Vinay Krishnan, National Field Organizer at Popular Democracy unpacks the long standing pandemic denialism and lackluster moderation of the COVI-19 pandemic that still plagues in the current moment.
This article is a part of Left Out: The Missing Election narratives, a collection of unreported histories by publications inside of the Movement Media Alliance.
Election Night 2024 hit folks hard and abruptly, and many are still reeling in its wake.
What was forecasted to be a long, contested fight that would drag on for days or weeks or months essentially ended a few hours after midnight, as solemn folks around me emptied from Brooklyn bars and headed home all but certain that Trump would recapture the Presidency. The following weeks saw all sorts of post-mortems of varying usefulness. Moderate liberals blamed progressives, as they always do. Progressives pointed out that moderates had become George W. Bush era Republicans. Republicans gleefully announced their fascist plans, including a slew of incompetent cabinet picks and increasingly more annoying public pronouncements and memes from Mr. Musk—who will now take his lifetime grift to Washington.
All this is set against a backdrop of a sitting Democratic President and Vice President offering nothing but cordiality, handshakes, and promises to accommodate the incoming totalitarian regime with whatever they need—fully encapsulated in Biden greeting Trump warmly with an Oval Office sit-down and West Wing walk-and-talk.
“Congratulations Donald. Welcome back.”
One group of people who were not particularly surprised by the collapse of the Democratic Party, though, were the folks who have been ringing warning bells about the deep rot at the heart of the Biden administration for the past three years. For healthcare organizers organizing around COVID—and the disabled, directly-impacted activists and visionaries driving this work—the honeymoon period for Biden ended much faster than it did for others, way back in 2021. His failures there tell us a lot about how we got to this moment—amidst an ongoing genocide in Palestine and a fascist capture of power at home—and how we can prepare for the challenges ahead.
The COVID Blueprint for Normalizing Mass Harm
The Trump era allowed for a clear us vs them dynamic when it came to organizing around COVID—as Trump rallied his base against masking and other protections, downplayed the threat of the virus, offered racist explanations for its origins, and failed to prep and supply states with the resources they needed to protect people. Within this context, Biden’s election win offered hope that at the very least, we would have a President who took the virus seriously. While campaigning, Biden told my then-colleague, the late Ady Barkan, that he would combat COVID globally and that he wouldn’t let vaccine patents get in the way.
Ady Barkan: The World Health Organization is leading an unprecedented global effort to promote international cooperation in the search for Covid-19 treatments and vaccines. But Donald Trump has refused to join that effort, cutting America off from the rest of the world. If the U.S. discovers a vaccine first, will you commit to sharing that technology with other countries, and will you ensure there are no patents to stand in the way of other countries and companies mass-producing those lifesaving vaccines?
Biden: It lacks any human dignity, what we’re doing. So the answer is yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And it’s not only a good thing to do, it’s overwhelmingly in our interest to do.
Biden was right, of course. Sharing vaccine technology with the rest of the world was both a moral imperative and just good public health policy. A global pandemic could not be controlled without a global response. But once in office, Biden went back on his promise. Once Pfizer and Moderna developed their vaccines, Biden and his administration moved swiftly to vaccinate the country, but he refused to vaccinate the world—not if it meant lifting patents. Rather than share their vaccines with less wealthy nations for free or at affordable rates, Pfizer and Moderna sought to horde their technology and to mine the COVID crisis for as much profit as possible—even as their actions exacerbated global health inequities and fueled mass death on the ground, creating what the World Health Organization called global “vaccine apartheid” in May 2021. Biden sided with these greedy corporations over the people.
