A deadly cynical strategy
It’s a cynical but sadly reliable formula for a certain breed of politician: Break things, and then run on a promise to fix broken things.
And so it has been in the COVID -19 pandemic. Certain politicians — especially on the right — pander to anti-vaccine, anti-government, nobody-tells-me-what-to-do sentiment, helping to frustrate the effort by federal, state and local governments to encourage people to get vaccinated. And then they rail against the struggling pandemic economy, or the failure of governments to bring the pandemic under control, or public efforts to stop the spread of the virus with mask mandates and workforce vaccination requirements.
A case in point is a politician who, before her sharp turn to the far-right fringe, we would have thought would know better — New York’s own Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-schuylerville.
It’s not that Ms. Stefanik is antivaccine. She’s quick to call for all Americans to have access to vaccines when it’s politically convenient, as it was back in February when she condemned the Biden administration for providing vaccines to inmates at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility for terrorists and terrorism suspects. Those precautions, she disingenuously suggested, were prioritizing terrorists over American citizens. Never mind, of course, the health of the military people guarding them.
And she was all for mandated testing and proof of vaccination — of illegal immigrants on the southern border. But she opposed Canada requiring tests of travelers from the United States if they were already vaccinated, even as she was demanding the border be fully reopened.
She demanded a criminal investigation into former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s handling of COVID -19 nursing home death data, but condemned mandates by President Joe Biden and Gov. Kathy Hochul that health care workers be vaccinated — requirements that will likely save lives in nursing homes and other health care facilities.
And predictably, with the virus continuing to spread around the world — including right in her own district — Ms. Stefanik was quick to blast Ms. Hochul’s orders for crowded hospitals to cease elective procedures in order to free up bed space and for businesses and other indoor venues to again require masks unless they implement a vaccine mandate.
Ms. Stefanik — who this year became the number three Republican in the House of Representatives — and the many other Republicans who have adopted this strategy would better serve the public if they used their bully pulpits to unequivocally encourage people to get vaccinated, rather than sending out all sorts of conflicting messages. If we’re to put mask and vaccine mandates behind us, political leaders must stop playing to a misguided base that sticks adamantly to the notion that not getting vaccinated or wearing a mask is somehow an exercise of liberty. It’s not. It’s reckless, self-centered behavior that’s nurturing variants, jeopardizing the reopening of businesses, schools, travel and tourism, and keeping the United States in the grip of a pandemic that has claimed nearly 800,000 Americans, including 47,135 in New York.
This cynical political calculation isn’t just breaking government’s effort to beat the pandemic. It’s killing people.