The Fury of the Vaccinated [View all]

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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/7/16/2040296/-The-Fury-of-the-Vaccinated

The Fury of the Vaccinated
Dan K
Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)
Friday July 16, 2021 · 5:21 PM EDT


There’s an article on Taggan Goddard’s Political Wire (behind a paywall) about how the pandemic could affect the 2022 midterms. One part particularly caught my eye:

There’s another big part of the population — those that are vaccinated — that are increasingly furious with the unvaccinated. This anger will only grow if there are new lock downs, school closures and other restrictions.

We spend a lot of time on this forum worrying about the political power of the unvaccinated in this country. But maybe we’re overlooking the impact they’re having on the other half of the country — the half that believes in science, that understands we’re all in this together, and that personal responsibility means having some consideration for those around us.

These are the people rapidly getting pissed off at the other part of the country: the ones that think Covid is a hoax (including some who continue to say that even as they’re dying from Covid), the ones that swallow the right-wing malarkey about vaccines injecting microchips and making you magnetic. The ones — especially the ones — who say it’s their body and no one has the right to tell them what to do with it (pregnant women excepted). The ones who want Trump to get all the credit for a vaccine they refuse to take.

GQP politicians have gone to great and well-documented lengths to get people not to get vaccinated. Whether it’s to make Biden look bad or to pander to the Trump craziness of the moment, whether they're caught in a vicious cycle of pandering to their base, whether they think they can diminish the Democrats’ votes by killing off more minority voters — the point is that they’re keeping the vaccinations down and the number of Covid cases up. Unvaccinated individuals now account for the vast majority of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths in the U.S., according to available data.

That is political energy waiting to be tapped in this election cycle: the fury of the vaccinated. Get them riled up and get them out to vote.

Seems the White House is starting to do at least part of this now: ‘Potentially a death sentence’: White House goes off on vaccine fearmongers:

The Biden administration is casting conservative opponents of its Covid-19 vaccine campaign as dangerous and extreme, adopting a more aggressive political posture in an attempt to maneuver through the public health conundrum.

The White House has decided to hit back harder on misinformation and scare tactics after Republican lawmakers and conservative activists pledged to fight the administration’s stated plans to go “door-to-door” to increase vaccination rates. The pushback will include directly calling out social media platforms and conservative news shows that promote such tactics.

That’s only part of it, though. The other part is for Dems (maybe not Biden himself) to get the vaccinated mad as hell and not willing to take it any more.

On getting out the vote: Republican voter suppression efforts are nefarious, unscrupulous, and very worrisome. But voter suppression has a history of sometimes backfiring in two ways. First, it can cut off voters that the suppressors want to be voting; they cast too wide a net. Second, attempts to take away our vote, when widely publicized, can motivate those who would be suppressed to get out there and vote in even greater numbers. We saw that the Georgia Senate runoffs.

So, worry. But also get to work.