The fault lines of organizing and advocacy then shifted. Rather than a partisan or culture war between Republicans and Democrats, we had a split within the Democratic ranks. On one side, we had Biden, other western nations including the EU, and vaccine makers like Pfizer and Moderna. On the other side we had public health organizers across the world, disability rights organizers, and leaders from the scientific community. The latter group included the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a global network of organizations and individuals demanding global vaccine access to confront COVID. I played a small role in this movement, working as an organizer for Popular Democracy (then the Center for Popular Democracy), where we organized a COVID Families campaign of impacted people to fight for protections from the virus. From 2021 to 2022, we worked with Act-Up NY, Health Gap, Rise and Resist, Housing Works, Spaces in Action, and others to stage multiple actions outside the Pfizer building in Manhattan, outside the U.N., and in Washington, D.C.. We demanded that Biden take swift action to lift vaccine patents, #FreeTheVaccine, and help vaccinate the world.
Biden refused to take these steps, ignoring our many warnings that he was abandoning less wealthy nations to COVID ruin, that nobody was safe from a global pandemic until everyone was, and that his failure to take bold action would produce an endless stream of evolving COVID variants. We said this before Delta. Before Omicron. Before the Omicron sub variants. Before FLiRT. None of this was a surprise. It was predicted and preventable. All of this loss, this pain, this hurt—all of it could have been avoided. It’s hard to understate the global impact of Biden’s decision on patents, a cascading cause and effect that led us directly to where we are today—navigating an ongoing pandemic while political leaders lie about its severity and withhold tools for curbing its harms.
Throughout his Presidency, Biden would continue to protect the profits of corporations over the COVID safety of his people. It was Delta airlines who convinced Biden’s CDC in 2021 to shorten the 10 day COVID isolation requirement after a positive test to just 5 days, not any scientific body. The requirement has since been reduced to a recommendation that folks stay at home until 24 hours after symptoms begin to subside, which again has no backing in science. People can transmit COVID despite being asymptomatic, and the CDC knows this, but corporations want employees to work and customers to consume, and both Biden and his CDC continue to oblige them. What has resulted is the complete dismantling of the CDC as a trusted source of guidance on public health threats (a particularly troubling development, as the H5N1 bird flu continues to spread across the country).
Take February 25, 2022, for example—when the CDC altered its tracking metrics to focus on hospitalizations, instead of positive testing, and unveiled its new COVID-19 Community Level tool. By May 6, 2022, the CDC was claiming “more than 96% of the U.S. population lives in a low or medium #COVID19 Community Level”—a tweet accompanied by a calming map of almost the entire country shaded green. This, of course, was and remains propaganda—a bad-faith effort to placate a country engulfed by this virus. But people still trust the CDC, so the masks came off, just as new sub variants arrived. The CDC would go on to scrap it’s green-to-red scale and currently shades many of its guidance maps various shades of calming, misleading blues and purples.
Over the past 3 years, the agency has repeatedly altered how it displays its COVID metrics in similar ways (as recently as November 2024, they were caught altering the y-axis on their COVID transmission dashboard), while also reducing what data states and hospitals are required to report to begin with. They’ve done all this in a concerted effort to deceive the public into thinking they are no longer threatened by a pandemic that never actually ended.
Jamila Headley of Be A Hero summarized it well in a tweet shortly after the first Omicron sub-variant began spreading across the globe in March 2022, writing “Cases decline. Leaders confidently declare that we’re turning the page. Mask mandates and other protective measures are relaxed. COVID resurges. New variants emerge. Hospitals get overwhelmed with the sick. Hundreds of thousands die. Rinse and repeat.”
This dynamic has persisted through the rest of the ongoing COVID era. On October 22, 2020, before the final Presidential debate between Biden and Trump, Biden tweeted about Trump’s mismanagement of COVID, saying, “220,000 deaths. If you hear nothing else I say tonight, hear this: Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain President of the United States.” Biden, however, has presided over more than 800,000 COVID deaths during his Presidency, which included several years of access to vaccines that Trump didn’t have. The number of people who have filed for disability has increased significantly as Long COVID becomes mass disabling, all while countless studies point to repeated COVID infections damaging immune systems and leading in increased incidence of heart attacks, strokes, and other serious illness. The White House and CDC have downplayed these threats throughout, and simple steps like mandating masks in mass transit and healthcare settings were abandoned prematurely, while others like investing in cleaning the air in public/indoor settings have been largely ignored altogether.
