The new talking point coming out of the Republican camp is that those refusing the vaccine would have been more apt to get the COVID vaccine if Democrats had been just nicer to them, and less partisan.
Just ask Senator Bill Cassidy, who proclaims the president isn't allowed to promote getting vaccinated.
The beltway media has always framed debates between Democrats and Republicans like this, and the right is jumping on that faux meme.
Michael Brendan Dougherty writes a lengthy piece for the National Review called "Convincing the Skeptics," but the word "skeptic" dilutes what is happening in this country.
In his article, Dougherty raises many issues, but admits "many of the most prominent anti-vaxxers do indulge in conspiratorial thinking."
Ya think? There is no defense against this cult-like thinking at all.
Dougherty then tried to support his premise by saying anti-vaxxers are skeptical, just like Democrats were when they expressed fears that Trump would corrupt the vaccine process. That, however, was a valid fear to anyone paying attention to Trump's antics for the last five years. Once the scientific community rallied around the newly developed vaccines, though, those fears were alleviated.
It's not Democrats who are refusing to get the vaccine.
For some, there has always been a hesitancy to get a flu shot in the country.
That's not the case with the antivax crowd. Science has no place in their hemisphere. There is a much smaller percentage of people who are vaccine hesitant, but it's not because they think the Moderna shot will magnetize them.
When you have right-wing media incessantly attacking the CDC, Dr. Fauci, masks, and the vaccines, that tends to turn their hesitant viewers into hard line anti-vaxxers.
Dougherty writes, "To understand vaccine skeptics, proponents need to understand that the skeptics typically don’t fear COVID."
They don't fear COVID because the conspiracy theories permeating through Fox News, Newsmax, OANN, Facebook, Rumble, and every other avenue of right-wing disinformation got to them first. They believe the federal government is lying about the death totals, hospitalizations, and the severity of the virus in an effort to undermine the former president. They don't even believe the death total is 600,000.
It's all a deep state conspiracy against Trump.
Now, they believe that Pres. Joe Biden, the CDC, and the Democratic party are stealing your freedoms by trying to get as many people protected against COVID as possible.
The world has been dealing with the pandemic for over a year, but to raise their pageviews, the right wing media has to go against the obvious. They have turned what Dougherty calls the "vaccine skeptics" into anti-Vaxers.
If the Trump administration and right-wing media had promoted the use of vaccines against COVID
at the end of 2020, the problem we are facing today wouldn't be nearly as difficult.
Dougherty writes, "A vaccine skeptic may brush off a proponent by saying, 'It’s approved for emergency use only; it’s not FDA-approved. I don’t think we should require it.'”
But aren't Republicans against all types of government regulations? The former president's focus was on getting rid of any regulation he could, and destroying any agency that tries to protect the health and safety of this nation.
Suddenly, right-wing media is using the fact that the FDA hasn't approved it yet to say it's unsafe? Didn't Trump say he was trying to ram it through without FDA approval?
If you start with a faulty premise, no matter how detailed one's argument is, it falls flat.
Deadly flat.
