Trump wasted an opportunity to change the narrative on Covid-19

Perhaps the best example of a leader changing health comes from 19th-century Britain, when Queen Victoria’s son and heir, Prince Albert Edward, contracted typhoid fever, one of the deadliest infectious diseases of the period.

Can the sickness of a national leader change public health? It depends. Donald Trump’s hospitalisation offered an opportunity to change the public narrative on the Covid-19 pandemic; instead, the president fuelled anti-science rhetoric. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s polio, on the other hand, galvanised the nation into public health action; in his second term, he helped create the most successful public health campaign in American history, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, later known as the March of Dimes.

Perhaps the best example of a leader changing health comes from 19th-century Britain, when Queen Victoria’s son and heir, Prince Albert Edward, contracted typhoid fever, one of the deadliest infectious diseases of the period. After decades of ignoring or discounting one of the greatest health calamities of their age, a royal illness spurred British leaders, followed by the British public, to reframe the narrative around typhoid, characterising it as a serious, preventable disease—and creating the first modern public health infrastructure, a system that still influences public health efforts today. Guided responsibly, Americans’ reactions to high profile Covid cases could have a similar impact.

Typhoid, caused by a strain of the Salmonella bacterium, is passed from person-to-person when tiny amounts of infected fecal matter contaminate food and water. In the 1800s, it was a fulminating, cluster disease, erupting annually in cities, towns, and villages across Britain whose water supplies became contaminated. Typhoid killed up to 20,000 and sickened and debilitated up to 150,000 people each year. The Prince of Wales caught the illness in the fall of 1871. Bertie, as he was affectionately known, spent two months in a feverish, delirious spell at the family’s retreat in Sandringham, looked after by two royal physicians, William Jenner and William Gull. All of Britain was absorbed with daily updates on the future king’s condition. When the prince began to recover in early 1872, there was massive jubilation, including a royal procession from Buckingham Palace to St Paul’s Cathedral.