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?
