Healthy Disruptions: The Politics of Pandemics

Mask mandates, quarantine, and vaccines. These are some of the safety measures that were implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic that continue to cause controversy in the United States. But how and why did measures to protect public health and safety become increasingly polarized along party lines? Why did science and researchers progressively become targets of mistrust? Join Dr. Jennifer Syvertsen and her PhD student Sahar Foruzan as they examine the causes and consequences of pandemic politicization. We will hear from the chief executive officer of the local non-profit, Health Assessment and Research for Communities (HARC), Dr. Jenna LeComte-Hinely, and UCR Associate Professor of Political Science, Dr. Kim Yi Dionne about their experiences with pandemic politicization and the possible reasons behind it. 

Transcript

 Episode 2: politics of pandemics 

E2 Description: Mask mandates, quarantine, and vaccines. These are some of the safety measures that were implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic that continue to cause controversy in the United States. But how and why did measures to protect public health and safety become increasingly polarized along party lines? Why did science and researchers progressively become targets of mistrust? Join Dr. Jennifer Syvertsen and her PhD student Sahar Foruzan as they examine the causes and consequences of pandemic politicization. We will hear from the chief executive officer of the local non-profit, Health Assessment and Research for Communities (HARC), Dr. Jenna LeCompte-Hinely, and UCR Associate Professor of Political Science, Dr. Kim Yi Dionne about their experiences with pandemic politicization and the possible reasons behind it. 

[Intro]

SF: Hello, welcome to Healthy Disruptions, a podcast about health and community in southern CA.

AE: This season’s theme is titled ``Narrating the pandemic: Collective reflections through the Disruption.” 

SF: We will talk about the lived experiences of individuals surviving and thriving in Southern California through the Covid-19 pandemic.”

AE: Thank you for joining us for your healthy dose of disruptions. Stay with us. 

[Montage]

JS: We’ve now passed the two-year anniversary of the first global lockdowns in March of 2020 and more than 1 million people have died of COVID-19 in the United States alone. Yet only 67% of people in the US are fully vaccinated and we’re still engaging in political debates about the harms of this virus. 

I am Jennifer Syvertsen, an Associate Professor in the Dep of Anthropology at UCR

SF: And I’m Sahar Foruzan, a graduate student in the dep Anthropology at the University of California Riverside. To understand how we got to this point of low vaccination and high death rates, we looked to some of our participants in our Covid Narratives Project, many of whom discussed the politicization of Covid-19 - as one person put it - 

“And the thing is, I don't know when, I wish I could pinpoint when, but I don't know when this went from being a public health and safety issue to being a political one.” 

JS: As researchers and community members in Southern CA who have lived through the pandemic - we have the same questions. And we continue to experience waves of new variants, mask mandates, and confusion around testing, vaccinations and booster shots, all of which continue to be politicized. How do we make sense of this? That’s why we’re dedicating this episode to the politics of pandemics. 

JS: Sahar, given how complex this topic is, why did we agree to do this episode? 

SF: Because it's important. We hope this episode can help us all clarify some of the seemingly insane things that have happened since 2020 and I think talking about politicization might help settle why things like advising people to inject bleach and events like really violent opposition to mask mandates were happening all over the country.   

JS: You’re right. Politics can be frustrating and bewildering but this is really important to understand.

SF: So for today’s episode we’re going to hear from UCR Political Science Professor Dr. Kim Yi Dionne, who will help us make sense of how pandemics become political.

JS: We’ll also hear from Dr. Jenna LeComte-Hinely, a researcher at HARC, a community-based organization in the Coachella Valley. She offers some local examples of how politics crept into their community health survey. We hope weaving together these two interviews will help us to make better sense of where we are now and how we got here. 

SF: In our Covid narratives project, people frequently discussed the politics of the pandemic. Trust and facts, including how our trust in the government has shaped the course of our health policies, was a recurring theme with people we talked to. Here is one of our participants discussing her distrust of politicians based on her experiences with HIV. 

“…based on my experience with HIV and with AIDS. President Reagan. It was as bad as Trump in that situation. So I learned to ignore politicians in these situations, they twist things to fit their own agenda, and I just do not have time for their agendas. And I have learned to trust research and studies and the medical point of view, the medical perspective and seeing that happen.” 

So how did distrust of the government and for many other people distrust of scientific information become such pervasive issues to the point where we are now with cases rising and less than 70% of the population fully vaccinated? 

