Five years after becoming Nevada's first diagnosed COVID-19 patient, Ronald Pipkins reflects on the lasting division the pandemic carved into America's social fabric -- a fracture that still echoes today as public trust in vaccines, science and government intervention remains perilously low.
From political battles over mandates to a resurgence of preventable diseases like measles, Pipkins' personal journey through the pandemic mirrors the nation's struggle with misinformation and the fallout of a fractured public health response.
"COVID made us look very weak, very divided as a people," Pipkins, now 60 years old, said. "Some people got the vaccination, some people didn't, and because of that, it just went on and on and on."
That division Pipkins felt wasn't exclusive to him. The COVID-19 pandemic left its cultural fingerprint across the nation. Childhood vaccination rates have declined since the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, vaccine exemptions in schools are on the rise, and previously fringe beliefs about medicine are reaching the mainstream. And leading the country again is President Donald Trump, just as he was at the pandemic's start.
Pipkins described himself as "not a big fan of vaccines." But he said he saw the trauma his then-19-year-old daughter, Jaela, had undergone when he woke from his coma at the North Las Vegas Veterans Affairs Medical Center, where he was being treated for COVID, near the end of March 2020.
"So, for the love of my daughter, a vaccine, what's it mean to me?" Pipkins said.
He said he was surprised by the level of vaccine-adverse sentiment held across the country during that time, adding, "I thought we were an educated country, but we acted like we were children."
In a survey released last month, the Pew Research Center reported 72% of respondents felt the COVID-19 pandemic "did more to drive the country apart than to bring it together" during an already divisive period for the U.S.
While some opposition to vaccines had long existed in the country, the COVID-19 era provided a platform for the antivaccine community and its new members to expand their reach, framing vaccine mandates or requirements as infringements on personal freedoms, said Tony Yang, a professor of health policy at George Washington University who studies vaccine hesitancy.
"This kind of thinking resonates with certain political groups, particularly in the U.S., where skepticism for government intervention is deeply rooted," Yang said, noting that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. amplified "how antivaccine sentiment has infiltrated mainstream political discourse."
Kennedy, who ran an unsuccessful presidential campaign on criticisms of the health industry and medical conspiracy theories, has said he was not antivaccine, but he has a longstanding history of vaccine skepticism.
Nevada, joined by 39 other states, has felt the rising trend of exemptions to school vaccine requirements. That rate has been on the rise for years, but reached its highest mark in at least 12 years in 2023-24. Total exemptions for kindergarteners increased from 4% in 2019-2020 to 7.1% in 2023-2024, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Las Vegas resident Maria Bourke, who initially supported Kennedy in his 2024 campaign but shifted to Trump after Kennedy dropped out, said she considered herself "moderate" in her vaccine beliefs.
"I am actually pro-vaccine, but I am pro-understanding what the side effects are of those vaccines," Bourke said. "And I am actually against the COVID-19 vaccine."
She said she experienced negative health effects after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine and doesn't know if the two were connected. Bourke added she believed the vaccine was rushed and, as a result, there's now severe distrust people hold for the entire vaccine industry.
As of January, the Food and Drug Administration said that based on available information, it "strongly believes that the known and potential benefits of COVID-19 vaccination greatly outweigh their known and potential risks."
Before the pandemic, U.S. Air Force veteran and Clark County School Board member Lydia Dominguez said she would have never entered politics.
"I was never political. I never wanted to be political," Dominguez said. "And the COVID-era definitely launched me into politics and got me involved in what is going on with our government, what's going on with our state government and our local school boards, and it started to make me pay attention to what's happening around us."
About five years ago, Dominguez was still serving in the Air Force. She had taken all the vaccines given to her through the military, but the COVID-19 vaccine made her want to wait "because it was created so quickly and pushed so hard." She said she sought to avoid the vaccine on religious grounds, but her appeals were denied, then she was given a letter of disobeying an order and barred from reenlisting.
"It's become very difficult because it is a personal choice, it is an informed consent matter," Dominguez said. "It really is a personal, family decision, and it shouldn't be imposed by the government on anyone."
Dominguez was elected to the board in 2024. She had been a member of the conservative parental rights organization Moms for Liberty, a group that actively campaigned against COVID-19 responses in schools such as mask and vaccine mandates but left the group before joining the board.
The five-year anniversary of the COVID pandemic comes as another infectious disease outbreak is emerging a few states away, with at least 198 recorded cases of measles in western Texas, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. At least 80 of those patients were not vaccinated, with the status of 113 of them still unknown. Measles was declared eliminated from the U.S. in 2000, which meant there had been over a year in the absence of the continuous spread of the disease, according to the CDC.
"Currently, the outbreak of preventable diseases, like measles in Texas, highlight the real-world consequences of declining vaccination rates," Yang said. "And underscoring the urgent need to address the vaccine misinformation, build public trust in science."
Kennedy recently told the public the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccination was crucial for avoiding disease, writing a "call to action" in an op-ed in Fox News on Sunday -- days after Texas announced the first death from the recent outbreak.
Experts are pointing to the measles outbreak in Texas as an experience to learn from.
"There are kids who are not getting vaccinated against vaccine preventable diseases," said Brian Labus, an infectious disease epidemiologist and assistant professor at UNLV's School of Public Health. "And if those numbers go up, we can reach a point where there is a risk of an outbreak in the community, just like we're seeing in West Texas right now."
Labus said there was a disconnect between people's understanding of the seriousness of childhood vaccines, like the one for MMR, because of how distant the harms of those diseases may feel.
"None of us grew up with measles. It's something that we haven't seen widely since the 1950s and early 1960s," Labus said. "So parents aren't afraid of measles, and they wind up being afraid of the shot."
It isn't just a distrust of vaccines; "natural solutions," like a growing visibility among people who drink raw milk or use beef tallow as skincare, also pose health threats. Yang said these movements underscore a broader ideological divide amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic.
He anticipates the decrease of certain vaccinations to worsen before it gets better.
"When more people die and more people get hurt, then people will start realizing the important benefits of vaccines," Yang said. "But until then, I don't know. I don't know."
Pipkins said he believes many people couldn't take COVID-19 seriously because they couldn't associate it with a person they knew or an experience they had.
"One of my barbers, he saw me on TV, and he said, 'Wait a minute, this has got to be real,' " Pipkins recalled. " 'Because Ron, I know Ron, he would never be a part of something that's fake.' "
For Pipkins, the road to healing from being Nevada's first COVID-19 patient hasn't been easy. He said the conversations from his doctors and the notes his daughter scribbled about his condition during his coma all pointed to signs that his survival was not assured.
"I don't think people can imagine what it felt like to be living when so many people are dying and not understanding why," Pipkins said.
Pipkins says he lives with long COVID symptoms, like brain fog, and the trauma of his experience from March 2020. But he believes the period also marked the beginning of a "whole new life" for him, one where he can get remarried, find a small house where his dog, Leia, can run around outside and get "just basically all I want."
Reflecting on that period, he said Trump had many "backwards" ideas about COVID-19. Now that Trump is back in office, Pipkins is hoping the president "leaves Social Security alone and the veterans alone."
"I see a lot of division on the horizon right now," Pipkins said. "But I'm hopeful."