The Biden administration is increasingly talking about the Covid-19 vaccines not as a personal medical decision Americans are free to make, but one they must take. President Biden spoke of a new campaign to go door-to-door, and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said Thursday it’s “absolutely the government’s business” to know someone’s vaccine status. Meanwhile, NIAID Director Anthony Fauci is growing increasingly frustrated with those who haven’t gotten the jab yet, demanding they “get over” their concerns and “this political statement.”
So how can the administration convince the vaccine hesitant? Dr. Leana Wen, a CNN medical analyst and former head of Planned Parenthood, is suggesting making the lives of the unvaccinated more difficult in an effort to force compliance.
“What we really need to do at this point is to make vaccination the easy choice. It needs to be hard for people to remain unvaccinated,” she said on CNN. “Right now, it’s kind of the opposite. It’s fine, it’s easy if you’re unvaccinated. You can do everything you wanted to do anyway. But at some point, these mandates by workplaces, by schools, I think it will be important to say, ‘hey, you can opt out, but if you want to opt out, you have to sign these forms, you have to get twice weekly testing.’
She continued: “Basically, we need to make getting vaccinated the easy choice. That is what it’s going to take for us to actually end the pandemic.”
VIDEO - Dr. Wen: Biden Should Force Unvaccinated Americans to Undergo Twice Weekly Testing @VictorCNN https://t.co/ndqDVNABKQ
— Grabien (@GrabienMedia) July 8, 2021
Speaking soon with @AnaCabrera @CNNnewsroom: To increase #covid19 vaccinations, we need to make being vaccinated the easy choice and being unvaccinated the hard one.
— Leana Wen, M.D. (@DrLeanaWen) July 7, 2021
There should be vaccine requirements at more workplaces (those opting out need, say, twice-weekly testing).
Wen previously lamented how states were opening at 100 percent, arguing that it’s easier to get people vaccinated when they don’t have their freedoms.
“If everything is reopened, then what’s the carrot going to be?” she wondered. “How are we going to incentivize people to actually get the vaccine? So that’s why I think the CDC and the Biden administration needs to come out a lot bolder and say, ‘If you’re vaccinated, you can do all these things. Here are all these freedoms that you have,’ because otherwise, people are going to go out and enjoy these freedoms anyway.”