We’re back to this again. I can’t believe we’re back to this again—and that someone in the Biden White House communications office thought it was fine t add this in an official statement. Katie touched upon it earlier this week. We’re dealing with a new more contagious but less lethal variant of the coronavirus. This isn’t like the Delta wave. This isn’t March of 2020. Everyone needs to relax. Those who are vaccinated are not going to die from it, but you might get it again, albeit a much milder case. Yet, there’s full-blown panic in blue states. Joe Biden is supposed to deliver remarks on this spike today. There will reportedly be no new calls for a national lockdown. That’s good news, but no doubt fueled by the recent string of losses Biden has suffered from the Hill. With Build Back Better suffering legislative death and a nasty midterm season for Democrats ahead—it's better to not make things worse.
Still, with this variant being less lethal, Biden decided to lie and say that a winter of death is coming for the unvaccinated. They will bring death to their families and overwhelm the hospitals. I’m still waiting for our hospitals to be overwhelmed. It has never happened. It’s been a centerpiece of COVID panic porn for months. It’s never happened. It’s also grossly irresponsible. When liberal writers and reporters are bashing the decision to include this statement, you know it’s bad. Also, it’s no longer the unvaccinated. The vaccinated and some of those who are boosted have become infected. Again, the good news is that the risk of death is pretty much zero, but as the Left wages war on the unvaccinated—it’s those who got the shot who appear to be getting COVID again. Bashing the unvaccinated was wrong then. It’s wrong now. As we’ve noted before, vaccinations have never been a smooth piece of public policy. There are still legions of people who think vaccines cause autism which has long been debunked. This debate creeps into parenting, the home, and it becomes deeply personal. When that’s the environment, prepare for a fight. Also, when you bash the unvaccinated, don’t think that will get them motivated to get the shot. There are those who simply cannot take it. Also, going back to old points here but check the demographics again, liberals. Some folks who are the most vaccine-hesitant are core voter blocs in the Democratic Party.
Who is this for? Unvaccinated Americans are not going to be persuaded by messaging like this. https://t.co/he3jvfEgnz pic.twitter.com/ZI365x4hlB
— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) December 20, 2021
Last week I noted the clear joy with which blue staters share stories of unvaccinated folks dying of covid (poorly concealed under ersatz concern)
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) December 20, 2021
On Friday, that tone showed up in a WH briefing. It's really gross, and not persuading anyone to get jabbedhttps://t.co/MwMdYyenlc pic.twitter.com/eU95nGBnNr
Sure, what Zients said is factually accurate. But people can and do infer your attitude towards people from the way you choose to state unpleasant facts about them.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) December 20, 2021
There were better ways to deliver that true and urgent message: unvaccinated people are in danger of losing their lives & overwhelming hospitals. Anyone who can't think of a better way should be fired and replaced with someone who has graduated from high school, emotionally.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) December 20, 2021
It is critical that the president and his admin consistently model caring about all Americans, not just the ones who voted for him, or the ones he thinks has earned his devotion. In choosing how it spoke about the unvaccinated, the White House failed this most important task.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) December 20, 2021
The responses to this boil down to "Yes, but they are irresponsible, and I am very mad!"
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) December 20, 2021
I agree with you: they are irresponsible, and you are very mad.
But the president doesn't get to take out his pique in public. Part of the job description. Neither does his administration.
Megan McArdle of The Washington Post wrote about this latest bash fest of the unvaccinated, notably the gross display of those who are jumping for glee at the deaths of those who died without getting the shot.
“It is critical that the president and his administration consistently model caring about all Americans, not just the ones who voted for him, or the ones he thinks has earned his devotion. In choosing how it spoke about the unvaccinated, the White House failed this most important task,” she wrote on Twitter.
In her column, she noted that there are certain situations in which triaging the vaccinated and unvaccinated is warranted but added it cannot be punitive for obvious reasons, but that seems to be the main course for liberals nowadays:
Many vaccinated folks are feeling pretty punitive. They’d like to change minds, or failing that, at least change behavior. But they’ll settle for making anti-vaxxers pay for their pigheaded refusal to protect others or themselves. Hence the popularity of anecdotes in which anti-vaxxers catch covid-19 and then die in the horrified realization that they did this to themselves. Blue America loves to share these morality tales with sanctimonious sorrow — so sad! (So satisfying!)
The best defense of the punitive instinct is that more people might get jabbed if we make it sufficiently costly not to resist. But at this point we’ve reached a hard core of refusers who are not merely a little hesitant, but apparently happy to risk their lives rather than take a shot. If the possibility of dying doesn’t faze them, how likely are they to respond to lesser threats? And if the answer is “not very,” can we really justify punishing them anyway?
It might be tempting to say “yes,” since we punish people who violate the social contract in other ways, and what else can you call recklessly endangering others and clogging up our health-care system with avoidable infections? But of course we, too, have obligations under the social contract. The health-care system exists to provide treatment for the sick, not judgments about how they got that way. And if you aren’t moved by appeals to the Hippocratic oath, consider the ways that punitive instinct might backfire.
Mandate a vaccine and your nursing home might struggle to find sufficient staff. Deny paid sick leave to the unvaccinated, and people might come to work with covid-19. Force anti-vaxxers to pay the costs of covid-19 treatment, and they might not seek care until they are really sick, costing the system even more and straining its capacity. Send unvaccinated people to the back of the triage line and you establish a precedent. How many of us would always fare well in a health-care system based not just on prognosis but perceived virtue?
Of course, it’s frustrating when people refuse a lifesaving vaccine. But we can’t solve that problem by building a world that none of us, vaccinated or not, would much want to live in.
Yeah, the horse has long left the barn because Biden, Fauci, the CDC, and a host of other experts have been abject failures in messaging COVID and the vaccine properly. This clown car has done more to harm the credibility of the vaccine Trump gave to them than any other group of so-called experts. It’s not the conservative media. It’s not the GOP. It’s not rural Americans. Fauci and his nonsensical media hits did more to undermine the vaccine. Then, we bashed the unvaccinated and now we’re doing it again even though most cases appear to be those who got the shot. These are the people who made it political, not the other way around. And it might be too late to correct course.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member