Anti-Vaccine Sentiment Could Sink the GOP

Anti-Vaccine Sentiment Could Sink the GOP

By Cliff Kincaid – July 12, 2021

The far-left MoveOn group is warning Democrats that Republicans are heavily favored to win back the House in 2022. However, the organization is promising “effective new strategies for persuading undecided voters and turning out Democratic voters who don't always show up for nonpresidential elections.” On this basis, the Democrats can maintain control of the House and Senate.  

One strategy is to depict Republicans as opponents of scientific progress by opposing life-saving vaccines to protect America from the China virus and turn our country around economically. 

Fear of the disease, in other words, will “trump” fear of the vaccine. And that is the Democrats’ winning strategy. Opponents of the vaccines will be portrayed as enemies of the people. This strategy will elect Democrats over Republicans.

I put “trump” in quotes because it was President Trump who launched the highly successful Operation Warp Speed vaccine strategy that has enabled America to turn the corner against the Chinese bioweapon.  Yet the sad fact is that Trump voters are leading the opposition to taking the Trump vaccines.

With a Covid variant making inroads and threatening more suffering and death in Republican states, the Democrats see a political advantage developing. In a bizarre twist, they will use the deaths of unvaccinated Republicans to elect Democrats. They will use the anti-vaccine sentiment as a political weapon against Republicans in 2022 and 2024.

One factor in Republican opposition to the vaccines is “distrust in government,” according to polls. One can understand this distrust. Conservatives don’t like federal intrusion into private and personal affairs.  But in this case the vaccines resulted from the determination of a conservative Republican president, Donald J. Trump, to mount a response to the Chinese bioweapon attack on America and our people. Trump cut through the federal bureaucracy and bypassed the federal medical establishment to pressure pharmaceutical companies to use modern vaccine technology to protect Americans.

Not only did the technology protect and save millions of people, it’s being discussed as a possible response to other diseases such as cancer. It’s being called the mRNA revolution.

With dramatic developments on the horizon, potentially benefitting victims of different diseases, the Democrats will be telling America that Republicans are standing in the way of progress for all of humanity. Republicans will be blamed for the next series of lockdowns that seem inevitable if the Covid variants continue to spread.

In this context, Republican writer Marc A. Thiessen has an interesting column on Trump’s role in producing the vaccines, noting that the Biden Administration doesn’t want to give the former president credit for saving lives.

“Today,” he notes, “it is Trump supporters who are most likely to remain unvaccinated. The 20 U.S. states with the highest vaccination rates all voted for Biden in 2020. Meanwhile, most of the 22 states with the lowest vaccination rates went for Trump – including almost all of the states with vaccination rates below 50%.”

Rather than go house to house to persuade people to get vaccinated, which is the Biden approach, Thiessen suggests, “If Biden wants to convince those Americans to get immunized, he should remind them that Operation Warp Speed – the greatest public health achievement in human history – was also the greatest achievement of the Trump presidency. Trump invested about $10 billion in six vaccine candidates – purchasing hundreds of millions of doses of vaccines before they were proven, and clearing away regulatory hurdles. All three vaccines that eventually received FDA approval received critical support from his administration.”

Biden wants confrontations with the unvaccinated to make Republicans look like extremists.

Those conservatives and Christians who have considered the matter seriously favor the vaccines.

Consider the Christian group, Liberty HealthShare, which is sponsoring this weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Under the rules of this Christian organization, “COVID-19 vaccines can be shared according to our current sharing guidelines…”  

The Christian group features an interview with former FDA commissioner Peter Pitts, who tells the members, “I plan to get vaccinated and I want to get vaccinated as early as possible. All the vaccines that are going through the FDA will be safe and over 95% effective.”
The interview also includes these exchanges:

Q. Do those who are young and healthy need to get the vaccine?

Yes, if you are young and healthy and you become infected with COVID-19, you will probably have a mild impact, similar to the flu or you may be asymptomatic. However, this doesn't mean that you cannot transmit the disease. One of the important things to understand about vaccines is that it protects you as an individual, as well as everyone around you.

We are all in this together and vaccines play an incredibly important role in keeping our nation healthy.
 
Q. If someone has had COVID-19 already, should they still get the vaccine?
 
Yes. If you've had COVID-19 once, you can get it again. There are many instances where people have had it and gotten it a second time.
 
“We're going to beat the pandemic because of pharmaceutical innovation,” says Pitts, the former FDA commissioner. He adds that “…the ecosystem for private sector innovation has long been a powerful force in the United States in the development of breakthrough treatments and cures.”
 
All of this is now in jeopardy because many Trump supporters are reluctant to take the Trump Warp Speed vaccines. They are threatening the lives of their friends, neighbors, and family members. And that gives Democrats the hope of reversing the political trends and maintaining control of Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024.
 
*Cliff Kincaid is president of America’s Survival, Inc. www.usasurvival.org