I can’t understand these people, to the point where I’m wondering how many of them are sincere and how many are just posturing because they know a meaningful number of their constituents/fans are stridently anti-vaccine.

Let me revise that. I’m sure Marjorie Taylor Greene is sincere. Dan Crenshaw, Chip Roy, and the “Fox & Friends” people should, and almost certainly do, know better.

We’ve hit the “vaccine wall” at a moment when an especially contagious variant is spreading across the country. For the moment, unvaccinated people are basically the only ones at risk of a dire outcome from COVID; last month in Maryland, in fact, literally every person who died of the disease hadn’t had their shots yet. The feds have already ruled out vaccine passports as a way of coercing people into getting immunized. Biden also seems reluctant to call on employers to require their workers to get vaxxed, not wanting to politicize that topic. So the administration’s stuck trying to figure out ways to get persuadable people to get their shots before Delta becomes more of a problem.

One idea is to send health officials out into communities with lower vaccination rates and offer the shots to people literally on their own front porches. Why anyone who wants a vaccine would have failed to get one by now is hard to understand, admittedly. They’ve had six months, the vaccines are abundant, they’re available at practically every convenience store, so why can’t we leave it to holdouts to take the initiative themselves? That question reminds me, though, of the vaccination drive held in a brewery in Buffalo a few months ago, where an unvaccinated young woman eating lunch with her friends had her arm twisted by them and ended up agreeing to get the shot. You know the way some people are — they may not be motivated to do a particular thing, but as you make it more convenient for them some will shrug and say “fine.”

I don’t imagine the suburbs being the main target of a door-to-door effort. I’d imagine the feds will focus on poorer areas where people don’t pay as much attention to the news as the average American does. Maybe those locals know that the nearest Wal-Mart has the shots, but maybe they don’t. Maybe they’re curious about the shot but have questions and haven’t focused on getting those questions answered, and getting to talk to an official face-to-face might help. Maybe they work long hours and have to take care of kids when they’re off and haven’t had the time or focus to go get vaccinated, but might say yes if the shots were brought to them. Maybe they’re housebound due to some health issue.

The point is, some people will agree to get vaxxed if officials come to their door. The question is how many, realistically. Is it worth even organizing this effort given the probably meager returns?

I can understand concluding that it’s not. I can understand believing that the feds don’t have the manpower to do this in any meaningful way and that the money allocated for it should be spent on outreach with more bang for the buck. What I can’t understand is this performative hostility. Greene even resorted to another Nazi comparison, just weeks after she toured the Holocaust Museum and said she’d learned her lesson:

Biden pushing a vaccine that is NOT FDA approved shows covid is a political tool used to control people.

People have a choice, they don’t need your medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations.

You can’t force people to be part of the human experiment. https://t.co/S8qlstuSqL

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) July 6, 2021

Hey @POTUS – coming soon to https://t.co/qR9l7GcL8G… pic.twitter.com/LzCSJt2qd7

— Chip Roy (@chiproytx) July 7, 2021

How about don’t knock on my door.

You’re not my parents. You’re the government. Make the vaccine available, and let people be free to choose.

Why is that concept so hard for the left? https://t.co/Fkv3kzNh6S

— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) July 6, 2021

People are free to choose in the door-to-door scenario, Dan. You can choose to get the vaccine or you can choose to say “sorry, not interested, have a nice day.”

“Fox & Friends” joined the parade against door-to-door sales of the vaccine too:

“People are up in arms about this,” Ainsley Earhardt noted. “Because we as Americans can make our own choices for our own families and our own bodies.”…

“When someone is knocking at your door with a vaccine, are they going to have the shot in their hand, or are they going to encourage you to go, ask you questions, like the census bureau does?” Earhardt continued. “Listen, when you are cooking or watching a movie, do you want someone knocking on your door that you don’t know? That’s a stranger?”

“The only answer when the government comes knocking at the door, ‘My body, my choice, see you later’ and shut the door,” Pete Hegseth agreed. “Ultimately, we are responsible people that can make that call for ourselves.”

I’m imagining the conversation:

“Good morning, I’m with the CDC. I’m wondering, would you be interested in a free lifesaving vaccine to protect yourself and your family? if you haven’t had time to get it but would like to, we can do it right now.”
“How dare you. I’m in the middle of the ‘Friends’ reunion special.”

Hegseth is wrong too. It’s not “my body, my choice.” Someone on Twitter this morning asked me how I’d like it if the feds started sending agents door to door to nag people for being overweight. I confess, I wouldn’t — and I also wouldn’t see the need since obesity isn’t contagious. You can stuff your fat face all day long and it won’t make any difference to my weight. But when there are people out there who might want the shot if it’s offered but sufficiently disconnected from mainstream society that they don’t know much about it even now, their vulnerability to COVID does pose some risk to the wider community — especially to people with compromised immune systems and even the vaccinated potentially. The most populous country in the world gave us SARS-CoV-2; the next most populous gave us the Delta variant. We’re the third-most populous and we have a gigantic number of unvaccinated people still, any one of whom could end up being the laboratory for the virus’s next deadly mutation.

So it’s not “my body, my choice.” It’s “your body, my choice” potentially.

Some experts think the situation with Delta is urgent enough that the White House should start leaning on companies behind the scenes to make vaccination a condition of employment. The state’s not going to mandate it, but Americans have enough respect for a business owner’s right to run his or her shop as they see fit that most will go along with that:

“I’m trying to restrain myself, but I’ve kind of had it,” said Kathleen Sebelius, who was the health secretary for five years under President Barack Obama. Schools and businesses should be encouraged to require the vaccine, she said.

“You know, we’re going to tiptoe around mandates,” she said. “It’s like, come on. I’m kind of over that. I want to make sure that people I deal with don’t have it so I don’t transmit it to my granddaughter.”…

Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, said that even though the federal government’s authority to enact mandates was limited, the Biden administration still had considerable power to recommend them. It can provide more funding for proof-of-vaccination systems and create incentives for colleges, universities and organizations to require that a vaccine be offered, he said.

YouGov published a poll this week that found fully 40 percent of unvaccinated adults are worried about the Delta variant. Compare that to just 19 percent who are worried among those who are unvaccinated and say they don’t plan to get the shots. That 40 percent figure suggests a surprisingly large pool of people who, for whatever reason, haven’t taken the plunge yet but are open to it. In the end, though, the probable reason why the door-to-door campaign will either never be launched or will happen in only a limited fashion is that there are enough militant anti-vaxxers out there that it’s easy to imagine some well-meaning health official getting blown away for ringing the wrong doorbell. Think of the viral videos we’ve seen since the start of the pandemic of nuts spazzing out at Costco or wherever when told they need to wear a mask to enter. Now imagine an agent of the state showing up at their own home, simply offering to help in case they want the vaccine but haven’t had an opportunity, and getting attacked for doing so. If even a guy as normally sober and genial as Dan Crenshaw is engaged in theatrical outrage about this, imagine how someone who’s genuinely unhinged would respond. This country’s too broken for a door-to-door operation.