For all of these reasons and more, it was clear all the way back in 2021 to folks organizing around COVID that this President was an antagonist, not an ally, and many forecasted then that if America could normalize mass illness, death, and such a flagrant disregard of science under a Democratic administration, then it could normalize all sorts of horrors—namely genocide and fascism. Folks with knowledge of how the 1918 flue pandemic and how the HIV/AIDS epidemic shaped society began sounding alarms about the dark path America was trodding.
Warning Signs–Steps Towards Genocide and Trump 2.0
Way back in May 2020, Igor Derysh wrote an article for Salon, titled, “The 1918 pandemic was linked to a rise in Nazi support. Will this pandemic be similar?” Derysh traces how Spanish flu sparked xenophobic attitudes and resentment of foreigners and how reduced spending and austerity following the pandemic contributed to rises in popular support for extremist positions. He also cites extremist researcher Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who pointed to the economic distress, lack of agency, and extreme fear and confusion of the time as being a “perfect storm for recruitment and radicalization” by far-right groups.
2 years later, researchers in Europe published “The 1918 Influenza Pandemic and the Rise of Italian Fascism: A Cross-City Quantitative and Historical Text Qualitative Analysis.” in the American Journal of Public Health. The team sought to address “concerns that the COVID-19 pandemic could further boost populist parties that have been attracting growing support in some countries since the global financial crisis.” To test “the relationship between the health consequences of a pandemic and support for Fascism,” they examined the rise of Fascism in Italy after the 1918 Flu Pandemic and came to this conclusion:
Our analysis shows a significant correlation between influenza deaths and vote share for the Fascist Party in 1924, even after accounting for other determinants of the rise of Fascism. Looking at Mussolini’s newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia, we also found that the rhetoric of some of today’s populist politicians concerning the COVID-19 pandemic mimicked that of earlier Fascist leaders.
We of course know that Trump’s own mishandling of COVID helped pave the way for a Biden victory in 2020. But what these writings point to is that Biden did not learn from Trump’s mistakes, and in embracing the same austerity and disregard for the well-being of his people, he set the same course for mass suffering and political ruin.
The great Imani Barbarin ties much of this together. A disability rights and inclusion activist and speaker, Imani warned for years that abandoning COVID protections In America would set the stage for eugenics and eventual genocide. On August 14th, 2023, less than two months before the U.S. and Israel would begin the current phase of its genocide in Palestine, Imani posted a video on Tik Tok and X, saying, “We can’t ignore that the Great Depression in the 1930’s happened because of the 1918 flu pandemic. And the economic pressures of the Great Depression led to the rise of fascism and eugenics, whose greatest indicators initially was obsession with fitness and the perfect body, which gave way to phrenology and race science. All of it culminates in genocide. We are on a fast track towards genocide because of what is currently going on with the pandemic. And disabled and immunocompromised people are going to be impacted the most, particularly those who are Black and brown as well . . . I need y’all to start asking yourselves what happens next?”
What happened next were war crimes in Gaza, ethnic cleansing, the methodical extermination of a people—all with Biden’s funding—and ultimately the loss of Democratic power in America to a totalitarian regime, which will likely only produce more expansive and brutal state violence both at home and abroad.
Throughout Israel’s violence in Palestine, Biden has used many of the same tools to make genocidal harms more palatable to the public as he did to make COVID harms more palatable, including:
1) a normalization of mass death, fueled by deeming certain populations expendable
2) a minimizing of harms on the ground
3) a fidelity to corporate profit above human wellbeing.
4) a refusal to articulate any vision for a crisis that would address the harms and grievances of the American people.
Additionally, attacking the public health infrastructure in Palestine has, itself, been a prominent tool of Israel’s ongoing genocide there—bombing hospitals, cutting off aid routes, removing all disease mitigation, targeting the most vulnerable.
