The phony war
The phony war
If you want to get vaccinated, walk into any drug store or supermarket and get your jab. I encourage you. If you don’t, prepare to be the scapegoat those who do judge are looking for.
The White House and liberal media are desperately searching for scapegoats for missing the president’s vaccination goal, and to misdirect the public from seeing through the sham of “equity” based race policies and heartless foreign policy blunders.
I’ve not seen such scrambling since Fran Tarkenton wore a Vikings uniform when I was a kid.
Here’s the rundown:
People have generally stopped getting vaccinated. Or I should say that all the people who wanted to be vaccinated in the U.S. have gotten their jabs, and now we’ve got kids who are turning 12, and the stragglers who waited. The remainder seem to be content to remain unvaccinated, and depend either on immunity gained through having COVID-19 at one time, or the fortune of others who are vaccinated to stop the spread, or they’re okay with the risk of getting the disease because they don’t believe they’ll die from it.
Statistically speaking, unless one of the new variants becomes more deadly than the ones circulating out there, young healthy people aren’t taking enormous risks given their propensity to do things like drive after drinking, or engage in other risky behavior. But the measure of “beating COVID-19” has long ceased from keeping hospitals from becoming overwhelmed, to ensuring nobody will ever get sick from COVID-19, even those with the most infinitesimal risk.
If the government’s messaging—going back to the Trump administration, and forward to now with President Biden—had been more consistent and, well, honest, I believe more people would choose to get vaccinated. Erick Erickson took us through a litany of blunders and flip-flops by our government and the media dealing with COVID-19, masks, and vaccines.
He concluded:
At this point, between media fear porn and government irresponsibility and hubris, a lot of people don’t know what to think and many think they’ll wait because the media has also overhyped shortages of the vaccine and never went back and gave adequate coverage to the vaccine being in stock everywhere.
So now lets blame Trump voters and correlate it to red state and blue state dynamics when the data also correlates to areas of high concentrations of minority voters and areas where employers do or do not give time off.
Meanwhile, worldwide, the U.S. isn’t doing so badly compared to, say, France, where the extremists of the far-left and the far-right joined by the hundreds of thousands Saturday to march against the French government’s vaccination policy. Worldwide, vaccines have not been shared with nations that need it most, by nations who have stockpiled far more than they need. The U.S. has enough doses to jab everyone nearly five times; the U.K. over eight; the rest of the E.U. has enough for nearly seven jabs; and Canada takes the cake at 10.5 future doses per inhabitant.
Either these nations think they’re going to need a lot of boosters, or they’ve got an embarrassment of excess. That doesn’t help Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia (the 5th, 8th, and 4th most populated nations on earth, totaling 659 million souls), not to mention India’s 1.3 billion, in a nation that’s procured about a billion future doses. Collectively, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia have 1.4 billion doses for 1.6 billion people. Twenty percent of the world don’t have enough vaccine for a single dose, nevermind the second dose.
Obviously, more must be done, though even if Canada gave all its future doses to India, it would barely register.
Blaming someone for America’s failure to meet Joe Biden’s goal is not a logical exercise, however. It’s a cathartic great scream at the sky. People in the real world evaluate risk and get news above the noise level of their busy lives. American twenty-somethings aren’t listening to doomsaying, especially those in red states where skepticism and mistrust of federal government initiatives is rampant.
It wouldn’t matter if Biden’s goal was to sell 100,000 white Ford F-150 trucks (the most popular color of the most popular model), once that was announced, red state people would buy Dodge Ram or Chevy Silverado models. (Wait, actually they have: in 2021 Ford F-150 sales dropped 12.5% while Dodge and Chevy gained between 30 and nearly 40%, despite a giant demand spike.)
A good part of the reason is the smug way the media and Biden bubble call Trump voters stupid, over and over again.
Granted, if you believe this poll, there’s a lot of really impossible ideas floating around that unvaccinated Republicans take as true. Hitting people over the head and calling them stupid isn’t the way to solve the problem.
Those who reject vaccinations believe two negative theories about the effects of COVID-19 vaccines: half think it is likely that vaccines in general cause autism and that this vaccine in particular is being used by the government to microchip the population. Most Americans reject these theories, but only minorities of those who oppose their vaccinations do. Nearly one in three say they aren’t sure what to believe.
The argument goes: How could you possibly believe that the government is using the vaccine to microchip the population, because this isn’t even possible given current technology? Therefore you must be an idiot.
But the government has also argued that wearing masks, outdoors, will help to stop the spread of COVID-19, when all data shows that being outdoors and socially distanced, even with a totally unvaccinated population, is enough by itself. Millions of people heard and unquestioningly believed the government, including the bovine herd of media.
The Surgeon General is now saying that, despite vaccines, we should have localized mask mandates, such as the one Los Angeles County recently revived. In California, 51.7% of the population is fully vaccinated, and in Los Angeles County, the number of residents 16 and older with a single dose is nearly 70%. President Biden’s goal was 70%, and Los Angeles County achieved it, and yet they’re back to masks.
Does the media see the explanatory value of the poll showing 85% of Americans who choose not to be vaccinated believe that COVID-19 risks were exaggerated for political purposes? Does LA going back to masking help anyone decide they should get the jab, since it appears to make no difference in the bluest of the blue parts of the bluest of the blue states?
