Home Chris Graham: The stupid politics behind COVID-19 vaccines
Local News

Chris Graham: The stupid politics behind COVID-19 vaccines

Contributors
doctor health vaccine shot covid
(© auremar – stock.adobe.com)

I get some people’s reluctance over the COVID-19 vaccines. I also get that the why some people have reluctance over the COVID-19 vaccines has nothing to do with any actual science.

In that, science is no longer science, but rather, what your favorite TV news network passes off to you as science.

For months this past summer, into the early fall, if your favorite TV news network was CNN or MSNBC, there was almost no chance that you would be letting somebody stick you in the arm with that Trump vaccine.

Wasn’t going to be safe, anything having to do with that Trump.

As if Trump would have had anything to do with anything more sophisticated scientifically than a bottle of bleach.

The science that led to the development of the three vaccines began, coincidentally, during the final year of the Trump administration.

That’s it.

But up until around the Saturday after Election Day, it was tainted in the minds of the CNN and MSNBC set, because it might make Trump look good.

Around that particular Saturday, when the networks – even Fox News! – and the AP called the election for Joe Biden, the attitudes started to shift.

We got word shortly thereafter, coincidentally (!), that we had vaccines ready to go into arms, and a mass mobilization effort was set into motion.

CNN and MSNBC viewers were at first still reluctant. And then the Fox News folks got in on the act.

The science behind the vaccines, mind you, hadn’t changed since the late spring, when we first heard the initial promising reports on the vaccines then in early development.

What changed was who would benefit politically.

If the news about the vaccines being ready to be deployed had been released a few weeks earlier, what kind of impact might that have had on the final outcome?

We’ll never know, but we know it wouldn’t have taken much.

That point is moot, good for democracy, but now that successful vaccines aren’t a benefit to Donald Trump, Democrats are back on Team Science.

And Republicans, for months on board with the vaccines, now that successful vaccines are a benefit to Joe Biden, are suddenly all Team Skepticism.

They’re being egged on in that respect by Fox News and the rest of the conservative media, but before you read that as an indictment, consider how the situation was flipped four months ago.

The bigger issue is that we so obviously live in a competing truths world.

Well, folks, time for a reality check: there aren’t competing truths.

It doesn’t help that folks in lab coats cosplaying science can’t seem to get the basic messaging right.

If those dolts would just come out and say, the vaccines are safe, and they’re our way back to normalcy as you knew it a year ago, instead of dithering, we’d be so much further along.

We get it, it’s nice to feel important, and once life gets back to normal, the folks in lab coats cosplaying science will be reduced to spending their Friday nights with their Bunsen burners.

We’re almost there.

That’s the truth.

We’re all tired of the ceaseless back and forth on masks and whether schools should be open.

The way we can get back to our interrupted back and forth on abortion, guns, taxes, immigration, the rest: vaccines.

Just get your damn shot already.

Story by Chris Graham

Contributors

Contributors

Have a guest column, letter to the editor, story idea or a news tip? Email editor Chris Graham at [email protected]. Subscribe to AFP podcasts on Apple PodcastsSpotifyPandora and YouTube.