“The Republicans are not willing to fight Covid, period.”
That doesn’t come from the Democrats. It comes this week from the neoconservative writer Bill Kristol. I first met him when he was chief-of-staff to conservative Vice President Dan Quayle. He went on to found the conservative journal The Weekly Standard. Hardly the credentials of a liberal activist.
But Kristol— a conscientious conservative who can’t abide the wicked course of his party— says that’s the campaign slogan that the Democrats ought to be screaming to the rooftops: “The Republicans are not willing to fight Covid, period.”
As a slogan, I think he’s totally right. There are plenty of positives that President Biden and the Democrats can justifiably crow about— pulling an economy out of the tank, reducing child poverty, restoring relationships with allies, steps to reverse climate change, progress against the pandemic. The trouble is, they’ve been crowing for some time and look where it has gotten them. Almost every pundit’s prognosis is for the Democrats to take a drubbing a year from now.
Yet here’s the disconnect: if more than seven out of every ten Americans have been vaccinated, it seems fair to conclude that most do want to fight Covid. So the slogan should resonate.
And as a fact, Kristol is totally right too. Florida Governor (and wannabe president) Ron DeSantis, following in the footsteps of three fellow governors from Donald Trump’s cult, proposes to pay benefits for people who refuse vaccinations, and to pay fines for Florida businesses that buck federal mandates. Texas Senator (and another wannabe president) Ted Cruz callously calls vaccine mandates “illegal, unconstitutional, and abusive.” Abusive? That they might actually save people's lives evidently escapes him.
Have these dangerous demagogues not noticed that on the last day of last month, the reported U.S. death toll from Covid was higher than 1,500? That happens to be the same day that a right-wing TV evangelist named Marcus Lamb, who had told his audience the vaccine was “experimental” and “dangerous” and that instead of getting vaccinated they should pray, died. Of Covid.
What are these people thinking?
I think I can answer that. It’s the confluence of Covid and politics, and it is no coincidence. Their political calculation apparently is, if the virus succeeds, the president fails. And they’re prosecuting it in plain sight. It fits with what Republican leaders have pursued as their sole strategy since inauguration day: to defeat President Biden at every turn. Of course he’s trying to control Covid and they’re weaponizing it, but evidently these enemies of the common good will continue down their cynical course.
And they’re doing a darned good job of it. As even the conservative Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, “Democratic-leaning states have gone further with social distancing, school closures, mask mandates and vaccinations than Republican-leaning states. As a result, the former had generally lower rates of infection and death than the latter.”
Kaiser Health News, which tracks Covid in counties across the country, is even more specific. It reports that in October, out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties in America, 25 citizens died of Covid. The corresponding figure in heavily Biden counties was fewer than eight.
But the unvaccinated are a burden on every state. Colorado’s Democratic governor Jared Polis this week pulled no punches: “I have no qualms if (unvaccinated people) have a death wish, but they’re clogging our hospitals.”
Vermont has just recorded its highest number of Covid cases since the pandemic started. Military medical teams had to supplement civilian staffs this week at hospitals in New York, Michigan, and Minnesota. In Nebraska, nearly all who are hospitalized with Covid right now are unvaccinated.
Yet still, ignoring statistics and science, Trump’s torchbearers— although most admit to being vaccinated themselves— aren’t just failing to encourage people get their shots (and wear masks), they’re working determinedly to discourage them.
Of course the poster boy for their disregard for the public good is Donald Trump himself. We learned this week that on September 26th last year, Trump tested positive— prompting his chief-of-staff to warn aides to stay away from the president— but did he do the safe thing in case the test was accurate and go into quarantine? No, of course not. With no public acknowledgement of the positive test, Trump went on to meet with Gold Star military families, and to fly to a rally in Pennsylvania, and to attend a fund-raiser in Minnesota, and to throw a Rose Garden shindig for his new Supreme Court nominee (which turned out to be a super-spreader event), and— without a hint about his positive test— to meet Joe Biden for their first campaign debate. Three days after that, the narcissist-in-chief was hospitalized with Covid.
The good news is, more than 70% of Americans now have been vaccinated. The bad news is, almost 30% haven’t. And you probably can lay most of that on the Ron DeSantises, the Ted Cruzes, the Donald Trumps of the world.
Not that the “vaccine hesitancy” that stops some isn’t legitimate. For many Americans it comes from somewhere deep down inside. But the statistics are legitimate too. Vaccines aren’t killing people. Covid is. What part of that don’t these perfidious politicians understand?
So yes, the Democrats right now ought to play to the majority— the 70+% of Americans rational and responsible enough to get their shots— and underline not what Republicans are doing (if anyone can figure it out), but what they’re not doing. If one side can weaponize Covid, so can the other. That’s why the Democrats should embrace the sole slogan that might hit home: “The Republicans are not willing to fight Covid, period.”
For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his writing also appears on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.
NPR: Pro-Trump counties now have far higher COVID death rates
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828993/data-vaccine-misinformation-trump-counties-covid-death-rate
"People living in counties that went 60% or higher for Trump in November 2020 had 2.7 times the death rates of those that went for Biden. But 60% includes a lot of Biden voters."
"In October.. reddest tenth of the country saw death rates that were six times higher than the bluest tenth, according to Charles Gaba.. analyst.. tracking partisanship trends ... Those numbers have dropped slightly in recent weeks: "It's back down to around 5.5 times higher."
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If you estimate the rate between a hypothetical 100% Trump voting county and a 100% Biden voting county, it is safe to say that the ratio would be at least 5:1
May 1 (544k deaths), Dec 3 (744k) - increase of 200K.
5:1 :: TrumpVoter:BidenVoter gets you
166K Trump voter deaths
33K Biden voter deaths
difference is 133K, largely attributable to GOP/FoxNews posturing/messaging.
Almost 20K a month.