The COVID Blueprint made clear that the American public could grow accustomed to mass death, and Biden used all these lessons to follow his greatest public health failure with his greatest foreign policy failure—both of which remain ongoing. What this country was left with was an historically unpopular President presiding over multiple catastrophes, a largely unknown Vice President taking the electoral baton, and the return of the very fascism people had been warning about for years.
Election Night 2024—Democrats Get the Loss They Deserve
All this brings us right back where we started—to Election Night 2024. Again, much has already been written on the various failures of the Harris campaign. A particularly helpful breakdown comes from Gabriel Winant’s “Exit Right” for Dissent. Winant hits at most of the campaign’s failures here:
Harris pointedly refused to offer any criticism of the incumbent administration, or even suggest any way in which she differed from it. . . . Her surrogates and supporters often reacted with contempt, scorn, and even racism toward those who thought it fair to ask for something more. In this fashion, she squandered the wide lead she had opened in the summer. Although food insecurity and poverty—especially child poverty—had increased significantly after the expiration of pandemic relief measures, and inflation had outpaced earnings for tens of millions of Americans, Harris eventually settled into a campaign roadshow of billionaires, celebrities, and neocon Republican defectors, advocating for an ill-defined status quo. It was a rerun of Hillary Clinton’s “America is already great”: tone-deaf, incompetently targeted at a nonexistent moderate Republican voter, and often expressly hostile toward part of its own nominal base.
I need not add much more to this analysis other than to emphasize that to understand Harris’s profound failure, we must look past her flailing final months of campaigning and the earlier months that Biden wasted by refusing to step down. The rot at the core of the Democratic Party extends far back through a genocide in Palestine, through a public health catastrophe in COVID, and through the entirety of Biden’s four years in office.
Biden began his administration by wordsmithing his way out of delivering a promised $2,000 relief check to the people who just voted for him (he sent folks $1,200 instead, arguing they had already received $600 before he took office and that his campaign promise always meant the sum total). Right out of the gates, the President reminded us that in America, care is a calculus. He followed that up by refusing to hold President Trump or his insurrectionist co-conspirators in Congress accountable for January 6th, he let a Parliamentarian and a filibuster stop him from fulfilling most of his campaign promises, he never even once broached the idea of universal healthcare amidst an ongoing pandemic, and once Congress ended the continuous enrollment requirement that had gotten states to sustain Medicaid enrollment in exchange for federal funding through COVID, Biden presided over the loss of Medicaid coverage for 25 million people. This was all before Israel began its genocide in Palestine, with Biden providing money, weapons, and political cover.
For all these reasons, Winant called Biden “a de facto austerity president,” precisely the kind of austerity that Derysch, Miller-Idriss, the researchers writing in the American Journal of Public Health, and Imani Barbarin warned us all about for years. People told Biden exactly where this all would lead. We told Harris all the same things. But the Democratic Party is afflicted with a stubborn fidelity to doing as little as possible when much is required.
So to be blunt, the many centrist liberals who blamed progressives for Harris’s loss are either lying to the public or they’re lying to themselves. They’re either acting in bad faith or speaking out of some fatal combination of ignorance and incompetence. This was all on display when members of Harris’s staff went on Pod Save America after the election and seemed largely unconvinced that they had done anything wrong. And what remains alarming is that these same people—or others with the same mindset—will likely remain at the levers of control over the Democratic Party for the foreseeable future. And if the party leadership’s undermining of two consecutive Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns is any indication, they will not take kindly to a populist candidate demanding a progressive shift away from the status quo.
Still, Winant also offers us this slight bit of hope:
One could argue—I would—that virtually every historical moment of substantive liberal triumph has been made possible by social movements that imposed themselves from below, often over the protest of liberal policymakers and thinkers, registering their objection to the means despite their abstract support for the ends. Universal adult suffrage, the welfare state, equal protection under law—such is the story of each of these.
It’s this task that we must set ourselves to now—erecting structures that liberate and protect our people, rather than plunder from them to ruin. To do that, we’ll have to confront not just the Trumpism in front of us, but the neo-liberalism that got us here.
