Let’s begin with the obvious: Joe Biden is not a “dictator” for expanding vaccination and testing requirements, nor is he “trampling on civil liberties.” None of the steps outlined Thursday to combat COVID-19, which is still rampaging 18 months into the pandemic despite the widespread availability of safe and free vaccines, amount to “tyranny.” Those seeking to give you a Pfizer shot are nothing at all like the “gestapo,” and Americans should absolutely comply with public health guidelines—regardless of what some hysterical guy standing in a cornfield at night might tell you.
The right-wing backlash to Biden’s new efforts to beat back the pandemic is as predictable as it is aggravating. Republicans, particularly devotees of noted public health expert Donald Trump, have already been standing in the way of the long-sought return to post-COVID normalcy, with some on the right apparently eschewing vaccines in favor of an anti-parasitic commonly used to treat heartworm in animals and state leaders like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott warring against common sense precautions as caseloads rise. That this lot, already prone to hyperbole, would go absolutely ballistic over the White House’s more forceful vaccine push was a foregone conclusion.
And yet, the right’s response to the Biden administration’s new six-part plan has somehow been even more unhinged than anticipated. Ted Cruz called the updated guidelines “utterly lawless” and applauded the right-wing Daily Wire for announcing it wouldn’t comply with the administration’s new vaccination requirements—and his was one of the more subdued takes on the matter. Several GOP lawmakers, including Senator Marsha Blackburn and Representative Madison Cawthorn, likened Biden to a “dictator.” Senator Josh Hawley, one of the main instigators of the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill, accused Biden of “threatening” Americans. Steve Scalise, the number two Republican in the House, charged that Biden was “abusing power.”
But all that nonsense was nothing compared with the bile that exploded out of the far-right media after the Biden announcement. A piece on the Federalist called the White House move “fascist.” A Breitbart headline declared that Biden had gone “full authoritarian.” And, as CNN’s Oliver Darcy pointed out, Fox News—which Biden mentioned in his address as a company not quite as opposed to life-saving vaccines as its public-facing propaganda operation would lead viewers to believe—was among the worst offenders, with banner headlines reading: “BIDEN IS AN AUTHORITARIAN,” “BIDEN DECLARES WAR ON MILLIONS OF AMERICANS,” and “FULL TOTALITARIAN.”
What did Biden do to generate this level of outrage from the right? He announced on Thursday that he had instructed the Labor Department to institute an emergency rule requiring that companies with more than 100 employees mandate vaccinations or weekly testing and that they give employees time-off to get their shots. He also broadened his existing mandate on federal workers and healthcare workers, and urged school districts to adopt requirements like the one in Los Angeles. “The time for waiting is over,” he said in his White House remarks. “This summer, we made progress through the combination of vaccine requirements and incentives, as well as the FDA approval...But we need to do more.”
If that doesn’t sound all that tyrannical to you, that’s because it isn’t. It’s not unreasonable to require citizens to protect themselves and others against a virus that has killed upward of 650,000 Americans, and it is no more an affront to individual liberty than the litany of other vaccines that are already mandated. There are almost certainly some whose brains have been so rotted by five years of culture war mania that they cannot tell the difference between asking people to take a shot and the Holocaust. But there are many more, presumably, who know better but are cynically feeding into the base’s frenzy. They are people in positions of power who have discovered that, to maintain and expand that power, they can simply parrot Trump’s self-serving grievances at the pandemic he couldn’t control and the public health officials who would not accede to his alternate reality. That their lies and conspiracy theories and bluster have a real, human-scale impact—not just on their political opponents they’ve already shown how little they care about, but on their own base—doesn’t seem to matter to them.
The good news: Whatever these belligerent cranks and cynics might tweet, nearly 75 percent of eligible Americans have received at least one shot, and almost two-thirds have been fully-vaccinated, and surveys suggest that the public is broadly in favor of mandates. Some requirements, including ones in the workplace, may receive more pushback than others, as a Gallup poll conducted last month implied. Still, it suggests that for a majority of Americans, these mandates represent not the iron fist of tyranny, but reasonable measures to get a once-in-a-century public health crisis under control. Some will no doubt be persuaded by the right’s latest culture war call to arms. But for the significant, growing majority of Americans who have done what they’re supposed to do but are still slogging through the pandemic life we’d nearly sloughed off, it might be Biden’s words that resonate more: “We’ve been patient,” he said Thursday, “but our patience is wearing thin.”
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Biden’s COVID Vaccination Strategy Triggers Full-Scale Republican Meltdown - Vanity Fair
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