No, but you’re stupid, they say.
To gild the lily, the Biden administration is also blaming social media and big tech.
“Modern technology companies have enabled misinformation to poison our information environment with little accountability to their users,” Murthy told reporters on Thursday. “They’ve allowed people who intentionally spread misinformation—what we call ‘disinformation’—to have extraordinary reach. They’ve designed product features, such as ‘Like’ buttons, that reward us for sharing emotionally-charged content, not accurate content. And their algorithms tend to give us more of what we click on, pulling us deeper and deeper into a well of misinformation.”
Let’s get this straight. The liberal media believes that the Biden administration is more compassionate than Trump, because Biden is a nicer guy than Trump (I have no argument about who is nicer, as a person). Yet, the Biden administration is fine turning away Cuban refugees by the boatload, while the sieve at our southern border is wide open.
The Biden administration is just fine settling Afghan friendlies, whose lives are at risk because we’re departing in a hurry, in other countries, that is, if they can get out. We’re going to see another Saigon departure soon. But believe how Biden cares.
The Biden administration is committed to “equity,” which is really racism against white people in disguise. As Wesley Yang wrote in his Substack blog Year Zero:
It took a decade or so for the theory of "colorblind racism" to move from academia to corporate America, and another half-decade for it to be explicitly endorsed by the federal government. It amounts to a quiet overturning of the post-1964 racial consensus. “Cancel culture”, which has created a situation in which 62 percent of the American public told pollsters that they afraid to share their political opinions, was always simply a means to an end—the noisy herald of a mandated adherence to new dogmas to come. The agenda is here today, in the process of being rolled out at scale across a range of institutions, including K-12 schools. The means must therefore be judged in relation to the ends they have secured. They have already begun to transform the schools and to exert influence over law enforcement in ways that are changing the character of education and city life.
Biden’s push to enlist social media giants and tech companies must be given the benefit of the doubt, they say, because liberals always have the best of intentions, and those who refuse vaccines are tinfoil hat nutcases.
Skepticism is actually healthy. Risk management is also healthy. Believing in microchips by Bill Gates in vaccines is unhealthy, but so it believing that the Biden administration is Moses on mountaintop, because “America is back,” running with the pack of diplomats in elite refined European circles. We care so much about “equity” in America while South Africa is burning, and France is convulsing over mandatory vaccinations.
It’s all a phony war against phony enemies.
If you want to get vaccinated, walk into any drug store or supermarket and get your jab. I encourage you to do it, because it’s far less risky than getting COVID-19, of any variant. If you don’t, I won’t judge, but you’ll be called stupid by those who do. They have a casting call for scapegoats and you are perfect for the role.
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"Statistically speaking, unless one of the new variants becomes more deadly than the ones circulating out there, young healthy people aren’t taking enormous risks given their propensity to do things like drive after drinking, or engage in other risky behavior. But the measure of 'beating COVID-19' has long ceased from keeping hospitals from becoming overwhelmed, to ensuring nobody will ever get sick from COVID-19, even those with the most infinitesimal risk."
This formulation completely ignores the issue of mutation. Some people like myself who want more people to get the shot are more worried about minimizing the pool of susceptible victims where the virus can multiply and mutate than the health of someone who is hesitant or resistant to the vaccine. Personally, I like the latitude that my vaccination has opened up to pursue activities in 2021, and I'll be more annoyed if a mutation emerges that could have been preventable.
That said, given how poorly more populated countries like India are faring, me worrying about some anti-vaxxer in Tennessee becoming Patient Zero for a variant that gets around my immunity, given the hundreds of millions in India who would gladly take the shot but are unable to, might be me worried more about a lightning strike than a more routine way of meeting my end.
Given that the consensus is that everyone who wants to get vaxxed has likely done so, perhaps it's time to lift whatever emergency waivers have been put into place to make the vaccine affordable/free, lift any restrictions on insurance companies charging more to unvaxxed customers, allowing airlines to refuse service to unvaxxed flyers (without a valid medical reason), etc. so that the costs of choosing to remain unvaccinated can be properly assessed and the rest of us can get on with our lives without worrying about paying for the economic externalities imposed by people who refuse to do the common-sense thing. We save a stockpile for children and teens to be able to get their shots, and send what we have left to places that need it, at least to have some diplomatic victories to show that not all Americans are idiots and are willing to help the world get back on its feet, despite the fools in places like the Tennessee legislature that think they can roll back the clock on sane public health.[1]
[1] https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/health/2021/07/13/tennessee-halts-all-vaccine-outreach-minors-not-just-covid-19/7928701002/
"If you want to get vaccinated, walk into any drug store or supermarket and get your jab. I encourage you to do it, because it’s far less risky than getting COVID-19, of any variant. If you don’t, I won’t judge, but you’ll be called stupid by those who do. They have a casting call for scapegoats and you are perfect for the role."
I think that after a certain point of reaching out in good faith, the vax-skeptic folks are going reap what they sow. Whether it is higher health insurance premiums, or businesses refusing to let the purposely unvaxxed shop there, airlines refusing to board them, or just being shunned by others, they will be held accountable in some form, shape, or way. It doesn't have to be this way, but the ball is on their court now.