I will never really understand why these people want to kill their own audience and Republican voters, but they do. It’s the damnedest thing:
The White House has been stepping up its community outreach efforts for the coronavirus vaccines, with President Joe Biden announcing an effort to get ahead of emerging variants in a speech on July 6. But at the same time as many public health experts say there should be even more stringent requirements for people to get vaccinated, right-wing media outlets are instead waging their own scare campaign against even the community outreach, continuing their shameful record of undermining the vaccination campaigns.
Polling data has shown that Republican voters are far less likely than Democrats to even want to get the vaccines, seriously contributing to the country having missed Biden’s goal for 70% of adults to have been vaccinated by July 4. (Most of the states that fell short were won by former President Donald Trump in 2020, while the states that have surpassed the goal were all won by Biden.)
But conservative media figures have quickly seized on one particular line from Biden’s speech on Tuesday, in which he appealed to people to get vaccinated as “a patriotic thing to do.”
“Now we need to go to community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, and oftentimes, door to door — literally knocking on doors — to get help to the remaining people protected from the virus,” Biden said. “Look, equity, equality — it remains at the heart of our responsibility of ensuring that communities that are the hardest hit by the virus have the information and the access to get vaccinated.”
Now, right-wing media is engaged in a dishonest and irresponsible spin operation, warning people that the government is coming to get them with the vaccine.
Fox News prime-time host Tucker Carlson, who has led a propaganda campaign in concert with anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists and with Fox’s full corporate support, fearmongered about Biden’s speech during his program on Tuesday night.
Following a segment in which he claimed the pandemic had been “overhyped” because most deaths occurred in the elderly — though this argument also disregarded other adverse effects associated with “long COVID” — Carlson warned anyone who might come knocking to promote the vaccine to “stay the hell out of my house, for real.” Carlson then claimed that a door-to-door vaccine promotion campaign was a “much bigger” scandal than even the Iraq War.
That’s just the beginning. Click over to the full story to see that Fox, Newsmax and OAN are pimping vaccine rejection all day long. They are obsessed with it.
I wonder how many of them have been vaccinated?