But even the conservatives who didn’t go all the way to vaccine opposition often seemed to take vaccine uptake somewhat for granted, treating it as a purely individual decision and training most of their fire on the perils of the next round of public health overreach. Those perils existed, in blue America especially — but the vaccines were so much more effective at preventing deaths than the most common nonpharmaceutical interventions, the stakes of their uptake so much higher, that a lot of conservative leaders ended up imbalanced, saving their enthusiasm for opposition to whatever the liberals were up to next, when what was needed first was just some over-the-top Republican enthusiasm for the vaccines.

A figure like DeSantis exemplified this problem. He made a big initial push for vaccination in Florida, but he was clearly much more comfortable pushing back against mandates than he was being a permanent salesman for vaccines that part of his core constituency resisted. And this was a problem because he, precisely because of the credibility he’d built up resisting prior public health overreach, was the best possible salesman available in Florida — and not only in Florida — not named Donald Trump. The fact that he wasn’t anti-vaxx was not enough: Precisely because red America was more resistant than blue America, it needed its leaders to be vaccine salespeople not only at the outset but through the Delta and Omicron waves as well.