San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Ivanka Trump loses loyalists by getting vaccine
On the afternoon of April 14, Ivanka Trump shared some good news with her Facebook followers.
The former first daughter posted two photos of a nurse injecting her with a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
“Today I got the shot!!!” she gushed. “I hope that you do too!”
Ivanka’s enthusiasm was not matched by her followers.
“One of the saddest pictures on the internet today,” one woman responded. “What a sellout!”
A male follower told Ivanka, “Not playing lab rat for BIG PHARMA. Experimental Gene Therapy DNA Modifying RNA Biological Agent, NOT A CHANCE!!!”
And so it went.
“I love you and your family, but nope. Never will I put that in my body,” one male commentator said.
“I’m sorry. I used to think you were smart and a patriot,” a female follower said. “Clearly not.”
Fifty years from now, historians will go through all kinds of brain contortions to make sense of our current right-wing resistance to the COVID-19 vaccine.
After all, for much of 2020, Donald Trump, the pied piper of modern American conservatism, pushed drug manufacturers to get vaccines tested, approved and administered before Election Day.
Trump was openly annoyed when the Pfizer vaccine’s emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration came a month after his failed re-election bid.
Nonetheless, Trump’s media acolytes wanted him to get credit for the vaccine.
Fox News commentator Geraldo Rivera suggested honoring the outgoing president by calling it the “Trump Vaccine.” Rivera’s pal Sean Hannity made a habit of using that very name.
At the same time, however, a substantial chunk of Trump’s Republican base regarded the idea of a government-funded mass vaccination program as something to be feared.
Loyalty to Trump, after all, meant a complete disdain for public servants; a belief that faceless deep-state bureaucrats routinely conspire to strip us of our liberties.
Trump’s devotees loved him in large part because they saw him as the wild bull rampaging through the bureaucratic china shop.
When it comes to the COVID-19 vaccine, that anti-government paranoia has dovetailed with a long-flourishing antivaxxer movement to create a perfect storm of vaccine resistance.
Going into this weekend, more than 137 million people in the United States (roughly 41 percent of the population) had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. More than 91 million (27 percent of the population) had been fully vaccinated.
Over the past couple of weeks, however, vaccination rates have slowed. Going forward, our problem is no longer supply, but demand.
A Monmouth University poll released last month found that 36 percent of Republicans are opposed to receiving the vaccine, compared with only 6 percent of Democrats.
If Trump had been re-elected, it would have been in the best interest of GOP politicians to tout the benefits of the vaccine. With Joe Biden in office, however, there’s little motivation for Republican elected officials to try talking their voters out of believing that Democrats want to use them for lab rats.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, pandered to the paranoia during a Thursday radio appearance.
Johnson said he sees “no reason to be pushing vaccines on people.”
Apparently, the devastation of a pandemic that has, in this country alone, infected more than 32 million, killed 570,000 and completely upended our way of life for more than a year, is not a good enough reason for mass vaccination.
Johnson uttered that idiocy on a talk show hosted by Vicki McKenna, a class act who tweeted this message about Biden’s vaccine initiative:
“The Drooler-in-Chief thinks we should all be forced to get an experimental ‘vaccine’ … to live a normal life in America. How about NO NO and HELL NO?”
Common sense says we should look at the vaccine as a gift that can allow us to return to something approaching our old sense of normalcy and protect each other from furthering the spread of this awful plague.
Instead, in our hyperpartisan, conspiracy-mongering time, the vaccine is widely regarded as Joe Biden’s mindcontrol serum.
Because Trump commanded the loyalty of COVID-19 skeptics and vaccine refuseniks, he would have been uniquely positioned to drive up vaccine participation. It’s not entirely clear, however, whether he could have cooled the anti-government distrust he spent most of his presidency fomenting.
After all, one of Trump’s most loyal supporters, rightwing rocker Ted Nugent, said back in December (when Trump was still in office), “It’s not a real pandemic and that’s not a real vaccine.”
Last Monday, Nugent revealed that he recently contracted COVID-19 and it left him barely able to “crawl out of bed.”
Nonetheless, Nugent remains anti-vaccine. He can’t be swayed.
It’s hard to knock down a wall built on pride, partisanship, paranoia and a twisted sense of patriotism.