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The COVID-19 pandemic created enormously difficult decisions for individuals trying to navigate both the risks of the pandemic and the demands of everyday life. Good decision making in such scenarios can have life and death consequences. For this reason, it is important to understand what drives risk assessments during a pandemic, and to investigate the ways that these assessments might deviate from ideal risk assessments. In a preregistered online study of U.S. residents (N = 841) using two blocks of vignettes about potential COVID exposure scenarios, we investigated the effects of moral judgment, importance, and intentionality on COVID infection risk assessments. Results demonstrate that risk judgments are sensitive to factors unrelated to the objective risks of infection. Specifically, activities that are morally justified are perceived as safer while those that might subject people to blame or culpability, are seen as riskier, even when holding objective risk fixed. Similarly, unintentional COVID exposures are judged as safer than intentional COVID exposures. While the effect sizes are small, these findings may have implications for public health and risk communications, particularly if public health officials are themselves subject to these biases. 

Understanding population‐level variability in responses to pathogens over time is important for developing effective health‐based messages targeted at ideologically diverse populations. Research from psychological and political sciences suggests that party and elite cues shape how people respond to major threats like climate change. Research on responses to the COVID‐19 pandemic suggests similar variability across party identities; however, prior work has methodological limitations. This prospective, longitudinal study of a large probability‐based nationally representative U.S. sample assessed in March–April 2020 (N = 6,514) and then 6 months later in September–October 2020 (N = 5,661) demonstrates that COVID‐19 fear, perceived COVID‐19 death risk, and reported health‐protective behaviors became increasingly polarized over the first 6 months of the pandemic. Initial differences between Democrats and Republicans failed to converge over time and became more pronounced. Responses among Republicans were further polarized by support for former President Donald Trump: Trump Republicans initially reported weaker responses to COVID‐19 than non‐Trump Republicans, and these differences became more pronounced over time. Importantly, political identity and Trump support were not linked to perceived infection risk of a nonpoliticized pathogen, the flu. Finally, political identity and Republican Trump support prospectively predicted COVID‐19 vaccine intentions 6 months into the pandemic.