So the vaccinated are “running out of patience,” eh? By Jazz Shaw.
It seems as if every day we see another slew of headlines about the Delta variant and “resurgence” of the virus in this or that place. In reality, even some of these surges involve a number of new positive tests that are still vastly lower than during the height of the pandemic last winter. …
These complaints are being picked up in the liberal media, with the vast majority of the blame being cast at a predictable group: white, Republican Trump voters. …
A prime example popped up today from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. … Let’s start with the “evidence” that Josh presents about the people who are late to the vaccination party. He talks about a reporter who went to a pop-up vaccination pod in Los Angeles and met a number of people who could have been vaccinated months ago but just made the decision this week.
The people who turned out at this clinic were mainly Latino immigrants, so not the demographic that has garnered the most attention in the mainstream media discussion. The reasons ranged the gamut: they’d had COVID and assumed continued immunity; they didn’t want to or couldn’t take time from work; they had general apprehensions about a vaccine without a long testing history; they’d heard conspiracy theories women becoming infertile. In some cases, it was perhaps some vague mix of one or more of these and just continuing to put it off — apathy for lack of a better word.
What jumped out to me is that basically none of the couple dozen people who showed up the day Mejia was there had held out for any ideological or political reasons. And in most cases — as their being there to get their shot makes clear — they were ultimately convincible. …
[Josh] is quick to point out that these are “Latino immigrants.” That means that everyone on the left has to rush to the bulwarks and make sure nobody suggests there’s anything disruptive or “bad” about their decision to wait this long to get a shot. And of course, there was nothing political about it. (Perish the thought.) …
Pardon me, but the vast majority of unvaccinated people I’ve heard from among the “stereotypical Trumpers refusing for reasons tied to political commitment and ideology” (that’s Josh’s description one paragraph later of the real bad guys in this story) have cited the exact same reasons. But somehow, if a white Republican Trump voter says the exact same thing, one is political warfare while the other is “justifiable apprehension.”
Does anyone proofread this stuff before it’s published? …
On a per-capita basis, both Hispanic and Black Americans are vastly less likely to take the vaccines than whites or Asians. But nobody is “fed up” with them, right? Only with a politically convenient group of people of a particular skin tone and party affiliation. Everyone else refusing to be vaccinated is just fine and needs to be allowed their space to process things.
It’s all sickening. …
“Fed up” is code for …
There’s also a huge assumption in these arguments … That assumption is that being “fed up” with the choices of others somehow implies that they have the right to enact some course of action to correct the perceived errors of their political opponents’ ways. …
There is no court precedent for a federal mandate telling everyone they have to be vaccinated because no president has ever tried. Private businesses can make vaccination mandatory as a condition of employment (and some are already doing so), but when the federal government and their water carriers in the media start encouraging that on a broad scale, a very serious problem emerges.
Vaccine passports and some pretty ugly coercion seem inevitable now, the way the narrative is shaping up.
