FOX OFFERS ANTI-VACCINE RHETORIC, WHILE PEOPLE CONTINUE TO DIE

 

                                                   …Anti-vaccine protests

 

Donald Trump could have averted this rolling disaster, but he won’t do it.

 

The past few years have made it clear that Republican officeholders live in constant fear of their party’s base. These officeholders fear their base and their undying devotion to Donald Trump.  Especially the base’s eagerness to purge its non-Trump believers and their thirst for physical violence. So much more than their Democratic colleagues, they carefully monitor what their constituents are hearing and believing, to determine what right-wing parade they might need to join.

When it comes to vaccines against Covid-19, the one thing that can finally deliver us from the pandemic, if we only push a little harder for a little longer and achieve true herd immunity.  But the GOP lawmakers have until now taken a variety of positions.

The extremist nutballs, which the party elects with regularity, they have been full-on for anti-vaccine. Many others have said that people should get vaccinated, but of course, they are quick to add that it’s only a matter of personal choice.  

But the always-complex dynamic between the elite and the masses may in fact, be shifting. As the Biden administration begins a new vaccine push, cynical provocateurs on the right see personal profit, both political or economic, in promoting anti-vaccine hysteria.  And the louder it gets, the more incentive the politicians will have to join in.

This week, President Biden gave a speech underscoring his commitment to getting more Americans vaccinated. “We need to go to community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, and oftentimes, door to door...literally knocking on doors… to get help to the remaining people,” he said.  This caused a full-scale freak out across all conservative media, but especially on Fox News.  Their hosts were railing against “vaccine pushers” assaulting you in your home. “People are up in arms about this,” said one host… or at least they will be, if we at Fox, tell them to get up in arms about it.

The reaction from the party’s lunatic fringe was highly predictable.  

Of course, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)  decried the coming of “medical brown shirts,” like Hitler’s brown shirts.  While the ridiculous Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) warned that “Biden has deployed his Needle Nazis” to her district.

But the Fox, anti-vaccine hysteria has now reached a fever pitch.

Charlie Kirk of the right-wing youth group Turning Point USA,  whose co-founder died of the coronavirus-related complications last year.  Kirk went on Tucker Carlson’s show to promote the group’s campaign against colleges that will require students to be vaccinated to return to campus in the fall. “It’s almost this apartheid-style open-air hostage situation, like: ‘Oh you can have your freedom back if you get the jab,’ ” he said. “That’s exactly right,” Carlson responded. Carlson had earlier falsely called vaccine requirements “medical Jim Crow.”

In addition to its anti-vax hosts, the Fox network also hosts one guest after another to rail against the vaccines. “No one under age 30 should receive any one of these vaccines,” an anti-covid-vaccine doctor told Laura Ingraham on the evening’s program.

 In another segment on the same episode called “Power Grabs and Needle Jabs,” Ingraham said, “Despite everything the experts either got wrong or lied about, they still think that parents should trust them and inject their kids with an experimental drug to prevent a disease almost none of those kids will ever get sick from.”

And of course, Tucker Carlson, who is unfortunately, the most popular cable news host in the country, he has been on an anti-vaccine holy war for months.

Think about the position that puts Republican politicians in. There probably isn’t a GOP officeholder in the United States who doesn’t keep tabs on Fox to see what their constituents are hearing, and now they know those constituents are being told over and over that vaccines are dangerous, if not deadly, and a dire threat to freedom. Worst of all, getting vaccinated means doing what President Biden wants you to do.

That will give every Republican official an incentive to toy with vaccine conspiracy theories, or at the very least perform some fake-outrage about how oppressed you are.  Especially if your government pleads with you to voluntarily get a lifesaving vaccine and makes getting it as easy as possible.

The result will be a further cycle of politicization, and a hardening of attitudes among those Republicans who haven’t yet been vaccinated.  And of course, more Americans will die.

Part of what’s so frustrating is that there is one person who could have averted this rolling disaster, and still could, but he won’t do it. That person is, of course, Donald Trump.

And he would even have been able to do it in a way that satisfied his ridiculous need for loyalty and adulation.  With his catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic, one thing for which he deserves credit is that he essentially opened up a firehose of money to drug companies to develop vaccines.

So he could easily say, “I gave you these incredible vaccines. Me, all me. Call them the Trump Vaccines. Everybody get your Trump Vaccine, because I killed the pandemic.” 

Had he done that, his devoted followers would have stampeded to vaccination centers.

But of course, he didn’t and he won’t.

Instead, he occasionally and grudgingly does say something positive about vaccination.  But he still refuses to put his considerable weight behind it. Instead of leading his followers, Trump is following them.

And so is the rest of the Republican Party elite. That is except for those who are actively promoting anti-vaccine derangement.

All of this just means that the day we’re finally free of the pandemic, it will recedes further and further into the future.  And all of that, while people are still dying.

Copyright G. Ater 2021