something anathema to the
authoritarian: true collective responsibility. There aren’t supposed
to be in-groups or out-groups that can be excluded and disregarded,
and that is completely against the grain of collective responsibility
as imagined by a dictator. There are no outsider groups that should be
demonized. It calls upon the whole body of citizens to act in the best
interests of the collective. Vaccination isn’t much of a sacrifice
considering that all it does is protect one’s health, but it is
ultimately an act for the collective. It doesn’t do so for moral
reasons and a respect for human life , but it also has to maintain
this for practical reasons: concepts like herd immunity simply fall
apart if there are second-class citizens or nonpersons who don’t get
vaccinated. 

What it wants to build in its place is a mix of eugenicist lifestyle
choices and a medical surveillance regime aimed at women and the LGBTQ
community. RFK’s focus on diet and exercise reduces health to
individual decisions. It offers the comforting illusion of control,
but for a government like Trump’s this turn is also an easy way to
wash their hands of responsibility to do anything at all. What remains
will be using public health agencies to crack down on reproductive
choice and gender-affirming care.

It's time to turn the tables, stop weakly defending the whole idea of
public health, and instead turn it into a rallying point for those
resisting this administration. These actions as yet do not have broad
support. For all of the work done to undermine vaccines, most of the
public still want them—even Republicans
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But the longer silence or passivity is allowed to persist, the more
uncertainty is sowed. States are starting to fall in line here as
well, with Florida conspicuously announcing that it was ending all
vaccine mandates
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There are important historical precedents here: doctors have been at
the forefront of anti-authoritarian activism before. The _sanitario_
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movement in Brazil was active against the country’s military
dictatorship, and not only protested human rights abuses but used them
as a way to argue for universal healthcare. AIDS activists have more
often than not had to fight for healthcare access and treatment
against repressive or unresponsive governments, most famously with the
Treatment Action Campaign [[link removed]] in South Africa.
Effective resistance to Trump has to rely on policies and things that
people want to fight for: fighting for effective healthcare is
precisely that kind of issue.

So what role can public health professionals and the rest of us play
in resisting Trump and RFK? We’re already seeing it with op-eds from
former CDC, or the hundreds of HHS employees co-signing a letter to
call for RFK’s resignation. But there’s more that can be done: in
the same way that conservatives used Covid as a political project, we
can use good public health as an anti-fascist organizing project. A
number of states have already begun to work together to coordinate
vaccine access
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by ensuring that they bypass federal recommendations if needed.

* Restore functions back to public health departments. The last
forty years have seen many functions previously done by public health
departments relegated towards nonprofits or other private entities.
Those nonprofits are now having funding stripped away
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but whatever happens to them one thing is true: the public health
departments will still exist. As essential services are stripped away,
forward thinking municipal and state governments need to fund their
public health agencies in order to maintain them. Moreover, this needs
to be seen not as a stopgap that will end when federal funding is
restored: we don’t know when federal funding will be restored. In
some cases, they can be restored by declaring public health
emergencies which would allow lawmakers to appropriate additional
funding.
* Local ordinances and laws. We’ve been relying on bodies like the
CDC to study, for example, the climate-related impacts of heat on
people’s health, or lack of access to air conditioning during heat
waves.  Cities and states can do this work as well and then use the
data to shape policy accordingly. Now that they can’t rely on
federal data, they can look to other civil society organizations such
as the American Academy of Pediatrics, or potentially to non-U.S.
actors.
* Communication. Because of the chaos caused by this
administration’s funding cuts and rhetoric, people are unclear as to
what services still exist. Many of them still do, but if people
don’t know about them it will close off access. We don’t need mere
advertising, though we do need that: we desperately need to make
inroads with every social club, union, church, PTA, and other
institution in the country to make sure that people know what’s out
there and how valuable it is.
* Building public health’s ties to the rest of civil society. 19th
century public health reformers were rarely medical professionals:
they tended to be dedicated reformers with an interest in the issue,
but ones who moved between charities, labor movements, and the urban
poor. The 1920s [[link removed]]
saw public health become increasingly professionalized and even
technocratic while also becoming more distant from many of the rest of
civil society. That distance is ultimately a downside because it
isolates them from potential allies, but it also encourages a retreat
into strictly medical areas – a practice that conservatives are all
too willing to accept.
* Fighting for healthcare as a right. One area where other countries
simply have a huge leg up over the United States is that healthcare is
a right, not a privilege that can be stripped away or subject to
budget cuts. This is one of the most salient and valuable areas of
activism open to anti-Trump forces in this country, and perhaps one of
the best inroads to winning back any portion of rural America.
Fighting to restore Medicaid (or publicizing the awful toll their cuts
will take) is the first step, but it has to go further than that. The
next logical step is a fight for Medicare for All, which to be sure
has no chance of passage under Trump – and that may be why it’s so
salient. It presents society with a choice about what it wants or
could have. 

[xxxxxx MODERATOR: ALSO OF INTEREST - 

_EXPANDING HEALTH SAVINGS ACCOUNTS WOULD DO LITTLE TO IMPROVE ACCESS
TO AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE_
[[link removed]]BY
NICOLE RAPFOGELCENTER ON BUDGET AND POLICY PRIORITIES_Amid the urgent
debate over whether Congress will act to prevent cost increases for
millions of people in 2026 marketplace plans, some Republicans are
promoting expansions of health savings accounts (HSAs). But expanding
HSAs mainly benefits wealthier people and would do nothing to address
impending premium increases for some 22 million people with low and
moderate incomes who are facing higher costs. Instead, Congress should
extend premium tax credit (PTC) enhancements to ensure enrollees
continue to have access to affordable health coverage._November 11,
2025]

_ZEB LARSON is a writer and historian in Columbus, Ohio. He received
his PhD from Ohio State University in 2019, where he studied the
anti-apartheid movement in the United States._

_LIBERAL CURRENTS publishes writers of diverse perspectives who share
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* public health
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* pubic funding
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* COVID-19
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* individual rights
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* authoritarian regimes
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* Science
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