The Guardian calls the midterms a victory for science and a rebuke of MAHA. Here is what one of its winners called science in 2021.
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On Thursday, the Guardian ran this headline: “’Revenge of the nerds’: US midterms deliver a win for science – and a rebuke of Maha.” The story credits a wave of Democratic doctors and scientists, and its first named example is Michigan’s senator-elect, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.
So it’s fair to ask a simple question. When the Guardian says “science” won, what does it mean by science?
What the winner called science
This week, a clip shared by Nicolas Hulscher and viewed more than a million times shows El-Sayed on FOX 2 Detroit's Let It Rip on November 18, 2021, in a panel titled "Why is Michigan leading country in COVID-19 cases?" Here is what he said:
“We have a responsibility to protect people from the unvaccinated and their higher probability of spreading this disease.”
”The most important thing is to mandate those vaccines.”
“Your right to choose not to get vaccinated ends where the breath that you’re breathing out of your lungs is now going into my nostrils.”
“We have a responsibility to protect people from the unvaccinated and their higher probability of spreading this disease.”
- Abdul El-Sayed, 2021
He made the same argument in writing. In October 2021, the University of Michigan's Ford School summarized his op-ed calling vaccine mandates "essential to public health and protection."
Look closely at what that is. It isn’t a finding. It’s a policy argument, and he names the claim it depends on: that unvaccinated people were more likely to spread the virus to others. That claim can be tested. Here’s what the record said at the time.
What the record said
When the FDA authorized the first COVID-19 vaccine in December 2020, it said plainly that there was no evidence yet that the shot prevented person-to-person spread, as FactCheck.org later documented. Pfizer’s trial was never designed to measure it.
By August 2021, the director of the CDC said on national television that the vaccines, against Delta, could no longer prevent transmission, according to CNN’s transcript.
To be precise: studies did find the shots reduced transmission of early variants to some degree, as Reuters has reported. But “some reduction that faded” is a long way from “your rights end where my breath begins.” The part of the mandate argument about protecting other people rested on the weakest part of the evidence.
On severity, El-Sayed was on firmer ground. In the same panel he noted that vaccinated people mostly had milder cases, and the CDC director said the same thing. The dispute is over transmission, the part of his argument that was about protecting other people.
Two more things about that period are now on the record. In 2024, Meta’s CEO wrote to Congress that senior Biden officials pressured his company to remove COVID-19 content, and that the pressure “was wrong,” according to his letter to the House Judiciary Committee. And a Senate investigations subcommittee report found federal health officials knew of myocarditis signals in early 2021 and decided against a formal alert to doctors.
The technical record
FDA, Dec. 11, 2020: “nor is there evidence that the vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from person to person” (FactCheck.org). Pfizer: “Stopping transmission was not a study endpoint.”
Walensky, Aug. 5, 2021, answering a question about breakthrough infections: “what they can’t do anymore is prevent transmission” (CNN).
The myocarditis report was issued by the Republican majority staff of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in May 2025. It is not a bipartisan finding.
A method, not a credential
Science is a method. You state a claim, test it, and change your mind when the data change. A medical degree is a credential, but an election result is a preference. Each is real, and none of them stands in for the others.
In the same panel, El-Sayed compared vaccine mandates to seatbelt laws. But a seatbelt protects the person wearing it. The case for vaccine mandates rested on protecting other people, and that was the part the evidence supported least.
When “a win for science” means more credentialed people won office, the word has quietly changed meaning. It no longer describes how we know something. It describes who is allowed to say it.
What voters actually said
There’s a simpler problem with the headline. Voters didn’t say they were voting on science, or on mandates. About 4 in 10 named the economy as the top issue, 3 in 10 named democracy, and about 1 in 10 named healthcare, according to the AP Voter Poll.
