The Patriot Post® · The Rank Politicization of Vaccination

The divide over COVID vaccine favorability has increasingly fallen along political lines, with Democrats generally in favor of receiving it and Republicans generally more reticent. How did the vaccine become such a politically divisive issue when it never should have been?

The answer from the Biden/Harris regime is to blame “misinformation” on social media. However, that dubious explanation itself is predicated on a political power play that Democrats and their Leftmedia cohorts put in motion early on when the coronavirus pandemic first began.

With the economy roaring under Donald Trump’s leadership, Democrats were desperate for anything that could be used to prevent his reelection. And that opportunity came with COVID. “God’s gift to the Left,” Jane Fonda called it. Democrats and the Leftmedia used the pandemic to create a narrative in which Trump was responsible for the deaths of what was then 200,000 Americans. It was an absurd and disingenuous claim, especially given the fact that after Trump left office, Joe Biden’s “solution” to COVID was essentially to continue doing what Trump had started.

When Trump predicted that his Operation Warp Speed would likely yield a vaccine by the end of 2020, he was widely panned by Democrats and their Leftmedia pundits as delusional. Yet Trump was proven correct with Moderna’s announcement a little over a week after the election that it had developed a vaccine. Pfizer soon followed suit. And just as Trump had predicted, Americans began being vaccinated before the year’s end.

Where were the media apologies or admissions that Trump had been right all along? They were nonexistent, of course, because Orange Man Bad.

Worse still, recall Kamala Harris’s comment regarding the development of a potential COVID vaccine prior to the election. When asked if she would take a vaccine developed under the Trump administration, Harris responded: “Well, I think that’s going to be an issue for all of us. I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump. … I will not take his word for it.” Harris is Exhibit A in who’s to blame for the politicizing of the vaccine.

And she wasn’t the only one peddling vaccine mistrust due entirely to the fact that Trump was president. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said it was “bad news” that the vaccine came during Trump’s presidency. But he didn’t stop there. Cuomo had state health officials review the vaccine because he didn’t trust the Trump administration to develop a safe one.

Biden himself similarly expressed distrust in the vaccines, saying, “I trust vaccines, I trust scientists, but I don’t trust Donald Trump.”

Leftmedia outlets blatantly considered any potential announcement of a vaccine prior to the election as dubious and downright dangerous. A Vanity Fair headline from September read, “Will Anyone Trust Serial Liar Donald Trump’s Coronavirus Vaccine?” USA Today echoed this with a story headlined, “If Trump announces a preelection COVID vaccine, who’d believe him — or go and get one?”

Even when Democrats were called out by the Trump administration for politicizing the vaccine, their Leftmedia defenders only doubled down. “Journalist” April Ryan fumed, “Mike Pence said Kamala Harris is playing politics with a national vaccine! He can’t be serious!” MSNBC producer Kyle Griffin offered his own disingenuous spin, stating: “Trump just lied, claiming that Joe Biden has ‘anti-vaccine theories.’ Biden is not anti-vaccine. Biden is against the possibility politicization of a vaccine by Trump. Trump made other lies about the production of COVID vaccine that are not worth spreading, even in a fact check.”

There was much, much more of this leftist anti-vaccine politicization going on for months — in fact, nearly the entire time Operation Warp Speed was going. And the result was predictable. A Gallup poll from October of last year found that 50% of Americans wouldn’t trust a COVID vaccine.

Fast-forward eight months, and now Biden and company are complaining that too many Americans are still refusing to get the COVID vaccine. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said “the administration is looking into” a federal vaccine mandate before walking it back after the predictable reaction.

Democrats and the Leftmedia have the temerity to lament the politicization of a vaccine that they are entirely responsible for creating. The Biden administration is now demanding that social media companies crack down on COVID “misinformation” because it is “killing people.” Democrats made this mess. They seeded vaccine mistrust. But now they want to blame Trump and Republicans.