Opinion By Hal Brown
Read my blog for stories that piqued my interest today
The above graphic is from U.S. Public Now Divided Over Whether To Get COVID-19 Vaccine — Concerns about the safety and effectiveness of possible vaccine, pace of approval process.
If a safe vaccine comes out while Trump is still president he will of course take credit for it. Oh wait, he’s already do it. Malignant narcissist and a man totally lacking in class that he is, he can't help himself by also disparaging Gov Cuomo:
He may make a major effort to promote it while he’s still president. It will let him bask in the spotlight as the hero we so wants to be. It will help to a small extent to help him avoid the narcissistic injury having to finally concede Biden won will cause. Hopefully it will mediate further outbursts of the narcissistic rage we have already seen.
Of course since experts like Dr. Fauci tells us that once approved the vaccine won’t be available for widespread administration until April Trump will have been out of office for at least three months so what’s in it for him to join the efforts to persuade Americans to take it? (See Coronavirus vaccine could be ready for all Americans by April, Fauci says; but one of the major hurdles will be convincing people to take it.)
For the sake of the millions of American who support him I hope this happens and it is able to convince them to get the vaccine. I don't have an outpouring of sympathy for them, but the country needs as many people to be vaccinated as possible to keep the rest of us safe.
If and hopefully when it comes out and mass distribution begins in earnest I doubt Trump will still be president. I do not think he will have any inclination to join the efforts of the Biden administration to encourage people to take it.
The sheer hypocrisy of his actively promoting a vaccine to stop the pandemic he caused notwithstanding it isn’t in his nature to spend any time doing anything that doesn’t accrue to his immediate benefit.
There is a connection between politics and general pre-Covid anti-vax beliefs. We know there is a large group of anti-vaxers across the the political spectrum (from 2015 before the Trump presidency “What’s behind the ‘anti-tax’ movement?”)
I personally know many liberal people who are against vaccinations. It will be difficult enough to persuade them to get vaccinated.
The QAnon wackos may believe that the vaccine is really a drug for insidious government mind control. It would be one of the less bizarre conspiracies they believe.
The members of the Trump cult may be so angry that Biden and his team, which may include Dr. Fauci, are promoting the vaccine that they won’t take it because of their visceral hatred for them.
The end result of this could be that rather than achieving herd immunity by just letting the virus run its course is that, in effect, we’d have a culling of the herd. Trumpers who refuse to get vaccinated because they see it not as “The Trump Vaccine” but rather as “The Biden-Fauci Vaccine” will be more likely to get Covid-19. They will pass it on to the those people who refuse to wear a mask because they believe this demonstrates disloyalty to Trump and makes them appear to be a liberal snowflakes.
We don't know exactly how the new vaccine or vaccines will work. If they are like the annual influenza vaccine they would keep you from getting Covid-19. Rather they’d just give you a milder case. Even if the prevent 90% of the vaccinated from contracting the virus, that's still one in ten that could get it if exposed.
Therefore, even when I’m vaccinated with a vaccine that has been recommended by Biden’s Covid-19 team I have a feeling that I still will be wearing a mask and taking precautions for a long time afterwards because the infected and contagious will still be among us.
Once I am vaccinated, even if it doesn't kill me, I don't want a mild case. I don’t want to be in the 10%.
Not only that, doctors and medical researchers are just learning about the debilitating, or even life threatening, long-term illnesses caused even by contracting a symptomatically mild case.
Bottom line: I don't anticipate a mask burning ceremony in the foreseeable future.