The Guardian’s own story backs this up. It reports that four in ten MAHA voters were worried about healthcare prices, and that winning Democratic ads focused on standing up to drug companies and insurers. Around 30% of midterm voters still say they support MAHA, according to KFF. And STAT found the health agendas of winning Democrats, El-Sayed included, “strikingly similar” to the movement’s goals.
Many MAHA candidates lost on Tuesday. MAHA’s concerns about food, chemicals, chronic disease and drug-company influence did not. They changed parties.
The movement didn’t lose
National MAHA candidates did have a hard night. Of 24 candidates MAHA Action endorsed for Senate, House and governor, eight won, according to The Defender. That’s the part the headlines covered. It’s the smaller story.
The bigger one is in the statehouses. Stand for Health Freedom, which describes itself as nonpartisan, reports 703 wins for its candidates, a 63% win rate, and 161 races still pending, according to its post-election announcement.
State legislatures are where school exemptions, informed consent and parental rights are actually decided. A movement that wins hundreds of those seats isn’t being rejected. It’s building where the policy gets made.
Its support also crosses party lines. About 30% of midterm voters say they support MAHA, according to KFF. STAT found the health agendas of winning Democrats “strikingly similar” to the movement’s goals. El-Sayed himself rolled out a “Building a Healthier America” plan and said, “We need to own this lane,” which The Defender read as a bid for MAHA voters.
When the winning side is competing for your issues, you’re not the side that lost the argument. You’re the one setting it. As MAHA Action’s Tony Lyons put it, voters “rejected some messengers,” but “did not reject the message.”
The question that remains
None of this is about whether El-Sayed is a capable public servant, as I opined on X. He’ll have a vote in the Senate, and that vote is where it will show. The question is narrower. If science really won on Tuesday, then a 2021 position should be judged by what the evidence showed, not by who won.
So it’s a fair question for the senator-elect: knowing what the FDA said in 2020 and what the CDC director said in 2021, does he still believe your right to decline a vaccine ends at his nostrils?
Science is a method, not a mandate.
Sources
the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/nov/05/midterms-science-doctors-maha
a clip shared by Nicolas Hulscher:
the University of Michigan’s Ford School: https://fordschool.umich.edu/news/2021/el-sayed-criticizes-police-officers-rejecting-vaccine-mandates
FactCheck.org: https://www.factcheck.org/2022/10/scicheck-its-not-news-nor-scandalous-that-pfizer-trial-didnt-test-transmission/
CNN’s transcript: https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/sitroom/date/2021-08-05/segment/02
his letter to the House Judiciary Committee: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/PDFFiles/Mark-Zuckerberg-Letter-on-Govt-Censorship.pdf
Senate investigations subcommittee report: https://www.ronjohnson.senate.gov/2025/05/21/2025-5-psi-chairman-johnson-releases-report-will-hold-hearing-on-federal-health-agencies-failure-to-warn-about-the-risk-of-myocarditis-following-covid-19-vaccination/
AP Voter Poll: https://apnews.com/article/midterms-trump-election-2026-democracy-economy-congress-young-voters-688773185f71690b00847726efbf045a
KFF: https://www.kff.org/public-opinion/health-care-in-the-2026-midterm-election/
STAT: https://www.statnews.com/2026/11/05/end-of-maha-2026-midterms-losses-democrats-aoc-cory-booker/
Looking for salvation from our godless 60+ billion in fraud fines, Big Pharma's medicine that kills 260,000 to 800,000 a year (i.e., Johns Hopkins iatrogenic study vs. Dr. Null's book and facts/ Death by Medicine) should teach us that the science is settled. I.e., the vast majority of scientists agree with whoever is funding them.
A study designed not to find harm will never find harm.
We know they are lying. They know they are lying
They know that we know they are lying. We know that they know that we know they are lying. And they still continue to lie.
– Alexander Solzhenitsyn
I support the MAHA movement. I neither support El Sayid’s rhetoric nor is logic. In addition, the hard, plain truth is that we have dismal public health in America. Focus on the health of the individual, never side-lining the sovereign individual rights.