It’s time for the GOP to dole out some tough love on vaccines
The only halfway decent excuse for delaying coronavirus vaccination — that no shot had received “full approval” from the Food and Drug Administration — is now obsolete. Time for the “Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings” party to stop coddling their followers, dole out some tough love and insist that everyone get their damn shots already.
A year and a half into the pandemic, 40 percent of eligible Americans still aren’t fully vaccinated. And while public health officials have begged the uninoculated to get shots, many ambitious Republicans and right-wing “news” personalities have, perplexingly, refused to do so.
It didn’t have to be this way.
Conservative leaders could have played up the “personal responsibility” angle and urged Americans to take ownership of their health and save taxpayers money. (In June and July alone, Uncle Sam shelled out hundreds of millions of dollars to hospitalize the unvaccinated, according to Kaiser Family Foundation estimates.) Or, conservatives could have touted the “family values” inherent in getting shots, because more adults getting vaccinated helps shield babies and children who remain ineligible. Or maybe promoted the “Christian values” of protecting the most vulnerable among us, including the immunocompromised.
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Instead, right-wing demagogues have indulged their followers’ most infantile fantasies about “freedom” (which apparently includes the freedom to infect and potentially kill others), as well as their fringiest conspiracy theories.
Republican politicians nursing presidential ambitions — such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas — rant about government tyranny and theft of liberty. At Fox News, where all staff are now required to report their vaccination status, anchors clog the airwaves with unsubstantiated claims that vaccines are dangerous and that federal vaccination efforts are part of a secret Democratic plot to sterilize Americans or maybe confiscate their guns (?).
Little surprise, then, that most of the unvaccinated fear coronavirus vaccines more than the virus itself. When a source they trust indulges their most grotesque, crackpot delusions about government oppression — rather than reinforcing the more mundane truth that the government is merely trying to curb preventable deaths — they listen.
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Eager to feed their followers snake-oil cures, Fox News hosts such as Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, and political figures such as Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), have lately urged their followers to take ivermectin instead of getting vaccinated. Ivermectin is a drug primarily used to treat parasites in livestock — that is, to deworm horses, cattle, sheep and goats. Not to treat covid, in man or beast.
The message seems to be: Don’t be one of those liberal sheep, getting vaccinated. Act like a literal sheep, getting dewormed.
Such messaging has life-or-death consequences, and not only for those sickened by covid. Seventy percent of recent calls to the Mississippi Poison Control Center have been “related to ingestion of livestock or animal formulations of ivermectin purchased at livestock supply centers,” according to the state’s public health department. When the FDA tweeted that anyone who isn’t a horse or a cow shouldn’t take ivermectin, the message was met by fierce blowback from conservatives furious about its supposed condescension.
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No. No, no, no. These snowflakes have been indulged for too long.
They need some straight talk, preferably from their own leaders — not just on the coronavirus vaccines but on all their other paranoid fan fiction too, including stolen elections and lefty baby-eaters and a supposedly senile president. Once upon a time, Republicans mocked people for insisting that their “feelings” and “lived experiences” superseded reality; today, whether out of cowardice or the desire to out-crazy their presidential rivals, party leaders cosset such delusions.
Even former president Donald Trump, who recently urged rallygoers to get vaccinated, backed down when the crowd booed him. Safer to stick to the usual playbook of grievance politics and imagined victimization, tactics that Republicans once derided Democrats for practicing.
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Now would be an excellent opportunity for that playbook to change. One of the most common reasons (or excuses) that vaccine holdouts have given for their hesitancy was that the shots had only “emergency use authorization.” On Monday, the FDA finally fully approved the Pfizer vaccine for people age 16 and older. So that excuse is gone.
Or is it?
Even before the FDA announcement, some politicians and conservative pundits began pivoting to a new, alternative cop-out: that the agency would surely approve the shots under duress, and therefore approval proved nothing at all. Over the weekend Johnson suggested the FDA had “rush[ed]” its approval, after warning earlier that the process might be “short-circuited.” A Fox News segment on Monday led with the same framing (though the guest, a former Trump public health official, did at least reassure viewers that the vaccines are safe).
Enough with the excuses. Enough with the mollycoddling. And enough with the lies. If Republicans want to keep their constituents alive, they should start telling them the truth.
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