How Reality Seems Negotiable

Another society-disrupting pandemic is inevitable, experts have warned us. It could be a century from now or months from now, but it’s going to happen.

And if it happens in the next four years, there’s a good chance that U.S. public health and science policy will be in the hands of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a nonscientist who has made a practice of taking many a debunked internet conspiracy theory as gospel. Recent reporting also indicates that President-elect Donald Trump’s second administration will be well staffed with vaccine skeptics and senior health officials with thin qualifications. Just this week, Trump named Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya — who in 2020, prior to available vaccines, advocated for a public health strategy that was essentially “Let everyone get Covid, it’ll be fine” — as his choice to lead the National Institutes of Health.

Wide-eyed MAGA-friendly optimists might look at Trump’s coalition of amateurs as a necessary corrective to the tyranny of the “establishment.” But any objective reading of Trump’s last year in office — with his bungling, chaotic and disastrous management of the Covid pandemic — does not bode well for the prospects of crisis competency in the next Trump administration.

This is a preview of Anthony L. Fisher's latest article. Read the full column here.