Something I was wondering. I expect it’ll get less open the more constituents one is running to represent, but I’m curious about who’ll try to thread the needle and who’ll say that everything done to fight this disease was just outright unnecessary or a plot/crime.
(Only somewhat related topic: I’m curious to see how the political opinions of the medical field may or may not have shifted in the past couple of years…)
What plague?
True, but I think there will be many candidates who find the “Biden took away our freedoms and ruined the economy because of a hoax!” line to be too good to resist screaming as many times as they can.
I think it will become a mainstream belief in the GOP, especially on the more right-wing side (so most CDs these days), that the reaction to COVID was driven by CDC lies and media hysteria, primarily to make it possible to steal the election from Trump.
That things like shutdowns, masks, and vaccine mandates were entirely unnecessary and didn’t save any lives (possibly even cost lives in net). Basically that there was nothing we could do but ride it out. Probably with some “it was only old/fat/diabetic/etc patients that died” thrown in.
Once the pandemic has subsided people will be happy to believe that - it’s much easier than “my party is full of idiots that caused hundreds of thousands of people to die unnecessarily”.
Full-blown “COVID was a hoax”? I doubt it, since there are still plenty of deaths to hand-wave away. You will get some of those at the state house level, and maybe a few at the US House level, but I highly doubt a US Senator could get elected on that platform. We will have a decent test-case in MO as some of our GOP primary candidates are pretty far down that road. It will be interesting to see how far they lean into it. One of them (current AG Eric Schmitt) has spent the last year suing municipalities and school districts to make them drop masking requirements, for example. He has a few big endorsements, and is actively courting Trump’s.
It’s much easier just to say “COVID was real, but the media whipped us into fear for 2 years over something that was 99+% survivable” (statistics will be blurred/lied about here). Then some platitudes about freedom and the economy, etc. There are plenty of parents still pissed off that their kid had to wear a mask for two years, and unless they personally lost a loved one to COVID they won’t really care about the societal necessity of that. Hell, even then there are plenty of examples of folks whose parents died of COVID that still don’t want their kids to wear a mask at school…