Vaccination pressure grows as Delta surges
What happened
Efforts to slow a nationwide Delta variant surge intensified this week, as New York City and California announced vaccine mandates for government workers, President Biden prepared to follow suit for federal workers, and a growing number of Republican governors and conservative media figures called on holdouts to get vaccinated. With the highly infectious variant driving outbreaks in red states, where vaccination rates have stalled well below 50 percent, many prominent Republicans urged holdouts to get shots. “It’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks,” said Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama, where Covid hospitalizations more than quadrupled in three weeks and just 34 percent are fully vaccinated. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and former Trump administration spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders all urged holdouts to get what Sanders called “the Trump vaccine.” House Republican Whip Steve Scalise—eligible for a shot since December— publicly took his own first dose. Fox News aired a public service announcement urging viewers to get vaccinated, and network star Sean Hannity did likewise. “I can’t say it enough,” he said. “We don’t need any more death.”
As new daily cases soared over 50,000 a day, both private employers and government began embracing vaccination mandates. New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio announced that the city’s 300,000 employees must get vaccinated or submit to weekly testing beginning in September, and urged private businesses to mandate vaccination for workers. California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a similar mandate for state employees and the state’s 2 million health-care workers, and the Department of Veterans Affairs mandated vaccination for its 115,000 health-care workers. President Biden was reportedly set to announce a vaccine mandate for all federal employees. The nation faces “a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” he said.
The CDC shifted gears on mask guidelines, recommending that vaccinated people resume wearing masks indoors in hard-hit areas and that all students and teachers—vaccinated or not—wear them when school resumes. “This is not a decision we have made lightly,” said CDC director Rochelle Walensky. “The Delta variant is showing every day its willingness to outsmart us.”
What the editorials said
It’s a welcome change to hear prominent conservatives “taking a firm stand on the right side of history,” said the Los Angeles Times. “But we’ll stop short of praising these latecomers for taking the high ground after the floodwaters were already rising.” If Ivey, DeSantis, and other Republicans had forcefully championed vaccination months ago, they might have helped close a “partisan gap” that has their states’ hospitals deluged with desperately ill Covid patients.
The federal government has no business mandating vaccines for the public—but “the matter is different for private employers,” said The Wall Street Journal. “It’s an odd libertarian streak” that protests government mandates but then argues that private firms shouldn’t be free “to set their own workplace rules.” With just under half the U.S. population fully vaccinated, increasing that number “has taken on more urgency.” The FDA could help by expediting “full approval of the clearly successful mRNA vaccines.”
What the columnists said
Republican officials’ pro-vaccine turn is no coincidence, said Susan Glasser in NewYorker.com. It’s “a coordinated political retreat.” As of July, counties that voted for Trump had vaccination rates of 35 percent vs. 47 percent for Biden counties. Republican leaders see the pandemic’s “alarming new math” and have decided they’d rather not “take the blame for killing off their own voters.”
The CDC’s new mask guidelines are “an extraneous distraction,” said Lawrence Gostin in TheDailyBeast.com. The unvaccinated will ignore them and continue to spread infection. Vaccine mandates may be politically fraught, but they’re the only way to bring “freedom from the coronavirus.” The CDC should encourage states to enact them for indoor public spaces and help them “implement them equitably,” while Biden should take the “bold step” of requiring vaccines for the military and all federal workers.