Republicans, Democrats and the vaccine

More Republicans than Democrats appear to be “vaccine hesitant” — that is, reluctant for one reason or another — to take the COVID-19 vaccine. They’ve gotten the treatment you might expect in some quarters of the press. “Right-wing antivaccine hysteria is increasing. We’ll all pay the price,” read one headline in The Washington Post. In The New York Times, there was, “Farright Extremists Move From ‘Stop the Steal’ to Stop the Vaccine.” The Daily Beast chimed in with “The GOP’S Paranoid Streak From John Birchers to Anti-vaxxers.” You get the idea.

But it’s not hard to imagine a different picture. If President Donald Trump had won reelection, the vaccine skepticism might have leaned more to the other side. We can’t say that for sure, of course, but we do know that during the 2020 campaign, top Democratic leaders, like presidential nominee Joe Biden and running mate Kamala Harris, laid the groundwork for vaccine skepticism.

For example, during a CNN interview on Sept. 5, with the vaccine still in development under Trump’s historic Operation Warp Speed, Harris was asked if she would get the vaccine when it was ready. It depends, Harris answered. “I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump,” she continued, “and it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he’s talking about. I will not take word for it.”

In her Oct. 8 debate with Vice President Mike Pence, Harris was asked, “If the Trump administration approves a vaccine, before or after the election, should Americans take it and would you take it?” Harris answered that she would take it only if the nation’s top virologist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, recommended it. “But if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it, I’m not taking it,” Harris said.

Later in the debate, Pence told Harris, “Your continuous

undermining of confidence in a vaccine is just, it’s just unacceptable.” But Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, was sending the same message. “I trust vaccines, I trust scientists, but I don’t trust Donald Trump,” Biden said in September. “And at this moment the American people can’t, either.”

In October, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, at the time respected by Democrats despite his disastrous handling of the COVID pandemic in his state, was asked whether he had confidence in the government’s approval process for the vaccine. “I’m not that confident, but my opinion doesn’t matter,” Cuomo told ABC News. “I don’t believe the American people are that confident. I think it’s going to be a very skeptical American public about taking the vaccine, and they should be.” During the transition, Cuomo suggested he would bar distribution of the vaccine in New York — an extraordinary step as the pandemic raged — as long as Trump remained president.