Republicans’ war on science generally and the medical profession in particular erupted in early 2020—when COVID-19 arrived in the United States.  

President Donald Trump first learned of the virus on January 3, 2020. Then he went golfing on January 4, 5, 18 and 19.

On January 19, the first Coronavirus case appeared in the United States.  

Coronavirus

The catastrophe that followed was the inevitable result of a confluence between natural disaster and an evil and incompetent administration. 

Upon taking office in 2017, Trump gutted the permanent epidemic monitoring and command groups set up inside the White House: The National Security Council (NSC) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). 

In 2014, following the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, President Barack Obama had created the White House Pandemic Office, run by the White House’s National Security Council (NSC).

Neither the NSC nor the DHS epidemic team was replaced.

The global health section of the CDC was decimated, and had to reduce the number of countries it was monitoring from 49 to 10. 

Pathologically jealous of Obama, Trump—a lifelong racist—tried to destroy every vestige of Obama’s legacy as the first black President of the United States.

Chief among these actions: Making repeated efforts to undermine—and ultimately destroy—the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as “Obamacare.” Under this expanded, Federally-subsidized insurance program, 28 million Americans who previously could not afford medical care now began receiving it.

Nor was Trump the only Republican to mount such an all-out war on medical science. Virtually every Republican member of the United States Senate and House of Representatives backed his every  lie about the dangers of COVID-19—and his assault on the medical establishment. 

Americans were further endangered by Trump’s having imposed a hiring freeze in 2017 at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). As a result, nearly 700 positions remained vacant there.

CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia

In 2018, two years before COVID struck, Trump pushed Congress to cut $15 billion from national health spending—and cutting the global disease-fighting budgets of the Centers for Disease Control, National Security Council, Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services. 

From January to early March, 2020, Trump and his allies within the Republican party and Fox News Network repeatedly assured Americans they had nothing to fear. 

On February 28, Trump told a cheering crowd of supporters:  “Now the Democrats are politicizing the Coronavirus….We did one of the great jobs….One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia’….They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax….It’s all turning, they lost….And this is their new hoax.”

And acting as Trump’s propaganda arm was Fox News Network. 

As late as March 9, Trish Regan, host of Trish Regan Primetime on the Fox Business Network, attacked not the virus but those who did not share her fervent embrace of Donald Trump.

“We’ve reached a tipping point,” said Regan. “The hate is boiling. Many in the liberal media are using Coronavirus in an attempt to demonize and destroy the President, despite the virus originating halfway around the world.”

To make certain no one in the television audience missed the point, an electronically generated caption read: “Coronavirus Impeachment Scam.”

Then, on March 14, Fox Business Network announced that Regan’s program would be on “hiatus” until further notice. The reason: Her comments had “triggered” an avalanche of criticism—from Coronavirus victims, their families and people angered at being blatantly lied to.

During the vital months of January and February, 2020, Republicans refused to challenge Trump’s refusal to take the virus seriously—before it gained a foothold in the United States.

The reason: They had utterly tied themselves to him since the 2018 mid-term elections, where many moderate Republicans lost their seats.

Accompanying Republicans’ hostility toward medical science was their disdain for higher education. 

An August 20, 2019 story in Forbes noted that a Pew Research survey, conducted in July, had found that “67% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning respondents say higher education is having a positive effect on the country compared to only 33% of Republicans and Republican-leaning participants.” 

Furthermore, “The percentage of Republicans attributing a positive effect to higher education has steadily eroded from 58% (2010), 53% (2012), 54% (2015), 43% (2016), and 36% (2017). Among Republicans, 59% now say higher education has a negative effect on the U.S., compared to just 18% of Democrats.” 

In March, 2020, an NBC News poll found that only 30% of Republicans said that they would actually listen to the advice of doctors to stay away from large, crowded areas to avoid Coronavirus. 

These are the same people who got their version of reality from Right-wing sources like Fox News Network and Rush Limbaugh. 

Rush Limbaugh

On his March 27, 2020 show, Limbaugh dismissed Coronavirus as “the common cold,” then added: “We didn’t elect a president to defer to a bunch of health experts that we don’t know.”

This is the same Rush Limbaugh who said, in 2015: “Firsthand smoke takes 50 years to kill people, if it does. Not everybody that smokes gets cancer. Now, it’s true that everybody who smokes dies, but so does everyone who eats carrots.”

