Yo, Delta Dolts: Is It Worth Getting Sick or Dead Just to Own the Libs?

By DICK POLMAN

On the fourth of July weekend, a number of sloppy headlines declared: Biden fails to achieve 70% vaccination goal. But in truth, the headlines should’ve read: Vaccination resisters fail to meet Biden’s vaccination goal.

They deserve the blame, not Biden. And now, because of what former Republican adviser Max Boot calls their “ignorance and irrationality,” they’re suffering the predictable consequences. New federal data shows that 99.5% of the Americans who’ve died of COVID in the last six months were unvaccinated; new data in the state of Maryland shows that, in May, 100% of the citizens who died of COVID were unvaccinated; and the highest death rates from COVID are not so coincidentally concentrated in states (Wyoming, Missouri, Mississippi, Arkansas, West Virginia) where the politics are red and the vaccination rates are lowest.

“It is the unvaccinated people who are dying,” Mississippi health director Thomas Dobbs tells a local TV station. “The unvaccinated people who are going to the hospital. The unvaccinated people who are getting diagnosed.” Even some red-state Republican governors are getting woke to reality. Arkansas’ Asa Hutchinson says, “We’re in a race against this Delta variant. The solution is the vaccinations.” West Virginia’s Jim Justice says that anyone who isn’t vaccinated has joined “the death lottery.”

Indeed, the situation is growing more dire by the day because the highly contagious delta variant is thriving in precisely those places where vaxx refuseniks reign supreme. In the last two weeks, the average number of daily COVID cases has spiked 145% in South Carolina, 137% in Nebraska and 121% in Arkansas. And by giving the variant license to spread, and perhaps mutate further, these stupid people are endangering those of us in the prudent majority who have vaccinated not just to protect ourselves but our fellow citizens as well.

I’d prefer not to call people stupid. But how else to describe the recent witness who testified at an Ohio health legislation hearing that the COVID vaccines “magnetize” us? This particular woman insisted, based on “evidence” posted on the Internet, that spoons, forks, and keys stick to our vaxxed bodies because we’ve been magnetized. (I tried to test that hypothesis by putting spoons and forks on my chest, but darn it, they kept sliding off.)

New polling stats sum things up perfectly: 86% of self-identified Democrats have been vaccinated, and six percent say they’re not likely to do it; but only 45% of Republicans have been vaccinated, and 47% say they’re not likely to do it. Meanwhile, 60% of unvaccinated Americans say that the government is exaggerating the dangers of the delta variant. President Biden said July 6 “The best defense against these variants is to get vaccinated. My fellow Americans, it’s the most patriotic thing you can do” – but hey, the MAGA-Republican attitude is that if Biden is pleading with them to do something, the impulse is to do the opposite. By the way, Fox News declined to air Biden’s vaccine address, which says it all.

What a pathetic and dangerous state of affairs. I want to ask these people whether it’s really worth risking sickness or death just to own the libs.

Apparently it is. And that impulse isn’t new. Lest we’ve forgotten, 12 red states are still refusing to expand their Medicaid programs under Obamacare. If those states were to miraculously change their minds – and give their neediest citizens access to health coverage – the federal government would pick up 90% of financial tab. A good deal, right? Apparently not. Those states adamantly prefer to let their neediest suffer just because Obamacare has the word Obama in it.

Biden’s political dilemma is obvious. He’s taking heat from some public health experts who want him to find ways to mandate vaccinations, or to at least pressure the private sector to mandate vaccinations for their employes. But if he were to take those steps, he’d likely prompt the vaxx refuseniks to dig in their heels against the supposedly tyrannical establishment. As former CDC director Tom Frieden told the New York Times, “There is so much toxic politics around COVID that it’s constraining sensible action. Obviously it makes sense to require proof of vaccination in various settings, but that has become a political lightning rod.”

So what we’re apparently left with, for the foreseeable future, is the Freedom to endanger each other. So I guess my last-ditch question for the refuseniks is this:

Trump got himself vaccinated. Isn’t that good enough for you?

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2021

Populist.com