JS: To start to answer this, we’re going to turn to Kim who will share some examples from her research and help us to define what it means to politicize pandemics:

Kim: Yeah. So when I think about politicization, a lot of my research is about politicization of disease or of crises, which is not to say that those are the only forms that politicization can take. But that's just where my work has taken me. And what that means is that instead of using the best practices or targeting those most in need, the ways we think we should respond to disease or crisis. Right. Politics gets infused. Right. And so that can mean diversion of resources to people based on their existing relationships with those in power. Or it can mean what I refer to as pandemic othering to other a group of people to single them out as different and in a negative way. Right. And so that kind of politicization also happens. Diseases often don't care about a person's demographics. Right. It's not actually the virus or the bacterial agent itself that's making decisions based on what someone looks like or how they present. But the way people talk about it can infuse this kind of politics into it, like associating a group with disease or associating a group with a crisis. And as I write in a lot of my work, that's actually not good for responding to the disease.

SF: When politics and disease mix it affects the way resources are distributed, the way people react to guidelines, the amount of coverage it receives by different news networks, the kinds of stories people tell and who people point their fingers at. There are many examples of the politics of pandemic othering and the effects are long lasting. 

JS: One example is the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s - this was a scary time as scientists scrambled to understand this new disease and find the cause. Unfortunately some of the first groups who appeared to be affected by this condition became singled out, blamed, and stigmatized. Here, Jenna discusses the evolution of the HIV pandemic; she notes there are differences between HIV and COVID-19, and yet both health conditions carry an important emotional impact.

Jenna: The only thing I can think of is HIV. Right? Is HIV, when that emerged in our world, it was that is a gay person's disease. It's something that only gay people, hookers and drug addicts get. And that's still, unfortunately, a misconception. We did a lot of work with what used to be known as Desert AIDS Project, and it's now known as DAP Health and around their Get tested Coachella Valley campaign. So this is a campaign that right in line with the CDC guidelines, says everyone, teenagers through adults, everyone should be tested for HIV at least once.

That's it. That should not be controversial. You go to your doctors and they check your blood sugar, they check your cholesterol. They do all of that without a thought. And you let them do all of that without a thought. In fact, you probably ask for some of that, hey, my cholesterol was high last time. Will you check my cholesterol? But suddenly say Check for HIV and it explodes, even though it's the same exact thing. It's a blood test, it's a mouth swab. It's really fast.It's really easy. It's not saying anything about your morals or your ethics. This is just good health practices.

So getting people to get that test, I had a wonderful provider, a nurse practitioner, who gave me so much good attention that no other provider had ever given me. But when she was running tests, I said, Are you going to give me an HIV test? And she said, Why do you need one? I'm probably her least favorite patient, because then I went on a rant about how you should never say that to your patient, ever. And you should be offering this HIV test to everyone because that is best clinical practice, and that is the only way we can stop the spread of HIV.

And if every single person on the planet got tested for HIV and those who tested positive were put into care on anti retrovirals, this would literally be gone in a generation because the antiretroviral drugs are so good now that you have a 0% chance of transmitting that to someone else. So literally we could eliminate this in a single generation if people just all got tested and everyone who tested positive was connected to care. But we can't seem to do that because we have this morality thing around HIV, that it's only bad people that get it. Or if you want an HIV test, you must have been doing something bad, not realizing that anyone can get it. You could be born with it. You could get it through a poor blood transfusion. You could get it because you're giving mouth to mouth to somebody that has a cut and you have a cut. I mean, there are all sorts of reasons, but there's this anger around HIV and there's some doctors who are unwilling to ask their elderly patients like, hey, can I get you an HIV test? Because the elderly patients will lose their mind and think their doctor is implying something about them. And I think that's, again, just heartbreaking that it has that connotation and that connotation is getting in the way of us eradicating a very serious disease.

But it is really interesting, right, that there are relatively few, like everyone can agree that cancer is a terrible thing. Everyone. You get celebrities with shirts that say fuck cancer and suddenly obscenities are okay because everyone agrees cancer is a terrible thing. So is Covid. So it's HIV. Why are those so politicized? And I find it interesting that Covid is so inciting, so much anger and rage and everything. Because it doesn't have those behavioral connotations. Right. It is airborne. This is not saying you did anything wrong. No one has ever said that. You can get out of the grocery store. So it's interesting that it's inciting the sort of the same level of emotions that HIV was. 

SF: While it is interesting that Covid has incited the same level of emotions as HIV, the outrage, indifference, and harm that comes with the politicization of Covid-19, and HIV, becomes less of a mystery when we consider what Kim shared with us about pandemic othering and in a recent article by herself and her PhD student Fulya Felicity Turkmen. What might be a key difference between reactions to cancer and reactions to Covid-19, is that with Covid there is someone else immediately to point your finger at, we were tracking who we got it from, its origins in Wuhan, China, and it’s a contagious disease. Which me ant the preexisting patterns of discrimination and stigmas, particularly against Asian and Asian Americans that we as a society have historically marginalized, got infused with the growing insecurity that Covid-19 caused nationally. The desire to control the situation drew on old stereotypes and created new ones. 

