Because they are angry
Apparently hating Democrats is an excellent reason to risk getting the virus and dying.
Many people here and elsewhere in the Southeast are turning down Covid-19 vaccines because they are angry that President Donald Trump lost the election and sick of Democrats in Washington thinking they know what’s best.
Hey people in the Southeast? That’s a really really really stupid reason to risk getting and transmitting the virus. That’s about as stupid as it gets. If you get the virus and die it will be you who’s dead, not the pesky Democrats. If you transmit it to other people and they die they will be the ones who die, not the pesky Washington Democrats. This is called cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The pushback from both state officials and people who refuse vaccination underscores the extent to which the federal government may never be able to convince rural, conservative populations in parts of the South to get the shot.
And it’s not just rural, conservative populations.
How did that happen? I have no idea.
One day last week in Sheffield, Melton and Grabryan were sitting in a large van in front of a local church. Its parking lot displayed a small white sign advertising Covid-19 vaccine to anyone who wanted it.
Only 18 people showed up. It’s been like that for weeks. At one point, Grabryan laid his head back on the van’s cushy seat, shaking it side to side. “I’ve been out to the funeral home for more visitations this year than I have before,” he said. “There’s no one in this area that doesn’t know someone who was affected by it.”
That’s not “hysteria” – it’s just reality.
Louisiana regional medical directors and physicians described a horrific last two weeks marked by overcrowded ICUs, people showing up to emergency rooms after suddenly developing shortness of breath, and Covid-19 patients clinging to their last hours before abruptly letting go and dying. Almost all of these people died because they chose not to get the vaccine.
To punish the Democrats. I don’t think they’ve thought this through carefully.
The state has recorded an average of 2,400 coronavirus cases in the last 14 days, an uptick of more than 230 percent from the two weeks prior. The patients seeking medical help are younger than ever before, between 30 and 60 years old. And they are dying. Two of the doctors at Our Lady of the Lake hospital say they both lost unvaccinated family members to Covid. In the past several weeks, two nurses in the hospital nearby died, too.
…
Doctors and health officials in Alabama and Louisiana say their only hope for getting people vaccinated is if the media outlets that message to these areas, primarily Fox News, start advocating people get the shot, instead of pushing them away from the jab.
But Fox News isn’t going to do that, because…
…I don’t know why. I can’t understand it. They’re promoting death, for the most frivolous of reasons, and I can’t get my head around it.
Maybe the idea is that if lots of people die of COVID under the Biden administration, then Democrats will look bad, and then Republicans will win the next election? So it’s a case of selfless martyrdom?
Ah, cunning…
Promoting death is awful enough, but promoting death in a manner that places most of those deaths on your own tribe is just amazing. It reminds me of this guy, except instead of eating an overcooked steak, he’s murdering his own friend.
Here’s what we do. We let it be known that, yes, ebil gummint scientists did conspire with the Chinese to engineer the virus. We also had a safe and effective vaccine ready to distribute in record time, but we crafted a sneaky disinformation campaign to discourage conservatives from taking it. Tucker Carlson and One America News are in on it, doncha know? And we did it all to kill off a whole generation of MAGA hat wearers, particularly the older ones. And we’re rubbing our hands in glee — it’s working beyond our wildest dreams! BWAHAHAHA!
Maybe then they’ll get vaccinated, if only to “own the libs”.
I certainly can’t speak for FOX news, but if I had to hazard a guess about their motivations for spreading lies I’d say it was probably the same motivation that’s behind their listeners believing lies: they don’t know they’re lies. Aside from the usual percentage of psychopaths and grifters, most of them think they’re telling the truth at the time.
It’s actually a bit comforting to tell ourselves that there’s a wide gap in intelligence and acumen between leaders and the sheeple, but I think a lot of the power hierarchy here is often due to chance and circumstance, not the gullible or careless being weeded out on merit. The difference between a television pundit and your Uncle Phil explaining the State of the World sometimes comes down to hair and makeup.
As for Josh, I think his predictive powers are slipping. It’s hard to see a former friend slip away, and especially so since he believes he’s the only healthy one left. The rest of us are either borderlines, narcissistic, or cluster Bs, deluding each other.
But it does go to show that this is not a matter of intelligence. He’s not stupid.
Not only will Washington Democrats not die, other people won’t care that they did, period.
I don’t have the energy to waste on the willfully stupid.
