I'll admit that, after having previously written extensively about the unwillingness of so many Americans to do the right thing when it comes to getting the COVID vaccine, I didn't expect to be posting about it again, this quickly. In writing about it last week, I attempted to be as comprehensive as possible. When it comes to documenting and discussing life in the world after Donald Trump's Presidency, and the carnage (to use a favorite word of his) he left behind, there's a lot to cover. But, as I wrote previously, the virus is an immediate life-or-death matter. So, even with a lot of other topics to take up--and I hope to do so soon--events this past week lead me to take it up again here.
I'm talking about the sudden about-face that Republicans and their conservative allies have done on the topic of the vaccine, and the need to get it. Suddenly, it's not as seemingly optional as it was only days ago.
Take a look here at the sudden willingness of Alabama Governor Kay Ivey to reverse her previous it's-up-to-you position on fighting COVID, and to blame (correctly) the unvaccinated for the fact that there's any pandemic at all left in the U.S.. It wouldn't be fair to describe Governor Ivey as a vaccine denier; she was vaccinated in December. But she has received a substantial amount of federal aid to promote and distribute the vaccine, which she has failed to use. Her comments this past week suggest that she should seriously reconsider rethinking that unwillingness. She may also want to rethink her reversal of mask mandates in the state, given that she seems to feel powerless to get shots in arms.
Oh, well. At least she's in a marginally better position on this subject than Ron DeSantis, the Florida Governor whose defiance of both medical science and human decency in the name of out-Trumping Trump has been obscene. He has even gone so far as to take a page out of the Donald's playbook and merchandise his defiance. But, that was then--say, last week--and this is now.
And then, there's Sean Hannity, on Fox News. Out of nowhere this past week, he suddenly made a statement that, in a highly nuanced way, encouraged the unvaccinated to go and get one of the vaccines. Unfortunately for him, it may not have been nuanced enough; an apparent backlash from viewers forced him in a subsequent broadcast to state that he was not insisting on more vaccinations, claiming that he could not do this because he was not a doctor. Of course, this lack of expertise didn't prevent him or other Fox talking heads from previously mocking vaccine advocacy and the people making it. "I'm not an expert," along with "Can't you tell I was joking" are the two rhetorical trap doors that right-wing yakkers use when their arguments go so far south that even dittoheads won't follow them.
At any rate, this week marked a change in conservative tone on the subject of COVID vaccines. Put simply, what's up here?
I think the meme embedded in this tweet says it all. Take a moment to look at it, and think over what it says.
First of all, it's not a lie. Time and again, Republicans have come around to the problems of society when those problems show up at their front door, ring the bell, and insist on making themselves at home. There's a conservative cliché that has been in circulation for decades to the effect that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. Actually, the mugging has more often than not been the other way around. It is, in fact, a severe blessing that the problems liberals want to address are problems that affect everyone, sooner or later. This is why the arc of history bends toward justice, however slowly it may do so.
You want to know what maximizes that slowness? Here's where it really gets worse. Even when the problems of society get inside of their front door, Republicans still won't protect everyone in their own house. Not if it means jeopardizing money, power, or both. Hence, Hannity's verbal backtracking of his brief moment of broadcast bravery on the the subject of vaccines. Obviously, the millions of Fox viewers who weren't (and may never be) prepared to handle the truth jumped on Fox's social media accounts to register their displeasure over Hannity's momentary apostasy. Hannity responded by making it clear that he doesn't care about his viewers' health, just the ratings they generate for him as long as they're alive.
What makes that even clearer, and damningly hypocritical, is the revelation this past week that Fox News requires vaccine passports for all of its employees. So, all of those folks on Fox promoting "healthy skepticism" about medical science, versus the good ol' 'Murcan common sense of the common people? They are neither healthy skeptics of medical science, nor fans of the common people's wisdom. They are flaming hypocrites who don't give a damn whether anyone in their audience lives or dies, as long as their are enough eyes on their programming to overcharge their advertisers.
All of this seems to be built on the P.T. Barnum principle that there's a sucker born every minute, so Fox is in no danger of losing viewers because the Republican Party is in no danger of losing voters. That may well be the prevailing view at Fox and, for that matter, at other conservative media outlets. On the other hand, not every Republican politician is so flagrantly two-faced on the subject of vaccines. Earlier this evening, while watching MSNBC, I saw an interview with former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman, in which she not only strongly encouraged vaccination, but went so far as to suggestion that Darwinian natural selection might be at work in the refusal of so many Trump followers to get vaccinated.
Personally, I'm not prepared to disagree with her. In fact, in the darker moments of my political thinking, I have considered the role that this process might play in boosting Democratic prospects in 2022. G-d, or Nature, may yet teach the GOP and its base a thing or to about voter suppression. But, I digress, in part because I had earlier been very anxious to write about Republican attempts to suppress the vote and the need to fight those attempts without pause or pity.
In any event, Whitman's position suggests that their is a faction of Republicans that is much more willing to publicly be pro-vaccine than the folks at Fox. Maybe the recent drop in the stock market has had more than a little something to do with this. After all, there's no more sensitive place to hit Republicans than in their capital gains. But I think that it is the at-long-last realization that the greatest number of infections and deaths from COVID have been at the expense of their own voters. Whitman effectively said as much, and I was kind of surprised that she said it in such a candid, pointed way.
Last week's post contained a mention of a story about a man who succumbed to COVID after refusing to get the vaccine. As I leave behind me my what-took-them-so-long reaction to the new GOP wave of vaccine reversals, I find myself wrestling with a very mixed bag of feelings. On the one hand, the vaccine deniers--all of them--have blood on their hands, in my judgment. Lest you think I am being too hard of them in using these words, keep in mind that, in the interview I have mentioned, Whitman used exactly the same words with reference to vaccine deniers.
And, on the other hand, they are human beings. My obligation is not to judge theme; that's not my role or pay grade. My job is to extend compassion to every person I come into contact with in any way. I mourn the deniers, and those they may have infected, with equal sincerity. None of these lives should have been lost. It is unbearably poignant to read stories like this one, in which a victim asks for the vaccine in their dying moments and is told it's too late.
In writing last week, I express the view that a hard legal mandate of universal vaccination may be legally difficult, if not impossible. My view on that has not changed.
But compassion for the greatest possible number seems to mandate some sort of all-hands-on-deck effort to get as many shots into as many arms as is possible. And if and when circumstances point to a massive outbreak with large numbers of people being infected, government at all levels may no longer have a choice. Frankly, it's not unprecedented; during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the situation grew dire enough that people who refused to wear masks were subject to arrest.
And, since Wall Street and Main Street are both still at the economic core of the Republican Party, economic pressure from the pandemic's effects, in the form of other economic impacts besides the rise and fall of the Dow Jones, are going to force both political parties and all Americans to face the reality that the only way to achieve escape velocity from this nightmare is to vaccinate ourselves out of it. In the private sector, vaccine passports are not exclusively the province of Fox News. Other large companies are beginning to require them. And, in a democracy, where the private sector goes, the public sector must find a way to follow.
As for Fox? Well, they may at some point find themselves facing government mandates on this subject not in the legislative or executive sense, but in the judicial one. Maybe they should stop counting their profits long enough to talk to their lawyers. The courts may be now stacked in favor of conservatives but, as I always tell my own clients, you never know.
This is probably not the last word, or words, on this subject. We have, to paraphrase Robert Frost, miles to go before we can sleep free of the fear of COVID. As Rachel Maddow would say, watch this space.
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