Suddenly, (some) Republicans are all-in on the vaccine

The Republican pollster Glen Bolger told me that he didn’t think the G.O.P.’s about-face stemmed from a sudden fear of electoral debacle so much as a reflection of the alarming trend lines in red America. Until now, “Republicans felt like we don’t necessarily need to push on vaccines and tick off a significant portion of our base, so we won’t talk about it,” Bolger said. But, with cases increasing, that calculus changed. “It’s more of ‘Hey, guess who’s getting sick? Republicans,’ ” he said. Red America is facing a deadly fourth wave of the pandemic, and Republican politicians, or at least some, appear to have decided that they don’t want to take the blame for killing off their own voters…

All the drearily predictable talking points reminded me that, if there’s one thing we’ve all learned by now in the pandemic, it’s that public health and politics are one and the same: there is no way to separate them. Biden came into office pledging to follow the science, to vaccinate the country and lead the recovery. But he could not vaccinate the country against Fox News. There was no shot that could give viewers immunity to Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene. The result, for now, is that we have failed to achieve the herd immunity that would have wiped out covid. Biden staked his Presidency on beating the virus and “building back better.” Politically speaking, though, there’s not much point in talking about infrastructure deals or high-speed Internet if the pandemic is going to keep millions of Americans confined to their homes. So—the irony of ironies—Biden’s political future may well come down to the persuadability of Trump’s political base. And are they really persuadable? After all this, I find it almost impossible to believe that there is a way to persuade millions of vaccine-skeptical Republicans to embrace the shot that their leaders have been demonizing for months. Demagoguery is addictive, and it’s proved brutally effective—even for public health. “It’s more about what your team or your cable news network says than it is about reality,” Bolger said, regretfully. At least both parties now seem to agree on one thing: —the covid Crisis isn’t really over anymore.