Hello everyone and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the

bulwark, and this week is the five-year anniversary of a time that changed the country and all of our

lives forever. The start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

About five years, it feels like I lived like 10 lifetimes in those five years.

And look, we could all tell stories about the way that that time sucked is probably the technical term.

And, you know, we're going to tell a few of those and get to how the shock of

the pandemic continues to reverberate through our politics today, including, in my opinion,

having a lot to do with what made Trump's comeback possible. I'm bringing back a great guest we had

on the show back in 2022, who was a prominent voice during the pandemic,

Dr. Lena Wend, emergency physician, non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution

and author of the Washington Post newsletter, The Checkup with Dr. Wend.

Dr. Wyn, thanks for checking up with us.

Glad to join you and glad to be back.

Now two,

three years after our last conversation together. Yeah. And I'm going to start with a big picture question about all the things that have happened since we talked last time. So the pandemic

obviously changed life in America in a ton of ways, but which ones would you say are the ways in which we are

still dealing with it today? I think we're still dealing with COVID in many different ways.

So they're definitely people who are still terrified of the virus. Many of them for good reason.

People who are severely immunocompromised, for example, people

who are elderly who really don't want to get this virus, just like they don't want to get

other respiratory viruses because of how dangerous that could be for their health. And then we

are dealing with immense mistrust, distrust of the medical system that has huge repercussions, as you were saying, on politics,

...