The administration is at a loss to understand its own role in the public’s growing hesitancy toward Covid boosters.
The administration is at a loss to understand its own role in the public’s growing hesitancy toward Covid boosters.
T he Biden White House is reportedly “at a loss over what to do” about combatting the type of Covid-19 vaccine skepticism that candidate Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris promoted during the 2020 election.
It’s not so fun when the shoe is on the other foot, is it?
In a five-part series titled “The Rise of the Anti-Vaccine Movement,” Politico claims to investigate the legitimization of the “anti-vaccine” movement on the right, treating as equals Hollywood-style anti-vaxx quackery and mere Covid-vaccine skepticism. In part one, Politico reports that the president and his aides have “grown increasingly paralyzed over how to combat the resurgence in vaccine skepticism.”
The article asserts:
The rising appeal of anti-vaccine activism has been underscored by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s insurgent presidential campaign and fueled by prominent factions of the GOP. The mainstreaming of a once-fringe movement has horrified federal health officials, who blame it for seeding dangerous conspiracy theories and bolstering a Covid-era backlash to the nation’s broader public health practices.
But as President Joe Biden ramps up a reelection campaign centered on his vision for a post-pandemic America, there’s little interest among his aides in courting a high-profile vaccine fight — and even less certainty of how to win.
Curiously absent from the story, which is built entirely on input from anonymous Biden aides as well as federal and private health officials, is any mention of the role that both Biden and Harris played in undercutting trust in the Covid-19 vaccines when the shots were in the early stages of development during the Trump presidency. Sure, Politico finds plenty of people to blame for vaccine hesitancy and skepticism — just no one currently in good standing with the Democratic Party.
Politico, for example, points a finger at Republican lawmakers who protested the Biden White House’s efforts to collude with social-media companies to censor certain speech: anti-vaxx voices and those merely skeptical of claims made about the Covid vaccine or opposed to government mandates. Politico cites the White House’s inability to “police” online speech now thanks to those meddlesome Republicans.
The article also blames Florida governor Ron DeSantis, not once but twice, for the spread of vaccine hesitancy.
“DeSantis has made opposition to Covid precautions a central element of his campaign,” the article reports, “most recently claiming without evidence the latest vaccine isn’t safe or effective.” The article also accuses the governor of “advanc[ing] anti-vaccine theories,” which is weird because it wasn’t that long ago that CBS News falsely accused DeSantis of orchestrating a pay-for-play vaccine scheme with a local grocery chain.
The only fault Politico can find with Biden himself is that “he openly defied his administration’s Covid guidance earlier this month, declining to wear a mask in public on multiple occasions after being exposed to the virus.” Aside from this single line, Politico casts the president as a well-intentioned but overburdened executive, one who hasn’t the time in this busy campaign season to take on the Right’s supposed embrace of anti-vaccine kookery.
Nowhere in the article is it mentioned that, during their 2020 campaign, both Biden and Harris promoted the exact type of vaccine-skeptical rhetoric that Politico finds now to be so distressing. Nowhere in the story is it noted that Biden and Harris warned repeatedly during the campaign that any vaccine developed under the Trump administration would likely be unsafe.
On September 29, during the first presidential debate, for example, Biden said, “In terms of the whole notion of a vaccine, we’re for a vaccine, but I don’t trust him at all.”
At the vice-presidential debate, on October 7, moderator Susan Page asked Harris, “If the Trump administration approves a vaccine before or after the election, should Americans take it, and would you take it?”
“If Donald Trump tells us that we should take it,” responded the senator, “I’m not taking it.”
Later, during a town hall hosted by ABC News, Biden was skeptical of Trump’s promise that a Covid-19 vaccine would be available by year’s end: “I have not seen it yet, nor the docs that I talk to have seen it.”
Then, at the final presidential debate, on October 22 (remember this date), the moderator noted that “just 40 percent of Americans say they would definitely agree to take a coronavirus vaccine if it was approved by the government” and asked Biden, “What steps would you take to give Americans confidence in a vaccine if it were approved?”
Biden reiterated his distrust of vaccines developed under the Trump administration. Whatever vaccine eventually gained approval, he said, the process would at the minimum need to be “totally transparent.”
“Have the scientists of the world see it, know it, look at it, go through all the processes,” he said, the obvious implication being that any U.S. scientist involved in a Trump administration initiative couldn’t and shouldn’t be trusted. Biden added at that October 22 debate that “there’s no prospect that there’s going to be a vaccine available for the majority of the American people before the middle of next year.”
The first Covid-19 vaccine doses were administered in December of that year, with the first shots going to front-line and health workers. The vaccines became available to the public in late winter/early spring of 2021.
And then there’s the transformation from Candidate Biden having doubts about the vaccine to President Biden decreeing unconstitutional vaccine mandates and grossly overstating the vaccine’s efficacy. The Biden White House made grotesque attempts to coerce people into taking the shots by threatening their livelihoods and employment. This is to say nothing of federal health officials lying about the efficacy of masks. The Politico report says nothing at all about any of these things or the effect they certainly had in undercutting trust in public health and the vaccines.
Politico just can’t bring itself to note the role that the federal government, that overbearing and two-faced bureaucratic monster, played in fostering vaccine hesitancy. It certainly never comes close to identifying Biden, Harris, and their cronies as part of the problem.
In a twist of unintentional humor, Politico even gives the final word to virologist and professional crank Peter Hotez. “It’s become now a politically motivated movement,” he says, complaining that vaccine skepticism has become a mainstream position on the right.
Hotez, by the way, was a major proponent of the disastrous school closures, even long after it became clear they would inflict long-term harm for little, if any, short-term gain. Now, however, Hotez insists that he “worked tirelessly with school teachers, principals, school board advising them on how to keep schools open safely” and that he did “a lot more to keep schools open than the wing nuts.”
This, of course, is a lie.
Goodness, between these “experts” and Biden’s hypocrisy, it’s a real mystery why there’s any hesitancy and skepticism at all.