JL/Sipa USA via AP Images
Pfizer vaccines at a Miami hospital in April
I have a relative who is a medical worker at a Florida hospital. His emergency room is now full, with people suffering from COVID. Not one of them was vaccinated. Many of his co-workers, including nurses, have not been vaccinated.
Presumably, nearly all of these people got the usual childhood vaccines, for smallpox, polio, and the long established vaccines for diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, and typhoid. So why is this vaccine different from all other vaccines?
The answer, of course, is Donald Trump. The anti-vax movement overlaps with the Trump movement—which is doubly weird because one of the two things Trump did semi- right (the other was to toss out the established China policy) was to throw public money at a crash program to develop vaccines at warp speed. And the program, despite several failures along the way and billions in excess profits, basically succeeded.
So why didn’t Trump puff up his chest and roll up his sleeves, bask in the achievement, and urge everyone to get vaccinated? Because the entire Trump movement is built on cognitive dissonance—holding two incompatible beliefs at the same time.
In this case, the vaccine is a monumental Trump accomplishment, but the government is not going to tell me what to do. So Trump is too cowardly to take on contradictory prejudices he helped create.
Just as a vaccine causes the body to create antibodies against the disease, Trump’s vaccine doubletalk created antibodies in the body politic against its use. Jesus wept. (Salk and Jenner, too.)
If only there were a vaccine against magical thinking. Were it not so tragic, it would be comic to watch politicians like Florida’s Ron DeSantis or Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell try to waltz around these contradictions.
The only way to slow down these surges is for everyone to get vaccinated. The longer we wait, the more people will die. Especially Republicans.
