Watching the show trials

Senator Rand Paul

Over a million Americans died from Covid. I just wanted to mention this data point, because it seems to have been forgotten.

In the early days, we had little information about the nature of the virus. The pace of death outstripped our medical resources. At one point in New York, someone was dying almost every two minutes (four times the normal rate) and bodies had to be stacked in trailers. It was an incredibly scary time.

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Yes, you know all this. And yet, it’s become almost a conventional wisdom that the US response was imperfect because it overreacted. “Maybe Fauci meant well, but…”

All institutions are imperfect, and crises expose those imperfections. I think the response to the pandemic does expose real institutional failures, but the greatest of those failures are those of our political system, not our public health system. The pandemic was a global phenomenon, but it seems to have broken the US in a unique way. Other countries had more serious lockdowns without entering a political psychosis.

In a country where conspiracy theories like QAnon are political movements, a real crisis provided the vessel for the worst aspect of American politics. And we are still living the politics of the pandemic. In 2026, Republican politicians are still looking to blame and jail public health officials for the pandemic while accepting no responsibility themselves. This is a version of political leadership that has real costs for public health preparedness.

We are worse off today; that’s not Fauci’s fault

A functional governing system learns from its mistakes so it can do better the next time. Let me ask you: how confident are you that we are ready for the next pandemic?

It seems clear to me the US is less well-prepared that it was before Covid. Trump has stripped away pandemic early warning systems that USAID ena…