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"Vaccination is very important, so I've been furiously working on this op-ed for several months, but gee golly, I'm just not the goodest with words, sorry for the delay!" What a strange coincidence that the right-wing messaging sphere waited until the virus began disproportionately impacting rural, white, southern America to finally implore people to get vaccinated. Like we needed another indication that the GOP acts only in self-interest, even when Americans' lives are on the line?
Suppose every Trumper out there went "well shit. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has never led me wrong before! I shall roll up my sleeve and Trump this virus!" in the next ten minutes. They're partially protected tomorrow. They're partially more protected August 9. They're as protected as they gonna be by August 23rd. This, more than anything, illustrates how reactive the Republican party has become. It's hard to believe there was any planning in this messaging. The most credible theory I've heard is every advertiser and lobbyist left jawboned every pundit and politician they could find after vague misgivings over Delta dumped the Dow 700 points last Monday. So perhaps the money masters have taken over priority from the populism masters. You'd think any skillful pundit would recognize the danger of self-selecting their constituency for fully-preventable have-not status, let alone fully-preventable plague. "Hi, I'm a Democrat! I go to work every morning and Covid gave me the sniffles." "Hi, I'm Republican. I live in fear of ventilators so I snuggle with my AR to feel better." They could point the finger at Putin. It's an easy gimme strategy - the Republicans have hated the Commies since Herbert Hoover. Trump's weird dance with Lavrov was never comfortable for them. But that would signal a full break from Trump. I dunno, man. It seems like the Republicans are caught in one hell of an inverse prisoner's dilemma. Break too early, you're Liz Cheney. Break too late, they might not name a freeway after you when you're dead or some shit. So they're all breakin' late.
I guess some Trump officials are starting to get annoyed (per Alex Azar): https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/03/opinion/covid-vaccine-safety.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage But we did not predict the politicization of vaccines that has led so many Republicans to hold back. As of mid-July, 43 percent of Republicans said that they have not been vaccinated and definitely or probably wouldn’t be, versus 10 percent of Democrats, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. I’m glad former President Trump got vaccinated, but it would have been even better for him to have done so on national television so that his supporters could see how much trust and confidence he has in what is arguably one of his greatest accomplishments.We could have done more to address vaccine hesitancy. We focused a great deal of our efforts at the start on the groups that we thought might be most hesitant. We demanded all clinical trials included a diverse, representative sample of participants, and the Department of Health and Human Services provided funding for an effort by the Morehouse School of Medicine to coordinate a network of national, state, territorial, tribal and local organizations to deliver trusted information to racial and ethnic minority communities.
I dont think Biden or Harris give a flying fuck about American lives, at this time they only want people to get vaccinated so the numbers look better for them- less recorded deaths under the Biden admin that under Trump, so they can fake superiority. Admitting they were wrong at any point ever in history doesnt align with the end goal, and will never happen. If President Biden, Vice President Harris, and others on the left truly care about increasing the vaccination rate and saving lives, they should admit they were wrong to cast doubt on Operation Warp Speed and give President Trump and his team the credit
"The Trump vaccine." I guess "vaccine" is is own plural now? (Not to mention that Pfizer did not participate in Warp Speed.) She basically makes the case here that Trump sealed his own fate by not highlighting the one thing he was right about in his entire presidency. Namely, that we can turn around an ambitious science program in record time when resources and will to succeed are unbounded. That should be a real takeaway that I think has not been paid enough attention. Like with all things Sanders, it's very difficult to tell which part she believes and which part is rhetoric that needs to be used in order to connect with morons.
The frustrating thing about the lily-whites is that their history predisposes them to an ephemeral time-horizon for their own positions. Liberals have been fighting The Struggle since Engels was in London but conservatives aren't particularly interested in discussing the racial covenants on their HOAs right now because they didn't write them. So Sanders and her ilk can postulate a new formulation for their behavior that lies in direct opposition to their formula from six weeks ago and like Golden Retrievers, the lily-whites will bark at the new squirrel. You and I both know that if Trump had said "there's a catastrophe, it's Chinese, I'm instituting martial law to protect America while we develop the Freedom Vaccine and withhold it from anyone who trades with CHyyyyyyyynahhh" we'd be saluting his mug on the wall every morning while Toby Kieth plays like the goddamn muezzin. I firmly believe American democracy was imperiled by incompetence, and saved by said-same.
No doubt. The vaccine race was by far the biggest success of the Trump presidency, so it's very ironic that he and his supporters have shied away from it. This moronic essay is Sanders trying to filter that fact into language that can be understood by those who have decided to only speak meme-Trump. It's actually an impressive bit of translating. If you read the subtext it is: Trump is vaccinated and there wouldn't be vaccines without him, so brighten the fuck up you imbeciles.I firmly believe American democracy was imperiled by incompetence, and saved by said-same.