Republican Leaders Are Finally Taking Vaccination Seriously, But Is Their Base Listening?

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- The "Trump Vaccine" is how Sarah Huckabee Sanders, fmr WH spokesperson refers to the shot in order to get deplorables to finally jab.
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- Daily Kos, July 28, 2021. Republican handling of the this new COVID-19 phase has been bizarre. It’s clear that they’re less and less interested in killing off their own voters. Conservatives are finally tiring of needlessly dying, so are they finally vaccinating?

There’s Republican Rep. Clay Higgings of Louisiana, who announced a couple of days ago that he, his wife, and his son all have COVID-19. “I have COVID, Becca has COVID, my son has COVID,” he wrote on Facebook. “Becca and I had COVID before, early on, in Jan. 2020, before the world really knew what it was. So, this is our second experience with the CCP biological attack weaponized virus ...” He can’t admit that his stupid behavior—refusal to get vaccinated and opposition to common-sense precautions—likely led to his infection.

So like so many other conspiracy-minded Republicans, he’s blaming it on the Chinese, who he says have deployed a “biological attack weaponized virus.” Higgins can’t actually believe that, can he? If attacked, isn’t the obvious response to, you know, protect yourself against that attack? If he truly believed that, wouldn’t he want to deploy countermeasures such as—just spitballing here—a vaccine? The whole “China attacked us” line is just as ludicrous now as it was when Trump tried to use it to excuse his own inept handling of the pandemic. Because if true, it wouldn’t just damn the Chinese, it would also damn Republicans who have so ineffectively worked to keep our country and its people safe. Like Clay Higgins of Louisiana.

Speaking of Trump, he just had one of his creepy cult rallies in Arizona, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to urge his supporters to not die in the name of who-knows-what. "How about the vaccine? I came up with the vaccine,” he boasted, despite the obvious ridiculousness of the claim. Odds that he even knows what “mRNA” stands for are pretty much zero. Yet instead of begging his people to sensibly take the jab, the best he could manage was to weakly say he “recommended” it before reiterating that he “also believes in your freedoms 100%." Meanwhile, Trump explained conservative vaccine hesitancy by claiming that people "don't trust the president, people aren't doing it."

Of course, it’s clear at this point that Republicans won’t jab out of any sense of civic or neighborly duty to protect themselves and those around them. As Politico blithely declared a few days ago, “Many people are turning down Covid vaccines because they are angry that President Donald Trump lost the election and sick of Democrats thinking they know what’s best.” They’d rather die than give libs the satisfaction of … seeing them live? Except that when they start dying, many begin to change their tune. You may have read about the Louisiana doctor who wrote about her patients begging for vaccines just as they were about to get intubated...

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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/7/28/2042447/-Republican-leaders-are-finally-taking-vaccination-seriously-but-is-their-base-listening