Suddenly, shockingly, the MAGA crowd began to boo Donald Trump. At a rally in the middle of a COVID-19 surge, he had suggested that his people get vaccinated. To this day, almost one out of two Republicans (47%) believe that “the COVID-19 vaccines have caused thousands of sudden deaths in otherwise healthy people” (Lopes et al. 2023). Trump quickly scrambled to the safe harbor of liberty: “You got your freedoms,” he said, “you have your freedoms.” For public health specialists, few modern emergencies are as worrisome as the populist spread of health care misinformation. How, we ask one another, can we drag public health back out of the maw of culture wars that grip the United States—before we confront the next epidemic?
In his marvelous The Contagion of Liberty, Andrew Wehrman puts our contemporary disquiet in an arresting historical context. When I first picked up the book, I...
