(Fucking psycho)
COMMENTARY
Why Joe Biden remains hostage to the GOP's death cult
Vaccine mandates are the only way to win the COVID wars. President Biden can just end this now
By AMANDA MARCOTTE
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 6, 2021 1:13PM (EDT)
their "right" to spread COVID-19 the center of their political identity.
On Monday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the Department of Justice will be taking measures to address "a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence" against public school employees at the hands of right-wingers who demand schools do nothing to prevent outbreaks. The administration is also fighting Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis for refusing to cooperate with federal programs to fight COVID-19 and Arizona's Republican Gov. Doug Ducey for blocking COVID-19 mitigation measures in schools.
Meanwhile, right-wing media continues to heavily push the idea that being anti-vaccine is the great culture war of our time.
Tucker Carlson keeps hyping the lie that vaccines are dangerous, most recently by hosting conspiracy theorist and Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin on his show to flog the idea taking medically useless horse paste is better than listening to medical experts. Media Matters, a left-leaning media watchdog group, has carefully documented how Fox News has undermined vaccines on a nearly daily basis for six months, hyping a bunch of fake "cures" and "treatments" — including bear bile, vaping, and sunlight — as alternatives to vaccination.
The death toll from this right-wing politicization of the pandemic is staggering.
Over 100,000 people have died from COVID-19 since mid-June when the vaccine was available for free to anyone who wanted it. That number doesn't even include all the people who have died because COVID-19 patients are overcrowding hospitals and making it difficult for other patients to get timely care. Meanwhile, the anti-vaccine protests are just getting uglier and more violent, which is why the Biden administration has been forced to act.
The White House has been desperate to depoliticize the pandemic since Biden first stepped into office, and for good reason. The right-wing grandstanding about it is killing people and sowing chaos (which is no doubt the point). But Biden's initial strategy of trying to make nice and appeal to people's rationality has clearly backfired, creating an opportunity for right-wingers to dig their heels in and make vaccine refusal central to their war on the rest of the country. So even as the administration has finally started to embrace vaccine mandates, they still don't seem to understand that the best way to finally end the COVID-19 culture war is to roll out vaccine mandates far more aggressively than they are doing.
This may sound counterintuitive. Wouldn't more aggressive vaccine mandates cause an ugly backlash from the anti-vaccination set?
Yes, it would.
But the move would be ripping-the-bandaid-off style pain: sharp but over quickly. The current strategy of slow-rolling the vaccine mandates is prolonging the controversy, giving the right months and months to make hay they wouldn't have if the mandates would have only come down more swiftly. Faster and more aggressive mandates will get shots into arms sooner, causing the pandemic to wind down and forcing right-wing media to find some other issue to create needless political drama over. (Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head are feeling neglected!) The vaccine issue only has political salience because COVID-19 transmission numbers are still high, giving conservatives the chance to feel they're "owning the liberals" by prolonging the pandemic. Take that from them, and they'll move on to something else.
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Early results from vaccine mandates demonstrate that loud-mouthed anti-vaxxers talk a big game, but that meaningful opposition to vaccines evaporates in the face of real consequences. Time and again, the prophesized mass resignations in the face of employment-based vaccine mandates don't materialize. The vast majority of the unvaccinated just shut up and get the shot already. In New York, mandates on health care and public school workers did not cause major staffing shortages. Instead, unvaccinated employees rushed at the last minute to get the shot, bringing vaccination rates up to 92% among health care workers and 96% among teachers. Private employers are also finding that mandates jack the vaccination rates up to over 90% pretty swiftly.
The vaccine inoculates the body against the coronavirus, but it should also be understood to inoculate the mind against anti-vaxx theatrics….
https://www.salon.com/2021/10/06/why-joe-biden-remains-hostage-to-the-gops/