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President Joe Biden’s administration, like the rest of those in non-idiot America, is quickly fed up with the antics of the right-wing death cult that has made its “right” to spread COVID-19 in the center of. its political identity.
On Monday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the Justice Department would take action to address “a worrying increase in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence” against public school employees at the hands of right-wingers who demand that schools do nothing to prevent epidemics. The administration is also fighting Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for refusing to cooperate with federal COVID-19 programs and Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey for blocking COVID-19 mitigation measures. in schools.
Meanwhile, the right-wing media continue to strongly promote the idea that being anti-vaccine is the great cultural war of our time.
Tucker Carlson continues to make vaccines look dangerous, most recently welcoming conspiracy theorist and Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin on his show to whip up the idea that it’s better to take medically unnecessary horse paste than to ” listen to medical experts. Media Matters, a left-wing media watch group, carefully documented how Fox News undermined vaccines almost daily for six months, touting a bunch of bogus “cures” and “cures” – including bear bile, vaping and sunlight. – as alternatives to vaccination.
The death toll from this politicization to the right of the pandemic is staggering.
More than 100,000 people have died from COVID-19 since mid-June, when the vaccine was available free to anyone who wanted it. This number doesn’t even include all of the people who have died because COVID-19 patients overcrowd hospitals and make it difficult for other patients to get timely care. Meanwhile, anti-vaccine protests are getting more ugly and violent, which is why the Biden administration has been forced to act.
Hey @HawleyMO, coming back just to see if you’ve seen the threats against school officials across the country. We’ve edited it for you in case you haven’t. pic.twitter.com/6OSROrY3Bq
– All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) October 6, 2021
The White House has been desperate to depoliticize the pandemic since Biden first took office, and for good reason. Right-wing demagoguery on this is killing people and sowing chaos (which is undoubtedly the point). But Biden’s initial strategy of trying to please and appeal to people’s rationality clearly backfired, creating an opportunity for righties to go out of their way and put vaccine denial at the center of it. their war against the rest of the country. So even though the administration has finally started to embrace the vaccination warrants, it still doesn’t seem to understand that the best way to finally end the COVID-19 culture war is to roll out the vaccination warrants in a much larger way. aggressive than it does.
It may sound counterintuitive. Wouldn’t more aggressive vaccination mandates cause a backlash from the anti-vaccination package?
Yes it would.
But the movement would be pain like a bandage: brutal but rapid. The current strategy of slowing vaccine terms continues the controversy, giving the right months and months to make hay that they wouldn’t have if the terms fell faster. Faster, more aggressive mandates will result in gunfire sooner, causing the pandemic to end and forcing the right-wing media to find another problem to create unnecessary political drama. (Dr Seuss and Mr Potato Head feel neglected!) The issue of vaccines is only of political importance because COVID-19 transmission figures are still high, giving conservatives the chance to feel they are “own the liberals” by prolonging the pandemic. Take it away from them and they’ll move on.
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The first results of the vaccination warrants show that bigmouthed anti-vaccines talk about a big game, but that significant opposition to vaccines evaporates in the face of real consequences. Time and time again, the prophesied massive withdrawals in the face of employment-based vaccination mandates fail to materialize. The vast majority of the unvaccinated remain silent and are already vaccinated. In New York, mandates on health care and public school workers have not caused a major staff shortage. Instead, unvaccinated workers rushed at the last minute to get vaccinated, pushing vaccination rates to 92% among health workers and 96% among teachers. Private employers are also finding that mandates are increasing immunization rates quite quickly to over 90%.
The vaccine inoculates the body against the coronavirus, but it should also be understood that it inoculates the mind against the anti-vaxx theaters.
Resisting the vaccine only makes sense before you get it. Flaunting unvaccinated status to trigger liberals is a lot less fun when you’re not actually unvaccinated. But more importantly, the pandemic simply won’t be a flashpoint for the political theater if case rates start to drop rapidly, which will only happen if gunfire starts to mount at a faster rate. .
Yet while the Biden administration has accepted the need for vaccination warrants, it still refrains from the aggressive application needed to actually work on the anti-vaxx package. For example, while Biden announced a broad mandate affecting all companies with more than 100 employees, the actual rollout has been strangely slow. It has been almost a month since the announcement, but the actual details of the policy have not been released and there is no timeline as to when employers should actually start complying. Unfortunately, as the example of New York shows, the hold-outs will wait until the last minute to pull their head off. The slowness of this policy is deeply stupid and dangerous, to boot – every day that there is has no deadline for getting vaccinated, tens of thousands of people are needlessly infected.
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The failure to deny access to planes to unvaccinated people is a similar oversight. The administration has a real opportunity here to force millions of people to choose between vacation plans or their resistance to vaccines. Not only would this policy save thousands of lives, it would also depoliticize the talk about COVID-19 at family dinners across the country. Conservative parents would be vaccinated and therefore much less likely to defend themselves and start fights over it. This depoliticization is important and would find an echo in the national discourse.
Ultimately, the right-wing cultural war on COVID-19 may die out. Case rates are currently dropping across the country, in large part because people who refuse vaccination continue to catch the virus and develop immunity the hard way. There may be another increase in winter, but there is a good chance that halfway through the case rates will be low enough that the masks disappear and the problem does not have the political importance of which the Parasitic culture warriors need to continue their temper tantrums. .
Yet why risk it?
Vaccines will reduce the pandemic much faster than letting right-wing Americans get vaccinated, one infection at a time. Political struggles over COVID-19 don’t end until the pandemic does. And the more aggressive the vaccine mandates, the sooner it will happen. The warrants will not only save lives, they will rid us of this silly death cult culture war once and for all.
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