The Democratic Cult of Moderation
All of this—every struggle we’ve documented here—comes down to America treating people as math problems. A calculus of whether you deserve dignity or not. Whether you deserve stability or not. Whether you are an asset or a burden. Race, class, gender, sexuality are all variables in this grand ableist formula we apply to every human. All to determine whether you get to breathe. Get to love. Get to feel joy.
What would this pandemic look like if we valued people over profits? What would this world look like if we valued Palestinian life as equal to Israeli life? What would this past election have looked like if we did both? We don’t know right now because we continue to drive public health policy that is inherently ableist, we continue to drive foreign policy that is inherently imperialist, and we continue to drive electoral campaigns that sacrifice our most vulnerable at the altar of corporate profit.
Surviving the crises ahead requires an organized resistance to the Trump regime, of course, but thinking beyond that, it requires a complete transformation of how the Democratic Party values humanity. For COVID, certainly, but also for healthcare in general, for housing, for climate, for Palestine, and for the less wealthy and less white regions of the world. People are not math problems, and being a person has to mean something sacred–something essential–or we’re already dead.
As we sit with these wounds, looking for wisdom, perhaps our guiding principle moving forwards should be this—moderation is not virtue. Moderation is violence. Capitalists have created a culture in which acting on basic human decency, on common sense, on kinship—makes you extreme. And valuing a budget over a human life, over a family or a community—makes you prudent. We’re looking at the whole thing backwards. Because capitalists want us to.
Moderation is the type of violence that tells you we have endless funding to drop bombs on Black and brown houses overseas but never enough funding to build Black and brown houses in America. You’ve heard these buzz phrases before—”How will we pay for that?” “We can’t afford it.” “They want to redistribute your wealth.” It is telling that those talking points are only ever used for social support that helps people—never for military spending or war or weapons. Never for funding Israel’s sustained occupation and mass murder in Palestine. This propaganda rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of money. We have all the resources our people need—and investing in people’s security through policies like universal healthcare is cost-saving. So even on their own rigged battlefield, the capitalists’ position still fails. It’s still bad policy.
Moderation is also the type of violence that tells you that believing in a gentler world is naive and that organizers are dreamers, as a pejorative. But I’m reminded of adrienne maree brown, who spoke in an interview with On Being about growing up being smarter than all the white kids in her class but not getting the same opportunities they did. She said it was illogical, and she said, “…often, when there’s no logic, then that’s when you know you’re in someone’s dream.” So I’m thinking about whose illogical dream we are living in right now. The dreams of pharma companies for sure, the dreams of police, of oil executives, of capitalists, of Zionists, of rightwing nationalists. A white dream. A straight dream. And we know that because our challenges are illogical but our solutions are logical. A Palestinian’s right to self-determination on their own land is logical. A sick person’s right to see a doctor without losing their life savings is logical. A people’s right to be protected from a controllable pandemic is logical. Justice. Equity. Abundance. These are all logical things—pursuits grounded in reality.
So it’s amusing to me when leftists are infantilized for their too-lofty ideals. No—what we’re describing is logic, is reason, is sound judgment. What capitalists and conservatives and fascists and Zionists are describing is a dreamworld. They’re the dreamers. And their dreams are absolute nightmares.
As we navigate these newest nightmares, let us reflect on Ta-Nehisi Coates, who tells us, “History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates or justifies political order.” He goes on, “A political order is premised not just on who can vote but on what they can vote for, which is to say on what can be imagined. And our political imagination is rooted in our history, our culture, and our myths.”
What we’re losing right now is a battle over people’s imaginations. And reshaping this place will require aligning our language with our values. We need better stories. We need to value abundance, not austerity. We need to reward policy that is expansive, not constrictive. We need to encourage going for all of it.
For every single thing we deserve. Because this election was a referendum on the Democratic Party’s violent moderation—the culmination of decades of political cowardice and cruelty—and we, the people, both deserve and demand something better.
