Being Republican Can Kill You

Jul. 26, 2021

9:18 a.m.

In addition to being a decent human being who supports free and fair elections and the fundamental principles of American democracy, there’s a frightening new reason to flee from what once was one of the nation’s two most powerful political parties: Being Republican can kill you.

It didn’t have to be this way. President Biden was sworn in on Jan. 20 amid the raging pandemic former President Trump never had any idea how to control. On that day, there were 185,000 new COVID cases and 4,440 deaths from the virus. The good news is within six months Biden had created a well-organized, nationwide delivery system making vaccines freely available to anyone wanting one and reducing the weekly infection average to thousands and deaths to hundreds.

That’s when the rapid spread of the new, more infectious delta variant publicly revealed a deadly new political division between Republicans and Democrats. The 2020 presidential election may have been one of the most politically polarized in American history, but the two parties were unified on the most important life-or-death issue facing the country. Both Republicans and Democrats strongly supported the rapid development of a coronavirus vaccine to finally end the deadly pandemic.

Trump has always wanted to claim sole credit for the scientific creation of the vaccines during his presidency, but the truth is it was a rare example of bipartisan action by Republicans and Democrats working together in Congress in a national emergency. They appropriated more than $2.5 billion in 2020 for development and early purchase of vaccines from both Pfizer and Moderna. So far in 2021 Republicans have refused to return the favor.

No Help from Trump

Since Trump couldn’t hog credit for the vaccines, he’s refused to lift a finger to encourage his supporters to get vaccinated and help Biden end the pandemic. Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson and other shameless Trump sycophants make matters worse by spreading scare stories about the life-saving vaccines. Only about half of Republican House members have been vaccinated so far. Tragically, those life-threatening statistics now appear to reflect Republicans nationally as well.

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As of June, 86% of Democrats had received at least one dose of vaccine, but only 52% of Republicans. The states with the lowest levels of vaccination—Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana and Wyoming—all voted heavily for Trump. Republican Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama, where fewer than 34% are vaccinated, finally got fed up. “It’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks,” she declared last week. “It’s the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down. . . These folks are choosing a horrible lifestyle of self-inflicted pain. Folks (are) supposed to have common sense.”

But that’s the toll after four years of Trump and other Republicans who never met a nutty, rightwing conspiracy theory they didn’t embrace. Folks without any common sense are now the party’s base. In one recent YouGov poll, half said they rejected vaccines because they believed the shots contained tiny government microchips to track the population.

‘Pandemic of the Unvaccinated’

You don’t have to be a brilliant Republican election strategist to question the political wisdom of a party that just got walloped in the presidential election for treating its own voters as expendable and discouraging them from getting vaccinated when a rapidly spreading, highly infectious new variant of COVID is creating what the Centers for Disease Control calls a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

Unfortunately, Ivey was wrong to suggest unvaccinated Republicans were only inflicting pain and death upon themselves. It’s true so far vaccines have been overwhelmingly effective in preventing serious illness or death from the dangerous delta variant. But the longer Republicans discourage a large enough percentage of Americans from getting vaccinated for the nation to achieve “herd immunity” wiping out the virus—remember when Trump briefly believed in that?—the more time COVID will have to develop even more deadly variants. The next one, the lambda variant, has already arrived.

So far, none of the new variants have yet achieved vaccine resistance. That would be a terrifying American tragedy.

We’ve all become numb from reading horrifying polls on a daily basis. Here’s another one. A new poll from the Associated-NORC Center for Public Affairs found that of the unvaccinated, 45% said they definitely won't get vaccinated and 35% said that they probably probably won’t. That’s a major victory for Trumped-up Republicans and Chief Fox Disinformation Officer Tucker Carlson who does all their thinking for them. For America, which will be strewn with the bodies of the recklessly deceived, it’s mass murder.

Only very sick, twisted Republicans would ever celebrate a political victory over Biden for preventing him from ultimately eliminating the deadly coronavirus pandemic. But after four years of watching Trump distort the Republican party into a vicious, openly racist, anti-American violent mob drawn from the most damaged lunatic fringes of society, would anyone really be surprised?

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Comments (3)

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Democrats... YOUR "Leftist" Media is who politicized the pandemic! YOU politicized it along RACE lines!

How did that happen??

Very easy... by REPEATING how this virus is attacking the Black and Hispanic people as being hit a whole lot harder with this disease then all the MANY GOOD WHITE folks were being hit!

Oh, you try to be "objective" and say "disproportionally affecting people of color",
but you did not immediately follow that with "these are people with JOBS... Jobs that require them to work closely together as part of their job description, and Jobs that require them to directly serve the public." That can be factory jobs like meat packing plants, service jobs like healthcare, food service, hotel hospitality.

