We’re closing in on the two-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic. I don’t think, in February or March of 2020, many people thought it would last this long.
There were a few moments when it looked like this peculiar chapter in history was coming to a close. On April 19, 2021, all Americans over the age of 16 were finally eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine. Our vaccines were proving highly safe and effective, and on average around two million people were getting their shots every day during Biden’s first 100 days in office. Demand for the vaccines was outstripping supply. By the first day of summer in 2021, about 47.6 percent of the U.S. population was fully vaccinated. At the rate we were going, it seemed inevitable that the pandemic would soon recede, until it was little more than another shared bad memory.
Then the pace of vaccination began to slow. As a new wave of COVID-19 swept through America in late August and early September, and as the death toll again climbed beyond 1,000 per day, approximately 19 percent of Americans said they still had no intention of ever getting vaccinated. Today, some seven months after summer began, only about 62 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated.
Transform Legal Reasoning Into Business-Ready Results With General AI
Protégé™ General AI is fundamentally changing how legal professionals use AI in their everyday practice.
There are many reasons why some people can’t or won’t get a coronavirus vaccine. Yet, one of the most significant reasons, and perhaps the most galling reason, is that these highly effective and safe vaccines have been politicized. Polling by Kaiser found that 94 percent of Republicans believe in the truthfulness of at least one false statement about COVID-19 and vaccine safety. Another poll found that among Americans who say they will “definitely” not get the COVID-19 vaccine, 58 percent identify as Republican, compared to only 18 percent who identify as Democrat.
Although Donald Trump avoided overt statements against COVID-19 vaccines while he was president, he repeatedly undermined vaccines in general pre-presidency, and he has often played to the significant anti-vaccination segment of his base indirectly. However, Trump’s successor in office recently targeted the Donald’s biggest weakness: flattery.
“Thanks to the prior administration and our scientific community, America was one of the first countries to get the vaccine,” Joe Biden said on December 21.
Pretty immediately after receiving Biden’s praise, Trump told Fox News, “I’m very appreciative of that — I was surprised to hear it.” He went on, “I think he did something very good. You know, it has to be a process of healing in this country, and that will help a lot.”
Not long before this exchange of compliments, Trump told a crowd of his supporters that he had gotten the COVID-19 booster shot. When a good portion of them booed him for this disclosure, Trump stood his ground on the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines. “Look, we did something that was historic,” he said. “We saved tens of millions of lives worldwide. We — together. All of us, not me.” Trump has since continued to reject anti-vaccine talking points in his media appearances.
Joe Biden gave credit to the Trump administration. In turn, Donald Trump complimented a democratically elected world leader, spread scientifically valid talking points, and went out of his way to share credit for an accomplishment. People can always surprise you.
Though Trump might convince a few folks to get the jab, his new role as a vaccine evangelist probably won’t change a whole lot when it comes to vaccination rates. But the fact that Trump’s own crowd booed him for being correct on vaccines shows that there is nothing that will bring a number of these people around to accepting objective reality.
Still, what we probably need even more than a few nutjob holdouts getting the vaccine is for these people to be pushed back out of the mainstream discourse to wherever they were before Donald Trump burst onto the political scene as the undisputed leader of the disinformation movement. If your half-cocked conspiracy theory is too crazy for Donald Trump to mirror back at you at the rally you paid handsomely to come worship him at, well, it doesn’t seem like the majority of Americans are going to have to continue taking you seriously for all that much longer.
It’s not the end of stark political division, but I’ll certainly take the newly developed Trump and Biden alliance on vaccines as a sign of hope for the New Year. If we can come together, most of us anyhow, and at least agree that good vaccine science is valid, maybe humanity has a chance to turn things around in 2022.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].