COVID WARS America’s Struggle Over Public Health and Personal Freedom

COVID WARS: America’s Struggle Over Public Health and Personal Freedom (Libratum Press: March 11, 2025), by historian Ronald Gruner is an investigation into the COVID-19 pandemic during which the United States suffered more COVID deaths than during all its foreign wars combined, the largest employment loss since the Great Depression, and the greatest increase in the national debt since the Second World War. No major nation had a worse record.

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, America suffered 3,200 COVID deaths per million and a peak loss of 21.9 million jobs,” explains Gruner.  “No major nation had a worse record. Rather than uniting against a common foe, we Americans were divided by partisan politics, distrustful of our healthcare systems, and overwhelmed by disinformation. I wrote COVID WARS to help my fellow Americans--and future generations--understand and learn from how we stumbled so badly during one of our nation's greatest challenges."

Unlike the partisan COVID investigations conducted by Congress, Gruner methodically explores the factors which caused the United States to stumble so badly during one of our nation’s greatest challenges. Each chapter of Gruner’s book focuses on a particular aspect of the pandemic.

1. The discovery and evolution of viruses leading to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic which killed over twenty million worldwide.
2. The warnings, starting with President Bush in 2005, that another major pandemic was inevitable, yet were largely ignored by Congress.
3. The confusion during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic as President Trump asserted the pandemic would soon pass while his public health officials urged caution.
4. The nation’s division as Republican states, preserving personal freedoms, reopened their communities while Democratic states, focused on public health, remained closed.
5. The success of President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed to develop a COVID vaccine only to be undermined by vaccine skeptics and disinformation.
6. The 1.1 million COVID deaths which varied broadly across America’s fifty states based on demographics, vaccination rates, and political orientation.
7. The conspiracy theories ranging from the sinister origin of the COVID virus by global elites to 5G cellular towers communicating with elements embedded in the vaccines.
8. The lockdowns which closed schools, businesses, and communities harming students, costing millions of jobs, and contributing to thousands of deaths due to despair.
9. The increase in non-COVID deaths from natural causes such as cardiac and cancer deaths, from drugs and alcohol, and even accidents.
10. The historical perspective which contrasts America’s COVID-19 pandemic with earlier pandemics with an emphasis on how America compared with other leading nations.

Gruner’s data-driven book contains over eighty charts, tables, and maps drawn from reliable sources used to examine the pandemic’s origins, its human and economic toll, and the cultural and political schisms the pandemic exposed. In addition, the book also includes extensive statistical appendices which allow the curious, or skeptical, reader to conduct their own research.

Remarkably, it wasn’t until 1976 that the first history of the 1918 Spanish Flu appeared when Alfred Crosby wrote America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918. By then, many of the lessons learned during the 1918 pandemic had been forgotten. Rather than the COVID-19 pandemic and its lessons be forgotten, Gruner wrote COVID WARS for both today’s young Americans and future generations hoping that they learn from the struggles, division, and loss we Americans experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.