In February, 2020, Limbaugh—a longtime and heavy cigar smoker—announced that he had Stage Four lung cancer. He died on February 17, 2021.

There was a time when most Americans considered doctors heroes, as men (mostly) and women who dedicated their lives to improving—and often saving—the lives of others. 

Television played a major role in shaping this image—not through documentaries but medical dramas.

In 1961, two such drama emerged as popular entertainment: Dr. Kildare (1961 – 1966) and Ben Casey (1961 – 1966).

As played by then-unknown actor Richard Chamberlain, young intern Dr. James Kildare tries to learn his profession and deal with patients’ problems.

Early on, his superior, Dr. Leonard Gillespie (Raymond Massey), warns him: “Our work is to keep people alive. We can’t tell them how to live any more than how to die.” Kildare ignores the advice, and this forms the basis for stories, many with soap-opera themes.

Richard Chamberlain and Raymond Massey in “Dr. Kildare.”

In Cult TV: A Viewers Guide to the Shows America Can’t Live Without, John Javna describes his character:

“Dr. James Kildare, the first bona fide TV hero of the 60s, symbolized the best hopes of this new era. Young, intelligent, committed, the evil he fought was disease. His weapons were a good education and a willingness to care about people….

“Americans were turning to science for salvation, and doctors were often the new gods.”

Ben Casey, on the other hand, brought other weapons to the medical drama: As a no-nonsense neurosurgeon (Vince Edwards), he was intense, aggressive, and never failed to display a hairy chest. He refused to go “by-the-book” when he thought he was right, often risking dismissal to save his patients.

The portrayal of doctors as heroes was promoted heavily by the American Medical Association (AMA). The organization created a committee in 1955 to ensure that these shows presented a positive image of physicians and accurate medical information. 

Logo of the American Medical Association

Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare were soon followed by other popular medical dramas, including:  

• Marcus Welby, M.D. (1969-1976)
• M*A*S*H* (1972-1983)
• St. Elsewhere (1982-1988)
• ER (1994-2009)
• Grey’s Anatomy (2005-Present)
• House (2004-2012).

Medical dramas evolved over time, moving from shows that presented idealized images of doctors to shows that delve into the complex realities of modern medicine. Current trends include:

• Utilizing medical consultants and doctors to ensure realistic portrayals of procedures and medical terminology;
• Addressing current social and ethical issues within healthcare, such as pandemics, mental health, and patient advocacy;
• Exploring the emotional depth and personal struggles of healthcare professionals. 

But for millions of Right-wing Americans, the medical profession generally—and doctors in particular—have become hated and feared targets. 

Republicans’ animosity toward the healthcare system can be traced to 1964, with the passage of Medicare. This has proven the most durable achievement of Lyndon B. Johnson’s one-term Presidency.

And even while it was under debate, Republicans—such as Ronald Reagan at the start of his political career—furiously attacked it as the initial step toward socialism.

But it was President Barack Obama’s signature plan to give every American access to healthcare, the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—universally known as “Obamacare”—that pushed the Republican party into overdrive. 

The reform effort became a lightning rod for Right-wing groups like the Koch-brothers-financed Tea Party. In 2010, a massive Rightist turnout cost the Democrats the House of Representatives, and threatened Democratic control of the Senate.  

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), the Florentine statesman and father of modern politics, could have warned him of the consequences of this—through the pages of The Prince, his infamous treatise on the realities of politics:

…There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things.  

For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor, and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.  

Niccolo Machiavelli

This proved exactly the case with the proposed Affordable Care Act.

Its supporters have always shown far less fervor than its opponents—with House Republicans voting more than 70 times to repeal, delay or revise the law.

Critics like Alaska Governor Sarah Palin lied outright that the Act would implement “death panels.” In an August 7, 2009, social media post, she wrote:

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society.”

Right-wingers pundits and their followers quickly agreed. On his syndicated national radio program, Rush Limbaugh said of Palin, “She’s dead right.” 

Despite Republicans’ lies and threats, the Affordable Care Act was signed into law on March 23, 2010.

The rift between the Republican party and the medical establishment grew wider between 2020 and the present. This has been fueled by Republicans’ relentless opposition to abortion, birth control  and transgender healthcare.

And, increasingly, Republicans—and their voters—attacked the very foundations of science itself.