Right Wing Media Sabotaging Biden Vaccine Rollout
The economy is presently poised for a strong economic recovery thanks to President Joe Biden and the Democrats in Congress. Already, the economy has created a record 3 million jobs in the last 5 months. In contrast, the economy was creating an anemic 60,000 jobs per month during the last three months of the Trump Administration. At the same time, we’re expecting the strongest economic growth since the early 1980s.
All of this progress has been made possible by Biden’s masterful vaccine rollout. The daily number of covid cases declined from 195,000 when Biden took office to around 12,000 by July 4. The Biden COVID-19 vaccination campaign prevented up to 279,000 deaths and 1.25 million hospitalizations, according to a recent study from the Yale School of Public Health and the Commonwealth Fund. Every Republican in Congress voted against Biden’s vaccine rollout. Every last one of them.
This impending success has made the right wing media desperate to sabotage all of this progress as part of a cynical power grab by the GOP. The likes of Fox News, Newsmax and AM right wing talk radio have been spewing out dangerous anti-vaxxer propaganda aimed at convincing their supporters not to get vaccinated. Unfortunately, this reckless campaign has caused a recent spike in corona virus cases.
In a recent opinion piece for The Daily Beast, Preston Padden, a former high-level executive at Fox Broadcasting, wrote that Fox News had “contributed substantially and directly” to “the unnecessary deaths of many Americans by fueling hesitation and doubt about the efficacy and safety of lifesaving Covid-19 vaccines.” He singled out the Fox’s highly rated prime-time opinion programs for blame.
Currently, there’s a lot of misinformation out there about COVID vaccines. Virtually all of that misinformation is coming from the right wing media. These right wingers are lying for profit and to sabotage the Biden presidency and the country.
Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum called out the right wing media in two recent tweets:
“COVID vaccine refusal was not some unprompted, spontaneous reaction among pro-Trump Americans. It was manufactured: first as part of a larger program of denial to cover for Trump’s pandemic failures; then after Trump lost, in order to stoke feelings of victimhood and persecution.
Had the US continued to vaccinate in the summer at the same rate as in the spring, the US would be near herd immunity by now. It took a lot of work by powerful people and institutions to prevent that outcome. It didn’t just *happen.* It was *done.*”
One of the more disturbing aspects of this propaganda campaign is just about every elected Republican official has refused to call it out and rebut it. It’s radio silence from the likes of Jeff Fortenberry and Don Bacon on this public health emergency. They are simply too cowardly to challenge their extreme base and are complicit in a sabotage campaign that is getting people killed.
Utah Republican Governor Spencer Cox is one of the few elected Republican officials who has spoken out: “We have these — these talking heads who have gotten the vaccine and are telling other people not to get the vaccine. That kind of stuff is just, it’s ridiculous. It’s dangerous, it’s damaging, and it’s killing people. I mean, it’s literally killing their supporters. And that makes no sense to me.”
Just why doesn’t Fox want its followers to get vaccinated? Why does Fox News and the right wing media want more people to get sick and for the country to fail ? You can rest assured that every Fox News host is vaccinated. Both Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham have refused to answer questions about their vaccination status.
“Put simply, I believe these Republicans are trying to promote outbreaks of Covid in America to soften or damage Joe Biden’s red-hot economy on the assumption that if the economy tanks then people will vote out Democrats and vote in Republicans in 2022 and 2024.” Thom Hartmann of AlterNet.org.
The D.C. Republicans and the right wing media have a long history of attempting to sabotage Democratic presidents and the country in order to regain power. In the past, those efforts have been confined to all out obstruction of the Democratic president’s legislative agenda. The likes of Mitch McConnell have been very open about their desire to wreck the Obama and Biden presidencies in the hopes of winning the next election.
The current sabotage campaign by the right wing media has reached a new low. The likes of Fox News are encouraging their followers to get sick — and even die- so that the Republicans regain power. This is treason. Period.
I expect elected Republican officials to join Utah Republican Governor Spencer Cox in denouncing this false and dangerous anti-vaxxer propaganda. If the likes of Fortenberry and Bacon remain silent, they are complicit in this treasonous plot to ruin the U.S.
The 2022 mid-term elections will be here before you know it. This will probably be the most consequential mid-term election in our history. If the Republicans regain control of one or more house of Congress, they will shut off funds for the Biden vaccine rollout in order to appease Fox News and their extreme base. Thousands of people will die — mostly their own followers.
That’s not all that the Republicans would do if they grabbed power again. Already, the D.C. Republicans are talking about shutting down the government and defaulting on the national debt to bully Biden into cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the ACA. The Republican Party in its present state is dangerous and unfit to govern.
Let’s leave it all out on the field in 2022! We can do it!