And then there's the mystery of a new disease itself, which created a lot of initial confusion for the public, the media, and for politicians that only got worse for some people as competing versions of the truth spread. Here’s Kim on this topic:

Kim: Now, this is the part where I actually think political leaders have a lot of influence, I think, especially in this particular pandemic. Right. This is an emerging infectious disease. Like, yes, we've faced this isn't the first coronavirus we've ever had, but this is obviously the biggest coronavirus pandemic that we've experienced. And we just knew so little about what to do. And when you don't know what to do, we really do have to rely on political leaders to make good, informed choices for us and on our behalf. And so I think in this case, at least in the United States, I think all the moments of inflection, they really had to do with political leadership. And so maybe that's Donald Trump having a Press conference, or maybe that's Gavin Newsom here in California having a Press conference. It's those moments. Right. Even when you see new pronouncements from the center for Disease Control and Prevention. Right. The CDC comes out and makes the recommendation, or a spokesperson for the CDC comes out and says, we've got new guidelines. Right. When people in power make proclamations, it can affect how the regular population sees the disease. What's interesting is that there was significant dissent about what to do. And unfortunately, that followed political party lines. Right. So that if most people from one party think that this isn't a real problem, this is going to go away. They're not seeing it as a major threat, then of course, those loyal followers will follow them. Why would their leaders lie to them? Right.

JS: But - politicians do lie - and stretch the truth for their own political gains. Within the past few decades especially, political polarization has widened with debates around abortion, climate change, the war on drugs, gun control, and “fake news,” - and now - we’re seeing this with the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump seemed to use the pandemic to amplify fractures that already existed. 

SF: Looking at the pandemic this way, it almost seems unavoidable that there would be political polarization and disagreements. Do we have any control over that? As people just going about our lives, how do we influence politicization? We asked Kim this question and if there was a difference between politicization from politicians vs the public.

Kim: How do we think about politicization, both from politicians or political elites? And also how do we think about it when it comes to ordinary people? And I'm glad that you asked the question that way, because I think a lot of people, when they hear about politicization of disease, they think about political elites. Right. They think about someone who's going to go on some media interview and say, make some racist comments or talk about undeserving populations. You know, they're going to infuse politics in it. But that's their bread and butter. Right. We might expect that from them. Right. Because that's what politicians do. They're the ones who decide who gets what resources, when and how. And so, of course, they have their own relationships and goals that they want to maintain and sustain. But ordinary people, we're just going about our daily lives. We don't necessarily need to infuse politics into things. But sometimes, especially when something scary happens, a crisis, whether it's a health crisis like a pandemic or a natural disaster or a war breaks out, we tend to go in times of fear or anxiety, we sometimes rely on our existing biases and prejudices, and we may use those as kind of mental shortcuts.

And that may lead us to think of some people as deserving of help and others as not deserving of help. Again, that's what politics is, right? It's about whoever is in power gets to determine who gets what resources and ordinary people, even though we're just ordinary people, we have some influence in that, right. We get to determine who gets to hold power. Right. And so if the people in power are responding to us in our politicization of the disease, they might see like, oh, well, most people are blaming this minority group for this disease outbreak. So let's just roll with that, because if a majority of people are doing it and the rules for our political game are that majorities decide winners, then we need to move with the majority. Right. Because again, that's what politicians do. One of their biggest goals is to maintain office. And the way to do that is to make sure that you have broad support. And if your supporters are the kinds of people who themselves engage in politicization of a disease, then maybe you should, too. It's also a chicken egg problem. Not sure which one always comes first.

Right. Is it that there was some political elite who planted the seed for let's talk about the disease in this way, or was it something that was more organic coming from ordinary people? And I think that is a harder question, and that would be a really important place for someone to learn more. So for me, one thing that's interesting is you don't necessarily have to politicize a pandemic or a crisis in a place that is sufficiently competitive or even polarized in terms of parties. Ordinary people can interpret the crisis and the response to crisis as itself being political and can say, like, even though my party leaders have never told me I shouldn't wear a mask or I shouldn't get vaccinated, my party leaders aren't in power anymore. And so I just don't trust this government because I don't trust them. I'm not going to do all these things they're telling me that I have to do to protect myself.

JS: Locally, we found examples of politics infiltrating community health research. Jenna’s organization, HARC, teamed up with the Riverside University Health System to do a household survey about Covid. They mailed paper surveys to a random sample of households in the county and had more than 9,200 participants. They asked 100 questions, primarily about experiences with Covid, awareness of public health resources, vaccination, and the like. 

