by ritualsinthemaking

A Spring of Unravel and Confusion: Drinking from the Firehose of COVID (and Vaccine) Media Coverage, April – June 2025

By Sarah Wagner and Martha Greenwald

Date Posted: June 26, 2025.

“Taking over the past is a point of no return. It’s not that we can’t get back to who we once were. It’s that we won’t even remember it.” – Monica Hesse, “Scroll through Trump’s new covid website — and have your mind blown,” The Washington Post, April 23, 2025)

On April 18, 2025, an email from the National Science Foundation notified the Principal Investigators of the Rituals in the Making project that our grant had been terminated, effective immediately, because it was “not in alignment with current NSF priorities.” Ours was one of about 50 grants canceled because of its focus on misinformation.

On that very same day, the White House unveiled its new COVID.gov website.

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There is no causal relationship between these two events. But they speak to a moment in time and remind us—members of this research team—that our work is to document not only how the pandemic was experienced in the past but also how it is understood today. Five years later, how do people in the United States make sense of its losses? What, if any,  lessons do they draw from it?

Our project has assumed a new urgency in tracing ethnographically and archivally the forms of forgetting and narratives of revisionism. This dispatch chronicles some of the headlines that have struck us as most revealing of the political headwinds facing American society in its reckoning with the pandemic.

Much of the national conversation about COVID of the past six weeks, since our grant’s termination, has centered on vaccines—from “do your own research” messaging coming from Secretary Kennedy in late April to FDA recommendations limiting the COVID vaccine to people 65+  and those with medical conditions (and notably not pregnant women, children, and young people).

RFK Jr. tweeted his announcement limiting access:

“Today, the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from @CDCgov recommended immunization schedule. Bottom line: it’s common sense and it’s good science. We are now one step closer to realizing @POTUS’s promise to Make America Healthy Again.”

(See the New Yorker article, “How to Think About COVID-19 Vaccines in the Era of R.F.K., Jr.,” Dhruv Khullar, May 31, 2025)

In addition to renewed debates about the virus’s origin (embraced by the White House’s covid.gov site and challenged in a new study examining natural origin, e.g., zoonotic links; see also David Wallace-Well’s helpful overview of shifting attitudes on the debate), another area of coverage has focused on expertise under fire or sprouting denialism, for example:

(“This version of germ theory denialism has become quite common. It’s what drove the comorbidity fallacy during the pandemic—the belief that COVID wasn’t really what was killing people, that underlying health conditions were actually to blame. It also drove the rumor that if you just eat right and exercise enough, there’s no reason to get vaccinated, because your immune system will be sufficiently “boosted.” More recently, it can be seen in the rumor that vaccines didn’t really cause the decline in vaccine-preventable illnesses like measles and polio during the 20th century, rather, better nutrition and sanitation were the true drivers.”)

Then came the bombshell on June 9, 2025, that HHS Secretary Kennedy fired the entire expert panel of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP)—all 17 of them—and the charge that partisanship (not science) influenced his decision. (That second article was written by NYT journalist Sheryl Gay Stolberg, who was our keynote speaker in March 2025.) Here’s an opinion editorial penned by a CDC virologist who resigned in protest; and a short video spelling out the potential consequences of limiting vaccine accessibility. A few days later, the secretary faced allegations of “willful medical disinformation” underwriting his changes to the vaccine schedule.

The Washington Post ran an article about how the threat of those changes and the wider uncertainty regarding the future of vaccine accessibility has mobilized a coalition of medical, policy, and industry experts in an effort to “create parallel systems of recommending, and perhaps even providing, vaccines.”* Included in the initiative is the Vaccine Integrity Project, “dedicated to safeguarding vaccine use in the U.S. so that it remains grounded in the best available science, free from external influence, and focused on optimizing protection of individuals, families, and communities against vaccine-preventable diseases.”

(* We noted that this Washington Post article was co-authored by reporter Lena H. Sun, who lost her mother to COVID, and included a quotation by epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina, who was a guest speaker for one of our virtual seminars about pandemic revisionism.)

The newly constituted ACIP held its first meeting on June 25, 2025. Controversy ensued. One of its eight members had to withdraw because of “financial withholdings”; on his bio, the individual represented himself as a Professor of Pediatrics at George Washington University, but, according to GW, he hadn’t taught at the university for eight years. The committee’s chair, biostatistician Martin Kulldorf, called for the “need to ‘rebuild public trust’ in federal health institutions in the wake of the pandemic and what he called the ‘inflated promises’ about the COVID vaccines and mandates.” Kulldorf himself was fired by Harvard University for refusing to be vaccinated against COVID-19. He had previously claimed that “immunity from when he was infected with Covid-19 in early 2021 would better protect him than a vaccine.”

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It’s been a lot to take in—the fierce debates around the pandemic’s cause, the rapid-fire pace and highly consequential decisions emanating from HHS and the CDC regarding vaccines, the confusion swirling around expertise and evidence.

Photos by Martha Greenwald.
And our thanks to Michael McWilliams for hitting pause.

(For the answer to the question on the left, see here. For the one on the right, see here. )

One piece stood out for the more optimistic note it struck: Jeopardy! Host Ken Jennings published an opinion editorial in the New York Times in early June in which he invited us to think about hope in the face of growing distrust:

“Facts may seem faintly old-timey in the 21st century, remnants of the rote learning style that went out of fashion in classrooms (and that the internet search made obsolete) decades ago. But societies are built on facts, as we can see more clearly when institutions built on knowledge teeter. Inaccurate facts make for less informed decisions. Less informed decisions make for bad policy. Garbage in, garbage out.

In a dark time, my secret optimism is that our viewers’ love for quiz games is a sign of what can eventually save us: a practical belief in fact and error that is more fundamentally American than the toxic blend of proud ignorance and smarter-than-thou skepticism that’s brought us to this point.”

It’s impossible to know if Jennings has a hand in what goes on in the Jeopardy Writer’s Room, but a casually observed tally of pandemic centered and adjacent questions clearly shows that at least on this one historied game show, the COVID pandemic is not being erased. Even in the contestants’ pithy introductory narratives, there are often references to hobbies begun, relationships initiated, and trivia memorized during “lockdown” and “social isolation.”  A few have even attributed their ability to be chosen for the episode to all the studying they did during “that time.” 

Though the stories put forth are largely positive and whimsical, at least Jennings and his writers and contestants are not engaged in erasure.

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