After a year now of pandemic life, America appears to be barreling toward a better future: Cases are way down from their winter peak, and vaccinations have continued to accelerate. In less than two months, President Joe Biden has promised, there will be enough supply for every adult in the country to get their jab. One of the biggest obstacles remaining: Convincing people to take their shots.
There’s been plenty of talk about vaccine hesitancy among Black Americans, who have been given a great deal of reason to be suspicious of the medical establishment. But the reality appears to be that unequal access to vaccines, not skepticism about them, is the biggest obstacle to getting Black Americans vaccinated, and that it is actually Republican men who seem most likely to resist getting their shots. According to a recent NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist poll, nearly half of Republicans surveyed said they would not get a vaccine if offered—a massive partisan gap that Dr. Anthony Fauci is now practically begging former President Donald Trump to help close.
Incredibly, this vaccine resistance is not just playing out among the general populace, but on Capitol Hill as well. As Axios reported Sunday, a quarter of lawmakers in the House have still yet to be vaccinated—some because of medical conditions, some just out of a refusal to get one. And while the party-affiliation of all the holdouts keeping Congress from returning to normal business isn’t clear, Democratic leaders have implied that Republicans are at fault.
“Roughly 75% of all members in this House have had a vaccination for COVID-19,” Minority Whip Steve Scalise said on the floor last week. “There’s a strong desire to get back to a regular floor schedule.”
“It would be a lot simpler,” Majority Leader Steny Hoyer returned, “if every member had been vaccinated.”
The refusal of some lawmakers to take the vaccines—Madison Cawthorn, for one, has said he won’t take his shot because the COVID “survival rate is too high for me to want it”—has led to the continued slowdown of work on Capitol Hill. Such delays, Axios reported, have been exploited by the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has sought to further gum up the works. But the more significant impact of the vaccine hesitancy in Congress could be its trickle-down effects on the American public, about 80% of which will likely need to be vaccinated to end the coronavirus epidemic in the country. “Vaccines are our only way out of this,” Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee, told NBC News on Sunday. “If we don’t have 80-plus percent of the population vaccinated before next winter, this virus is going to come back raging.”
The good news is, Americans have increasingly come around on the vaccines, with about 70% of respondents in a recent Pew poll saying they will get their shots or already have. The bad news: The partisan divide has increased, too, with Republicans in that same poll about 25% less likely to say they have been or will be vaccinated. That apparent reluctance can be traced to Trump, who has long pushed conspiracy theories about vaccines and COVID, which he spent the last year of his presidency downplaying. He has had ample opportunity to convince his supporters to take the virus seriously and to get vaccinated; he had a dangerous bout with COVID in October, and received his vaccine at the White House in January. But he never changed his tone on the virus after his own infection and, for reasons known only to him, he kept his own vaccination quiet. His efforts to promote the vaccines have been limited to pathetic braggadocio. “If I wasn’t president, you wouldn’t be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all,” Trump said last week in a press release.
Were he to more forcefully call on his supporters, who hang on his every word, to get vaccinated, it seems likely the widening partisan gap could be narrowed. “I cannot imagine…that they would not get vaccinated,” Fauci said on Fox News Sunday. “If he came out and said, ‘Go get vaccinated. It’s really important for your health, the health of your family, and the health of your country,’ it seems absolutely inevitable that the vast majority of people who are his close followers would listen to him.” Of course, the former president seems, at the moment, less concerned about getting his supporters to come around on the vaccines and more so about reminding the public that the first ones were approved for use while he was in office, writing in his press release, “I hope everyone remembers!”
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