One of the interesting findings she told us about us was vaccination: about 10% had not been vaccinated and did not plan on getting vaccinated either. About one third of this group said they refused to be vaccinated because they didn’t trust the government. Vaccines and government went hand in hand to them, and it was a real barrier. But this wasn’t the only surprising political finding in their survey:

Jenna: It was very clear that it was a nonprofit and public health Department doing this research. And yet we got so many responses that just spontaneously started talking about politics. We didn't ask him about them like this one in how do you identify yourself? They put Trumplican and then Mexican for Trump. And at the bottom of the survey, they wrote, thank you, God blessed us with Trump. None of these were questions that we asked about, but they're things that people just spontaneously really thought of these two things as linked, the politics and the disease, which I thought was really fascinating because there's nothing inherently connecting the two in my mind at least. But I'm certainly obviously in the minority about that. And it was a surprise to me personally. I just didn't expect that. But what's also interesting is the amount of people who didn't complete the survey, but they returned it to us like this one, they drew a huge X through it and they wrote, Immune system works, stop lies, fear mongering. And they sent that back to us. Or there were several where they sent back. They didn't fill it out at all. And they just wrote Go Brandon on the survey and the return envelope and sent it back to us with no data.

And you know. We haven't done a lot of paper mailed surveys. Most of our paper surveys are ones that are like given out in clinics and that sort of thing. So people in those they don't send back just one particular person didn't send us back the survey. Instead, he or she hand wrote a letter on notebook paper and sent that back in the prepaid response envelope. And it started out by saying, I am not participating in your nonsense. If you love Biden so much to play games like this, ask him these questions. After that, it got really hate speechy about illegals letting in to rape your daughters, et cetera, and ended with it signed, not interested.  He ended with, Just do your survey somewhere else. Everyone here threw them in the trash. Signed not interested. So it clearly evokes some very strong feelings in some people, not ones that I would have thought questions about your health status would have evoked.

SF: While most of us on the covid narratives project didn’t experience this kind of backlash from our questions, we did see a lot of confusion and distrust of both then President Trump and Candidate Biden. For a long time now there has been a widening of perspectives between the left and the right and we seem to struggle to find the center or a middle ground. And this is something that seems to be continuing as we enter a new phase of the pandemic in which we realize that we can’t control it - we have to learn how to live with it - and live with and talk to each other. 

JS: So where do we go from here? We asked Jenna and Kim what they thought our listeners should do next given the ongoing politicization of many things, not just the pandemic. 

While Jenna wasn’t sure if the political damage can be entirely undone - she recommends teaching the next generation to be critical thinkers and understand the scientific process. She also thinks bipartisan messaging from leaders of all political parties coming together to give one strong message is needed. 

Kim recommended homework for our listeners. Reading the late medical anthropologist Paul Farmer’s last book Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History gives us a new framework to make change moving forward: and this is all about care.

Kim: If there's, like, one thing that I would urge listeners to do it's to read his last book. So I'm only, like, on page, like, 275. And it's a tome because Paul Farmer does not write small books, but Fever's Views and Epidemics is this brilliant, wide, sweeping book about the Ebola pandemic in West Africa. And there's a lot of takeaways in the book, and I don't want to minimize it by saying this one thing that I'm taking away from it. But there's a super important thing that's totally rocking my world right now. And that is his argument about control versus care. When an epidemic happens, we want to control it. We think we are so egotistical to think we can control a disease and so we do all these things. We stop people from crossing borders. We make people do things to control the disease. But that's not very helpful. It doesn't really work. And his argument is what we need to do is care. We need to care for the people who get sick and really give them the world class care that Donald Trump gets when he gets sick. We need to really give care not just there's a hospital ICU bed for you, but that there's someone there holding your hand caring for you. Right. So this conversation is great Because it's not just about what's the social science it's like if we cared about each other, if we really and truly cared, that's the thing. I don't know what we need to get that, but I think it's a really powerful message And I think it gives us an opportunity to think about what are we even doing if we can't do this one basic thing and that is to care.

JS - As we reflect on our grim milestone, changing how we think about care could be an important way of preventing further harm and unnecessary deaths. We can’t just leave care to politicians or healthcare workers…. In our upcoming episodes in this podcast series, we’re going to think more about what it means to care for each other, our communities, and ourselves….

[Outro]

SF: Thank you for listening to Healthy Disruptions. Our episode today was hosted by Dr. Jennifer Syvertsen and Sahar Foruzan. 

AE: Thanks to Vince Parra from BelzarMusic for the intro and outro music. 

SF: This podcast was produced by the Center for Health Disparities Research at the University of California, Riverside in collaboration with HARC- the Health Assessment and Research for Communities team and the researchers from the anthropology departments at Cal Poly Pomona and UC Riverside.  

AE: Content was developed by our research team in collaboration with loved ones, friends and neighbors. 

SF: The podcast is funded by a grant from the University of California Humanities Research Institute and The College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at UC Riverside. 

AE: To learn more about our work, visit us at healthydisruptions.buzzsprout.com and to be part of conversations about this podcast you can follow the hashtag #HDpodcast.

SF: We’ll see you next time for some more Healthy Disruptions.