The Complicated Politics of COVID-Vaccination
The increasingly good news on COVID-19 vaccines is being offset by the continued reluctance of Trump's supporters to get the shot
Over the past several weeks, four COVID-19 vaccination developments have offered Americans both hope for the future and continued exasperation about our current plight.
First, the FDA fast-tracked approval for Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot vaccine that, along with Moderna and Pfizer, now offers Americans three vaccination options. Working with traditional competitor Merck, J&J will immediately ramp up production.
According to the Center for Disease Control’s tracking website, as of today, 18.8 percent of all Americans have received one vaccine shot (Moderna and Pfizer require two). Among those 65 or older, the number is even higher - 61 percent. With vaccinations steadily topping more than two million per day, President Joe Biden provided the second bit of good news three days after the J&J vaccine approval: By the end of May, vaccine production should be high enough to cover every adult American.
Unfortunately, those two hopeful signs were offset by two disconcerting developments.
The first and least surprising was confirmation that Donald Trump quietly got vaccinated in January, just before his term ended. Despite all his tough talk, the former president—who frightfully asked doctors last fall after he contracted coronavirus if he was going to be “one of the diers”—took care of himself but kept silent about it.
Nobody spots a sucker’s payout quicker than Trump, of course: He risked forfeiting donations from supportive anti-vaxxers if he made a public show of getting vaccinated live on television. For him, the smart play was to follow the science when it comes to his personal health but pander to conspiracy theorists whose blind devotion pads his personal wealth.
The second bit of bad news is the disturbingly high share of Americans who continue to say they will refuse to take the vaccine.
Only some of the blame for this ongoing aversion falls at Trump’s feet. Most notably, an unusually high percentage of Black Americans are wary about taking the vaccine. Understandably, the ugly history of inhumane medical experiments performed on Black Americans gives many pause.
Considering that Blacks are nearly three times more likely to be hospitalized and twice as likely to die from COVID than white Americans, it’s sad that racism’s reach is so great it can span from the failed Tuskegee experiments conducted almost a century ago to today’s pandemic politics. However, there is some hopeful progress to report on this front: A new Pew poll shows a recent uptick in the share of African Americans who intend to get vaccinated.
Meanwhile, many Republicans—overwhelmingly white, of course—are also refusing to get vaccinated, proving that politics does sometimes make very strange bedfellows. In a pre-Trump era, I would have been shocked to see large swaths of the public resistant to protecting themselves and their families from taking a simple, free shot to avoid contracting a potentially lethal disease. But in our post-truth America, where a resounding majority of Republicans blame the January 6 terrorist attacks on Joe Biden, Antifa, George Soros, or whoever the demon-of-the-moment is, nothing is truly surprising anymore.
This brings us to the fourth recent development: the dispiriting partisan results of the COVID attitudes poll conducted by Kaiser Family Foundation in mid-February. The survey shows that only 41 percent of Republicans say they either have been vaccinated or intend to get a vaccine once it is available to them. Almost the same share of Republicans told pollsters they either would refuse to take the vaccine (28 percent) or would get vaccination only if by mandate (10 percent).
By comparison, 51 percent of independents and 73 percent of Democrats plan to get vaccinated if they haven’t already. Clearly, the one virus against which America has zero immunity is partisanship. If NASA announced that the only way for people to protect themselves from contracting fatal skin cancer caused by a giant, impending solar flare was to cover their bodies from head to toe in blue cloth, one can’t help but wonder if half of Republicans would stand nude on their lawns rather than wear Democratic colors.
To his credit, Trump finally encouraged his followers to get vaccinated. But given how many conservatives anti-vaxxers there were before Trump declared for president in 2015 or the coronavirus emerged in 2019, Trump’s entreaty may not convince conspiracy mongers to do the smart thing for themselves and the nation.
Achieving herd immunity requires any nation to act like its citizens share a national identity and common set of interests. The sad fact is that these days nothing seems to unify Americans, not even the specter of death, nor the hope of eluding it. The costs, in lives and livelihoods, of the anti-masker resistance are clear: With just four percent of the world’s population, America accounts for 20 percent of global COVID fatalities.
When Biden announced his end-of-May goal deadline for every American to have access to the vaccine, I couldn’t help but wince. Like the start of March Madness or the presidential debate season, is it not better to set expectations low and beat them, than the reverse?
Now, I’m more worried about what happens on June 1, when the next-stage problem arrives: how to persuade vaccine resistors to get their shots. For the Biden Administration and state governors, that battle promises to be a cultural war fought along American’s next dividing line, between the vaccinated and non-vaccinated. The ugly political fights over mask-wearing may seem quaint by comparison.
Get back to your tunnel, rat