Date posted: November 17, 2024
In the months, weeks, and days running up to the presidential election, the Rituals in the Making team paid close attention to how various candidates, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump especially, addressed (or sidestepped) the pandemic. We tracked stump speeches, debate lines, radio and television interviews, and social media posts, and, above all, media reports. We also published a piece of our own.
But anger and anxiety about Covid-19 are woven into all those issues, simmering underneath as a proxy for the larger debate over trust in government that has shaped the 2024 race. – Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Here’s just a sampling of articles that caught our attention that last month of the campaign:
“Trump secretly sent COVID tests to Putin during 2020 shortage, new book says,” Washington Post, Oct. 8, 2024.
“Why did JD Vance accuse Kamala Harris of engaging in censorship ‘at an industrial scale’?” Austin American-Statesman, Oct. 4, 2024
“I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is,” The Atlantic, Oct. 10, 2024
“Marjorie Taylor Greene says Covid vaccines may be responsible for ‘all-time high’ cancer rates,” Yahoo News (The Independent), Oct. 18, 2024.
“Jon Stewart Tries to Make Sense of the ‘Fever Dream’ Part of the Election: ‘Did We All Die During COVID?‘” The Wrap, Oct. 22, 2024.
“6 Takeaways From Donald Trump’s 3-Hour Podcast With Joe Rogan,” New York Times, Oct. 25, 2024.
Arguably the piece that most struck a chord with our own research was Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s October 29 article in the New York Times, “Despite Covid ‘Amnesia,’ the Pandemic Simmers Beneath the 2024 Race.” “Anger and anxiety about COVID,” she explained, “are woven into all those issues, simmering underneath as a proxy for the larger debate over trust in government that has shaped the 2024 race.”
We also weighed in on the debate on COVID denialism. Four days before the election, on November 1, Martha Greenwald and Sarah Wagner published an opinion editorial in the Lexington Herald Leader: “The worst ‘weave’ from Trump is lies about a pandemic that killed so many Americans.”
Among other points, we homed in on a particularly disturbing example of the commodification of COVID denialism:
Trump and his acolytes have built a conspiracy-fueled set of dangerous pandemic counter-truths since the former president left the White House in 2021. Even while denying its facts, his circle has never stopped commodifying COVID. . . . The Contagion Kits were even the obvious star during the RSBN coverage of the Madison Square Garden rally just a few days ago. Available for over $300 per person, they are a bucket of medical disinformation, containing Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, generic antibiotics, Tamiflu, and a nebulizer with a recipe for a DIY “protocol” that was warned about by many authorities when it was first pushed online in 2020. The reason you need the Contagion Kits? To “get the life-saving medications that were withheld” previously during COVID. The language on the Wellness Company website hawking the merch, all derived from the Make America Healthy Again lexicon, is deployed to instill fear and monetize their followers’ distrust in standardized medicine.
Despite the election results, we hold fast to our closing argument that “these stories [of COVID loss] have to be told, both before and after the election, as their experiential truths are an antidote to the denial of scientific evidence.”