GOP seeks to sway its followers
Partisan divide seen in vaccination rates
When a group of Republican doctors in Congress released a video selling the safety of the coronavirus vaccine, their message wasn’t aimed explicitly at their conservative constituents, but nonetheless had a clear political bent.
Getting the shot is the best way to “end the government’s restrictions on our freedoms,” Rep. Larry Bucshon, an Indiana Republican and heart surgeon who donned a white lab coat and stethoscope when he spoke into the camera.
The public service announcement was the latest effort from GOP leaders to shrink the vaccination gap between their party and Democrats. With vaccination rates lagging in red states, Republican
leaders have intensified efforts to persuade their supporters to get the shot, at times combating misinformation spread by some of their own.
“Medicine and science and illness, that should not be political,” said Dr. Brad Wenstrup, a Republican congressman from Ohio and a podiatrist who has personally administered coronavirus vaccine shots as an Army Reserve officer and as an ordinary doctor. “But it was an election year, and it really was.”
Wenstrup said both parties helped foment some skepticism.
“Things could easily spiral quickly if we don’t solve this redstate-blue-state issue,” said Kavita Patel, a physician and health policy expert who worked in the Obama administration.
Patel said life could return to normal in certain parts of the country while the pandemic continues to rage elsewhere.
It’s easy to spot potential trouble spots now — and the political pattern.
Mississippi has the nation’s lowest vaccination rate, with less than 31% of its population receiving at least one anti-coronavirus shot. And the four states that precede it in national rankings? Alabama, Louisiana, Idaho and Wyoming, according to an Associated Press analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. They all vote reliably Republican in presidential races.
By contrast, the five states with the highest vaccination rates backed Democrat Joe Biden in November. New Hampshire leads the nation with 60% of its population receiving at least one dose, followed by Massachusetts, Vermont and Connecticut. The state with the fifth-highest vaccination rate, Maine, awarded three of its electoral votes to Biden and one to former President Donald Trump.
Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say they definitely or probably won’t get vaccinated, 44% vs. 17%, according to a poll released in February from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs.
Hence this week’s video in which Texas Republican Rep. Michael Burgess, an obstetrician who reassured viewers that rather than rush the vaccine out in an unsafe fashion, federal officials “cut bureaucratic red tape, not corners. And they got the job done in record time.” The video also credited the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed with bringing the vaccine so quickly.
Amid polling showing that Republican men were among the most likely vaccine holdouts, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said this month, “I can say, as a Republican man, as soon as it was my turn, I took the vaccine.”
Even Trump, who was vaccinated privately while in office, suggested on Fox News Channel that he’d be willing to record a video urging vaccination.
Doing so would be an aboutface for Trump, who as president said he’d be willing to take a vaccine but also relished politicizing the pandemic. He suggested that lockdowns recommended by his administration’s experts were governmental overreach, mocked then-candidate Biden for wearing a mask in public and used racist terms such as “China virus.”
Not all Republican lawmakers feel the same sense of urgency to raise the vaccination rate.
“The science tells us that vaccines are 95% effective. So if you have a vaccine, quite honestly, what do you care if your neighbor has one or not?” Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson said during a recent interview with a conservative radio host. “I mean, what is it to you?”