Suddenly, (Some) Republicans Are All In on the Vaccine

Since the end of the Trump Presidency, Republicans have been ratcheting up the doom-and-gloom quotient in their rhetoric. By this spring, they settled on a narrative of permanent crisis—to be blamed on President Biden, of course. There was the Biden Border Crisis. The Crime Crisis. The Inflation Crisis and its corollary, the High-Gas-Price Crisis. The Critical-Race-Theory Crisis. Even, this week, the Ben & Jerry’s-Is-Mean-to-Israel Crisis. America under Biden, to hear them tell it, has become a hellscape of disasters. In June, the House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, issued a letter to his colleagues. “Our country is in crisis,” he declared. “Republicans stand against the impending malaise and stand for a greatness that we reached just a few years ago.” The one crisis that Republicans have tended not to mention is the actual one—that is, the pandemic. When Republican politicians have focussed on covid in recent months, it’s often been to give Donald Trump credit for the vaccines, while simultaneously accusing the Biden Administration of forcing those same vaccines on unwilling Americans.

So it was more than a bit surprising to see some Republicans this week kinda, sorta, maybe embrace a different message. The Louisiana congressman Steve Scalise, the House’s No. 2 Republican, posed for a photo of himself getting a vaccine shot, many months after he was eligible, and urged others to do the same. “Get the vaccine,” Scalise said, at a press conference on Thursday. “I have high confidence in it. I got it myself.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a polio survivor who was never on board with his party’s vaccine denialists and anti-maskers, warned, during his own press conference: either get vaccinated or get ready for more lockdowns. “This is not complicated,” McConnell said. Fox News, which, along with Facebook, has been among the country’s premier platforms for vaccine disinformation in recent months, started promoting a new get-vaccinated public-service announcement. Its prime-time star, the Trump confidant Sean Hannity, stared straight into the camera on Monday night and said, “It absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated.”

These statements were not a coincidence; they were a coördinated political retreat. And no wonder: the new politics of the pandemic are following the alarming new math of the pandemic. With not quite half of the country—48.8 per cent, to be exact—fully vaccinated, cases of the new Delta variant are spiking upward across the United States, with particularly pronounced increases in large swaths of Trump country. At the end of June, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that eighty-six per cent of Democrats had at least one shot, versus fifty-two per cent of Republicans—and the gap in vaccination rates is not closing but widening. As of July, thirty-five per cent of the population in counties that voted for Trump had been vaccinated, compared with nearly forty-seven per cent in counties that voted for Biden. By this week, new daily cases nationally were at their highest level since April. Deaths are increasing, too, while the number of new vaccinations is down to January levels.

The Republican pollster Glen Bolger told me that he didn’t think the G.O.P.’s about-face stemmed from a sudden fear of electoral debacle so much as a reflection of the alarming trend lines in red America. Until now, “Republicans felt like we don’t necessarily need to push on vaccines and tick off a significant portion of our base, so we won’t talk about it,” Bolger said. But, with cases increasing, that calculus changed. “It’s more of ‘Hey, guess who’s getting sick? Republicans,’ ” he said. Red America is facing a deadly fourth wave of the pandemic, and Republican politicians, or at least some, appear to have decided that they don’t want to take the blame for killing off their own voters.

President Biden certainly noticed the rhetorical shift. “They’ve had an altar call, some of those guys,” Biden said, during a CNN town hall on Wednesday night. “All of a sudden, they’re out there saying, ‘Let’s get vaccinated, let’s get vaccinated.’ . . . That’s good.” But Biden is having to do his own, somewhat less egregious, version of backpedalling, too. The President had set a goal of seventy per cent of American adults being vaccinated by July 4th. Even though that didn’t happen, he went ahead with a huge party at the White House for some thousand mostly unmasked guests, including first responders and essential workers who’ve spent the past sixteen months battling the pandemic—Independence Day from the disease being the not very subtle message. But math is math, and the numbers are not good. On Wednesday night, at the town hall, Biden suggested that schoolchildren would probably have to wear masks when in-person classes resume this fall, and foreshadowed the reimposition of indoor mask mandates for the broader population that may soon be coming. (Confusingly, Biden added, “But this is not a pandemic.” Earlier, the President got the new reality right: “Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated.”) On Thursday, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, also seemed to indicate that such measures may be back on the table, with decisions to be “driven by the C.D.C.” She added, “We’ve never said that battle is over.”

On Capitol Hill—which, like the rest of Washington, has been rapidly returning to a pre-pandemic normal this summer—alarms sounded once again when it was revealed this week that one vaccinated aide to Speaker Nancy Pelosi had tested positive for the coronavirus, along with several staffers in the extremely covid-conscious White House. Everyone seemed to remember all at once a CNN poll from May which found that, although the entire Democratic membership of Congress had been vaccinated, the number was as low as forty-five per cent for House Republicans. When I went to the House for an interview, on Wednesday, I saw that some staffers were masking back up again. For a Wednesday-night reception that Pelosi held for the new House sergeant-at-arms, Axios reported, all guests were “expected to wear a mask.” On Thursday, Republicans had a press conference outside the Capitol for the ostensible purpose of prodding their voters to get the vaccine. There was a bit of that, as well as a lot of blame-shifting. A headline in the Times summed it up: “House Republicans Use Vaccine Press Conference to Bash Democrats.”

All the drearily predictable talking points reminded me that, if there’s one thing we’ve all learned by now in the pandemic, it’s that public health and politics are one and the same: there is no way to separate them. Biden came into office pledging to follow the science, to vaccinate the country and lead the recovery. But he could not vaccinate the country against Fox News. There was no shot that could give viewers immunity to Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene. The result, for now, is that we have failed to achieve the herd immunity that would have wiped out covid. Biden staked his Presidency on beating the virus and “building back better.” Politically speaking, though, there’s not much point in talking about infrastructure deals or high-speed Internet if the pandemic is going to keep millions of Americans confined to their homes. So—the irony of ironies—Biden’s political future may well come down to the persuadability of Trump’s political base. And are they really persuadable? After all this, I find it almost impossible to believe that there is a way to persuade millions of vaccine-skeptical Republicans to embrace the shot that their leaders have been demonizing for months. Demagoguery is addictive, and it’s proved brutally effective—even for public health. “It’s more about what your team or your cable news network says than it is about reality,” Bolger said, regretfully. At least both parties now seem to agree on one thing: —the covid Crisis isn’t really over anymore.