Joe Biden’s desire to blame the pandemic on his political opponents never ceases to amaze us. From mask-shaming to claiming that Republicans want to kill children, to grandiosely naming the COVID-19 pandemic as a “Pandemic of the Unvaccinated,” Biden has sought to portray his political opponents as obstacles to normalcy.
This is a policy formulated at the top levels of our government: portraying a segment of the American people as dangerous ignoramuses who don’t care if they kill their friends and neighbors. As recently as Dec. 14, in an interview with a local TV station, Biden said “This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated. Not the vaccinated, the unvaccinated.” Along with his oft-quoted and totally inaccurate statements about vaccinated people not spreading COVID, Biden is once again ignoring the science to score political points.
It’s interesting that Biden gave that quote about the same time that omicron was beginning to spread in the U.S.
Aside from denying the science, trying to scapegoat your political enemies for the pandemic is a convenient way to absolve himself of the blame for his administration’s incompetence.
So if vaccine mandates aren’t moving the needle on vaccination, what, precisely, are they for? One particularly ungenerous hypothesis is hard to avoid. Rebranding COVID-19 as the “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” then targeting that population with punishments for noncompliance, has been a way to scapegoat political opponents and technology companies, while bolstering the sense of virtuousness among the vaxxed.
Those dynamics were present at the creation of the re-brand. The same week that the White House COVID-19 Response Team began telling vaccinated people that the pandemic was now for those other people, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for a “whole-of-society” effort to combat “health misinformation,” then Biden just flat-out accused Facebook and other social media companies of “killing people.”
The more desperate Biden gets over his declining political fortunes, the more hysterically he lashes out at those Americans who, for their own reasons, don’t wish to be vaccinated.
This has led to Biden allies in the media gleefully posting stories about unvaccinated people getting COVID and dying. “COVID Death Porn” stories serve the purpose of demonstrating the left’s righteousness about masks, vaccines, and other virus mitigation efforts. It has become as nauseating as any other aspect of the pandemic.
The left’s morality plays are now irrelevant. Breakthrough infections among the vaccinated are skyrocketing as omicron doesn’t care if you’ve been vaccinated or not.
The pandemic of the unvaccinated framing actively encouraged one of the uglier and least productive societal reactions to COVID-19: Making the mere fact of contracting the virus a morality play falling largely along partisan lines. The whole notion that by “doing everything right,” and “following all the rules,” you will be righteously spared, unlike those anti-science people this summer down south.
That self-flattering narrative is collapsing, now that (as predicted) a stubbornly seasonal/regional virus has hit media/Democratic centers for a third consecutive winter. “Thousands who ‘followed the rules’ are about to get covid,” ran the headline on a Washington Post “Wellness” column last week. “They shouldn’t be ashamed.” Lovely sentiment, that.
It won’t stop the left’s shaming of those who choose not to be vaccinated. But the more Biden speaks about the pandemic, the more he’s exposed as a lying charlatan — a snake oil salesman who cares more about his own political survival than the survival of his fellow Americans.
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