In fact, in the last week, Republicans and Fox have started advocating vaccines. And this isn’t a glitch or a gaffe. As always, their messaging is coordinated. I found this even more mystifying than their previous lock-step opposition. I mean, what changed? Why now?
Chris Hayes (MSNBC) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2f633JsyCk has a plausible explanation. After Biden was elected, Republicans figured they could have their cake and eat it too. They could rely on Biden to do the vaccine rollout: he’s competent and committed. Meanwhile, they could continue with their anti-vaxx, COVID is a hoax, liberal plot (microchips!) messaging, which is good politics for them. It plays well with their base and gives them a wedge issue they can ride all the way to the 2022 elections.
Right now, 50% of Americans are vaccinated. For the earlier variants, that would have been enough to push R0 below 1.0 and extinguish the epidemic in the U.S. But it’s not enough to extinguish the delta variant. So case counts are spiking and we’re looking at a huge new COVID wave–worse, in a newly reopened economy. This could be really, really bad.
What’s more, the people who are getting sick and dying are almost exclusively the unvaccinated, and the unvaccinated are almost exclusively Republican. The Republican leadership looked at that and decided they needed to get the vaccination rate up, and the only thing for it was to tell their followers to get vaccinated. (Even so, you can see they are pretty uncomfortable saying it. It’s not a full-throated full-court-press all-hands-on-deck do-it-now campaign. It’s awkward and stilted and kind of under-their-breath.)
Discussion questions: 1. Does the Republican leadership a) actually care about their base, b) fear that sickness and death among their base will be bad politics, or c) fear that if too many of their base die of COVID there won’t be enough Republicans left to re-elect them?
2. Can the Republican leadership turn this ship around? Will their follower get vaccinated just because Mitch or Tucker tells them to? Or will this new messaging just drive their followers further into denial and conspiracy theories, making them even less reachable or persuadable?
Sarah Huckabee has the MAGAt answer: she got the vaccine because the Trumps did. (Also pray, of course.)
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/jul/25/the-reasoning-behind-getting-vaccinated/
Steven @8, re your questions:
1(a). No.
1(b). Probably yes, but not hugely so, hence the weak and still mixed messaging.
1(c). Not a chance. In the now thoroughly or soon to be gerrymandered and table tilted districts they hold or can seize, killing off <1% of their voters will make no odds.
2. No, a very few, some and, for that subset, a small number, yes.
it's just plausible deniability. They want to be able to point at an example of when they said get vaccinated, as if that makes up for the hundreds of times they railed against vaccination. The don't care about voters, they care about using a bent system to make those voters they can manipulate count over all others. They are consistently trying to push other topics to distract the base, from CRT to lying about tucker having been targeted by the intelligence services.
I think it’s just about where the median voter’s mind is at. Or, ok, the voter slightly to the right of the median voter — the one the GOP still needs to get even allowing for gerrymandering, the structural bias of the Senate and Electoral College, etc.
Depending on where you lived, up until around March or April or even May, there were more people wanting the vaccine than doses available. In fact, people were debating the ethics of who should get priority, and whether we should call some people out for jumping the queue and getting it before they were “supposed” to. Antivaxxers just weren’t a problem as far as most people were concerned — you don’t want the vaccine? Fine, makes it easier for me and others to get it.
Then we went through a period where the COVID numbers were declining. A lot of people probably figured that antivaxxers were not going to screw things up for the rest of us; we’re going to beat this thing without them, so they’re only hurting themselves. So lots of GOP-leaning voters who aren’t anti-vax themselves either agreed with the argument that it’s just personal choice, or didn’t really care that much that party leaders and media figures were stoking antivax sentiments.
But now numbers are going up. Many jurisdictions are reinstituting restrictions, and there are serious questions about whether schools will be open in the fall. And it’s become obvious that vaccine denialism is to blame. Suddenly indulging the antivaxxers has a real downside in the eyes of these median voters. Which means it has a downside for the GOP and its media allies. Up until now, they’ve been able to pander to the antivaxxers, knowing that the only people it pisses off are folks who were never going to support them anyway.
Which is why they’re trying to keep a foot in both camps now. Hannity is doing a tapdance of saying that he believes in the science of vaccination, while still urging his audience to “do their own research,” which is code for “go down the rabbit hole of online vaccine denialism.” They want to keep the antivax base on board, without alienating the others.