Bringing up "Color" was the big mistake!
People of color already knew, they did not see it reported.

But mentioning "Color" took over the white person's thought process, most got "stuck" there!
WHITE FOLKS CRITICAL THINKING CANNOT OCCUR WHEN COLOR IS IN MIND!

Simple fact is that when people hear "color unspecified news", they do not hear color unless a stereotype is clearly evident, such as saying "crack", "watermelon", "tacos", even "golf". They first think "people like me"... and their minds are more open.

To MOST white people who heard "disproportionally black", this was actually GOOD news!
It meant white people could feel safe, they could go about American life as usual.
No changes!

Besides, people like them simply do not mix with others, they really felt safe!
They do not realize how many of their daily contacts might have had secret ties into urban life.
Those are the ones with unvaccinated Delta variant now.
(Just like AIDS was no problem for taxpaying straights when it was just a "queer" disease... until it crossed over through *bisexual* celebrities... and got into where the affluent straight image was.)

In Wisconsin, only Milwaukee exposed that early covid case rate data with fine enough detail to pin down the neighborhood instead of lumping the entire county together as "one count"... and they used a "Heat Map" service that had layers you could switch on and off:
- How black a neighborhood was.
- How white a neighborhood was.
- How Hispanic a neighborhood was.
- The income class a neighborhood had.
I played with the layer settings... What did I see?
Instead of the worse case rates being by color, it was by income class!
... Notable to me was that the "poorest of the poor" did not have any more cases than the "wealthy" areas. Income was split into 5 levels... 1 at the bottom, 5 at the top. Levels 2 and 3 were the two groups that had the high case rates.

In other words, people who were NOT WELFARE cases, but people who had JOBS.
That is WORKING POOR jobs (level 2), but also SKILLED WORKING CLASS jobs (level 3).

Skilled working class like healthcare, more the nurses and caretaking classes. I could see that by some light experience of where certain kinds of Milwaukee area people tended to live.

WOW County Citizen more than 3 years ago

Color me BLACK for in mourning for those who don't get vaccinated

Where did color came into play in this article? It didn't! The point of this article was solely about the insanity of opposing vaccinations with the consequence being that more people will get Covid and die, or suffer severe symptoms from the more vicious Delta Variant. I do agree that historically all things that are bad, be it bad health, poor nutrition, lack of housing, high rates of crime, always occur more frequently in the poorer population.

Carl Buehler more than 3 years ago

Joel didn't mention Color, I did. I think color DOES play into how it became political.

Time and again, I hear Conservatives claim "money", "poor", "lazy", "drugs", etc. as their reason for their policies of division, exclusion, even "community distancing" that they like to preach about. I live in a Conservative area, work alongside Conservative people, I was raised by by a family who felt that way too. I've heard their talk, I also heard their hints as to "color" being the root of it.

I get that people often have no place for "the poor", it's hard to dispute the difficulty to make profit from the lives of "the poor." (that can only be done if there is a government "reparations" payout, what some call "reverse discrimination.")

But in other parts of the conversations, it comes out that there is racist intent linked to their disgust of "the poor." It soon becomes clear most of these people automatically link "poor" with "non-white", most often Black.

The rest of the conversations tell me "Oh, you don't mean 'the poor', you mean the people who are to be KEPT poor." Kept poor enough they cannot shop at places our kind shop, cannot go out to eat where our kind eat, but it is okay to see them WORKING there (but never in a management role.)

I have seen many of these people have decent thought processes and good rational thinking, so long as there was no hint of color, but I saw all that go out the window as soon as one of their "hated" groups was in mind. That "Elephant in the room" nobody can directly mention.

They are smart enough to NEVER bring up color as a root of their attitude, they know that gets them branded as a racist, and therefore eligible for a "hate crime adder" if they are ever found doing something not quite politically correct.

Because our "objective" news called out black and brown early on in the pandemic, the kind of white folk I hailed from were thrown into that "non-thinking" territory and made the "perpetual pandemic" political. Political along the same lines I think divides Trump-Republicans from the rest of the country. Trump, an anti-Obama "birther" from the get go. We all might have heard "born in Kenya", but most of us knew it was "born here Citizen" due to the 14th Amendment that many Conservatives find a problem for their idea of America.

Same as Reagan's "Chicago welfare queens with 2 Cadillacs", most all whites were thinking he meant blacks, not the abuse of the welfare system. (By the way, the real woman referred to with those 2 Cadillacs was white. Reagan never mentioned that.)

WOW County Citizen more than 3 years ago