In April, the Biden administration unveiled a massive public relations campaign designed to get Americans vaccinated. They even enlisted the help of celebrities and athletes. Then, earlier this month, there was talk of a door-to-door campaign.
Obviously, nothing they’ve tried to boost vaccination rates has worked. On Thursday, Joe Biden called on states to bribe citizens $100 to get vaccinated. We’ve seen this type of incentive before. Several states tried to boost vaccination rates with things like million-dollar lotteries, and they were expensive failures. None managed to reverse the decline of COVID vaccinations.
Does Biden really think $100 bribes will work now? I’m sure Biden considered his plan to be brilliant, but I saw the admission of failure. The Biden administration has been trying desperately for months to get most Americans, if not all of them, vaccinated. That effort has failed miserably, as the rate of new vaccinations has stalled.
It didn’t have to be this way.
Biden came into office with two vaccines approved for emergency use and a distribution plan. All he had to do was not screw things up.
Of course, he had already screwed things up before he was even inaugurated. Before the election, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were the most high-profile vaccine skeptics in the country, sowing the seeds of doubt about any vaccine that might be ready before the election.
Related: Democrats Have Not Allowed the COVID Crisis to Go to Waste
Still, for a while, things were going great with getting people vaccinated. Though, for what it’s worth, the Trump administration had been exceeding Biden’s target pace for vaccinations. Still, things were going so great that the Biden administration tried to take ownership of the vaccination plan they inherited from Trump. They memory-holed Operation Warp Speed and started claiming that they started from scratch—a claim debunked by the former head of Operation Warp Speed, as well as Dr. Fauci—and we watched as, for several weeks, vaccinations steadily increased.
And then, the Biden administration hastily paused the Johnson & Johnson vaccine after six people out of nearly 7 million people who received the vaccine experienced severe blood clots.
Nothing Biden has tried has been able to reverse the downward trend of vaccinations since his J&J pause. pic.twitter.com/gGbzgy2EHR
— Matt Margolis (@mattmargolis) July 30, 2021
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine pause coincided with a sharp decline in vaccination doses administered—a decline that continued even after the pause was lifted. Some have suggested the decline was a natural result of people who really wanted to get vaccinated already having been vaccinated. Still, the trend of a sharp decline in vaccinations beginning with the J&J pause would have to be the most bizarre coincidence ever, right?
Despite the decline in vaccinations, Biden got cocky and raised his vaccination target to 70 percent of adults by Independence Day. That’s when we started getting all the public relations campaigns and threats to go door to door. Biden was attempting to correct his big mistake. But his push to have states offer $100 to individuals who get vaccinated is doomed to fail. It just reeks of the desperation of an administration that tried so hard to own the vaccination distribution plan it inherited and then botched completely.
