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 Let’s take a step back. The reality of any viral pandemic is
that it continues until the population acquires a sufficient level of herd
immunity, whether naturally or through vaccination. Until that happens, the best
the government can do is mitigate the consequences of the disease while
developing a vaccine as quickly as possible.
That was essentially President Donald Trump’s plan for dealing with COVID-19.
His administration shut down travel from China in the pandemic’s early days, and
then focused on gathering information about the disease, funding and
distributing therapeutics and supplies, and accelerating the development of a
vaccine through Operation Warp Speed.
That effort has paid handsome dividends – it’s the one real success of the
pandemic response effort. About 75% of eligible Americans have had at least one
dose of the vaccine, and while the delta variant is still spreading in parts of
the country, the vaccines have prevented most of the serious illness and death
that otherwise would have occurred. Thank you, Donald Trump.
But during the 2020 election campaign, candidate Biden promised voters that he
would do better than Trump. He claimed that he had a “national strategy” to end
the COVID threat. In a campaign speech last October, Biden stated that if he had
“the honor of being elected your next president” he’d “immediately put in place
a national strategy” to “position our country to finally get ahead of this virus
and get back our lives.”
In turns out that there was no such “better than Trump” strategy. Biden has done
little that Trump was not already doing. The president’s current mandate
strategy is a backhanded acknowledgment that the Operation Warp Speed vaccines
are the only truly effective weapon against the disease. Biden has one arrow in
his quiver – and Trump put it there. Biden’s problem has been that vaccines
don’t work unless people take them, and his efforts at persuasion – his primary
responsibility – have been less than stellar.
That should come as no surprise. During the campaign, Biden did all he could to
ensure that people would not trust what Democrats called the “Trump vaccines.”
Biden openly expressed concern that a vaccine would be moved “quicker than the
scientists think it should be moved” and that there was “enormous pressure” on
the CDC and the FDA to approve it. Even left-leaning PolitiFact has acknowledged
that Biden raised “doubts about Trump’s trustworthiness, his ability to roll out
the vaccines safely and the risk of political influence over vaccine
development.”
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Perhaps Biden supporters believed him. The media often characterizes vaccine
resisters as Trump supporters, but African Americans (87% of whom voted for
Biden) and Hispanics (66% for Biden) are more likely to be unvaccinated than any
other racial or ethnic groups, according to the CDC.
Individuals reluctant to be vaccinated will get little comfort from the
government’s actions since Biden’s election. While the FDA fully approved the
Pfizer vaccine in August, the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines still have
only “emergency use authorization.” Even the Pfizer vaccine has only “emergency
use authorization” for children between the ages of 12 and 15.
Yet, Biden is ready to mandate vaccinations. Why? Well, his poll numbers have
been cratering because of the Afghanistan debacle, the growing inflation his
economic policies have caused, and the border crisis – created solely by Biden’s
determination to reverse Trump’s immigration strategy. So, now we get the
long-awaited Biden “national strategy” to aggressively combat COVID. Again,
ironically, it is to coerce private employers into forcing their employees to
take the very vaccines whose safety Biden questioned because – well, Trump.
Beyond that irony, the vaccine mandate is an unprecedented exercise of
presidential power and faces obvious constitutional hurdles in the courts.
Biden’s team knows that the president lacks authority to mandate vaccinations
(as he lacked authority to extend the eviction moratorium). But the point of the
mandate isn’t really to fight COVID, anyway: It’s to divert attention from the
administration’s cascading failures.
Personally, I’ve had my shots and I’ve never questioned whether the vaccines are
safe. But I understand the reluctance of people at low risk or who have had
COVID already and thus possess some degree of natural immunity. It’s wrong to
belittle their concerns, it’s wrong to force them to choose between their jobs
and their right to make decisions about their own health, and it’s wrong to
coerce private employers into doing the government’s dirty work.
If Joe Biden wants more Americans to trust him, he must act in a trustworthy
fashion. He’s never done so when it comes to vaccines. He made them a political
football last year, and he’s doing the same thing now – irony be damned.
Andy Puzder is the former CEO of CKE Restaurants, a board member
of the Job Creators Network, a senior fellow at Pepperdine University’s School
of Public Policy, and the author of “The Capitalist Comeback: The Trump Boom and
the Left's Plot to Stop It.” |
