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Donald Trump<\/strong> has spent most of the past week in a tizzy over his possible indictment, which he initially said<\/a> he expected to come Tuesday. But when he has managed to take time off from his\u00a0deranged broadsides<\/a> against Manhattan District Attorney\u00a0Alvin Bragg<\/strong> and his desperate efforts to\u00a0stoke political violence<\/a>, it has been to attack potential GOP rival\u00a0Ron DeSantis<\/strong>\u2014particularly over his handling of COVID-19. The Florida governor, of course, became a hero to the right for his stand against public health measures at the height of the pandemic\u2014and has pinned his White House ambitions, in part, on winning over anti-vaxxers. However, in a series of idiotic jabs, Trump has sought to cast DeSantis as some kind of\u00a0Anthony Fauci<\/strong>-like figure\u2014that is, a \u201cbig Lockdown Governor\u201d<\/a> who championed what the former president is now implying to be a dangerous and untested COVID vaccine.\u00a0<\/p>\n This content can also be viewed on the site it originates<\/a> from.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The posts<\/a>\u2014which rebuked DeSantis for having \u201cgot the vaccine and the booster\u201d and\u00a0for rolling out a statewide testing operation\u2014seem to complete Trump\u2019s descent into anti-vax madness, and serve as yet another signpost of the GOP\u2019s disturbing direction on public health. Indeed, Trump is just one of many Republicans to indulge in anti-vax sentiment in recent weeks: There was\u00a0Josh Hawley<\/strong>, who\u00a0implied<\/a> Democrats were using the deep state to target \u201cvaccine critics.\u201d There was the Republican-led House subcommittee, which\u00a0suggested<\/a> in a letter to the Food and Drug Administration this month that the government may have improperly approved COVID vaccines to \u201cprovide cover for implementing and enforcing vaccine mandates across the country.\u201d And then there was\u00a0Rand Paul<\/strong>, a frequent antagonist of Fauci and other public health officials, who\u00a0told<\/a> the\u00a0Hill on Thursday that he \u201cwouldn\u2019t vaccinate my children for COVID,\u201d falsely claiming that the \u201crisks of the vaccine are greater than the risks of the disease.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe risks of the disease,\u201d Paul said, \u201care almost non-existent.\u201d<\/p>\n While the families of the million-plus Americans who have been\u00a0killed by COVID<\/a> since its onset three years ago might beg to differ with Paul\u2019s assessment, the senator is right that the danger of the pandemic has decreased dramatically. But that\u2019s because of the very vaccines he\u2019s trying to undermine. Thanks to the shots, which were developed under the Trump administration, the crisis has receded, and for most Americans, \u201cCOVID no longer controls our lives,\u201d as President\u00a0Joe Biden<\/strong>\u00a0said<\/a> in his State of the Union address this year. The vaccine was the one success of the Trump administration\u2019s otherwise disastrous handling of the pandemic. But instead of taking credit for fast-tracking its development, Trump has gone the other way, following the lead of the base<\/a>, whose tendency toward conspiracism was nurtured by the former president and his allies.\u00a0<\/p>\n The danger of this kind of thing has already been made clear: It doomed the country\u2019s response to the initial wave of the pandemic, and seems to be contributing to the\u00a0higher COVID death rates<\/a> among Republicans. But the peril could escalate if anti-vax sentiment gets further baked into the official party platform, as my colleague\u00a0Katherine Eban<\/strong>\u00a0wrote<\/a> earlier this week. \u201cThe worst-case scenario is if it becomes a litmus test in the [presidential] primary,\u201d\u00a0Saad B. Omer<\/strong>, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health who has served on numerous US government vaccine advisory committees, told Eban. Unfortunately, that already seems to be happening, based on the one-upmanship between Trump and DeSantis as well as the reckless rhetoric from some GOP lawmakers. Not only could that exacerbate the partisan gap in COVID risks;\u00a0it could further compromise the country\u2019s public health overall.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\nTwitter content<\/h4>\n