During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when Donald Trump was mocking masking and promoting quackery—injecting bleach, taking hydroxychloroquine—I questioned the political logic of indirectly killing off your supporters. I considered writing about it, but when I did some rough calculations, I could not conclude that the death count distribution would make an electoral difference.
My hesitation proved warranted. One million Americans died from COVID-19, and we have evidence that Republicans died from pandemic-related causes at higher rates than Democrats. According to one study, after vaccines became widely available in 2021, the excess death rate for Republicans was 43 percent higher than for Democrats.
But spread out over the country, those deaths weren’t numerous enough to make a red state turn blue. If killing off Republicans was a risk for Trump in purple states, the 2024 election proved the risk was negligible. However, many swing state votes he lost from COVID-19 deaths, he made up elsewhere. Among the survivors who voted, not enough blamed him for the pandemic, and too many blamed Kamala Harris for inflation.
Trump’s ability to escape lasting blame for his disastrous pandemic response has led Republicans to make quackery a pillar of the party. Support for childhood vaccination among Republicans has plummeted, which helps explain why a measles outbreak in rural Texas has already killed one child. Across the country, GOP lawmakers have enacted a raft of legislation weakening vaccine mandates. And, of course, Trump and nearly every Senate Republican placed the nation’s most significant source of public health misinformation at the head of the Department of Health and Human Services: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Fears that the Kennedy appointment will lead to dire public health consequences ratcheted up this week with the abrupt cancellation of an annual Food and Drug Administration meeting necessary to select strains for the next flu season vaccine.
Sabotaging the flu vaccine will kill people.
The flu kills about 36,000 Americans annually. This year, the numbers are tracking higher, perhaps because flu vaccination rates among children are down. And the spread of other infectious diseases, such as measles, could compound severe flu outbreaks. Shortly before the FDA canceled the flu vaccine meeting, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention canceled an advisory board meeting where votes were scheduled on a meningococcal vaccine and an at-home nasal spray flu vaccine.
How much worse will the next flu season be if a scientifically sound vaccine isn’t available? How might the deaths distribute politically if Democratic areas respond as they did during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic with heightened masking, while Republicans scoff anew at “face diapers”?
Such questions do not seem to trouble Trump and Kennedy, who are well-practiced at the art of blame avoidance. As with COVID-19, any net loss of Republican voters due to flu deaths probably won’t be enough to tip any elections. Unlike in 2020, when Trump suffered politically from the pandemic, there’s no chance of another nationwide lockdown, no matter how severe the outbreak.
Trump and Kennedy will also get help from Elon Musk and hordes of MAGA minions who could, diminish the threat (People always get the flu, big deal!) and sow distrust (The mainstream media is concocting fake news about flu outbreaks so socialist Democrats can bring back lockdowns and grab power).
But if Kennedy hinders the availability and efficacy of the flu vaccine, the Trump administration will be far more politically vulnerable.
A little less than half of American adults get flu shots. But that still amounts to over 150 million doses. They aren’t all going into the arms of Democrats. The faction of people who usually get the flu shot but can’t this year and then get severely ill may well blame the incumbent party despite any Trump-Kennedy-Musk spin, much like how there was little Joe Biden or Kamala Harris could say to convince voters inflation wasn’t their fault.
Flu is different from inflation, of course. The flu will come and go for most people, whereas inflation lingers and affects everyone. However, the flu season typically begins just before the November election. That’s when most people get vaccinated. While the flu season’s peak is usually after the election, without a decent vaccine available, we could see more early cases—even early deaths—than usual.
This is a scenario, not a prediction. But what’s certain is that Republicans have learned all the wrong lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic. Because they managed to recover from the 2020 electoral defeat while embracing an irrational antipathy to infectious disease prevention and public health principles, they’ll likely repeat the worst mistakes from Trump’s 2020 pandemic response while abandoning the one thing he got right: funding Operation Warp Speed to quickly produce COVID-19 vaccines. Musing about bleach injections was one thing. But the Trump-Kennedy health regime is quite another. In his first term, Trump kept Anthony Fauci at the head of the federal government’s infectious and disease control efforts. In his second term, he made the author of a book calling Fauci a war criminal, the head of all national health.
The Kennedyization of the GOP may hurt Republicans politically in November 2026. Stock up on masks. It’ll increase your chances of being alive to see the election results.
