patrick.net

The idea that the summer surge was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” – as Biden and other Democrats and public health officials said over and over – was simply untrue.

The vast majority of Americans over 65 were vaccinated. If vaccines had worked nearly as well as public health authorities pretended, we simply wouldn’t have had enough vulnerable people to put a strain on the health care system, especially since many unvaccinated people had natural immunity from previous infection. ...

No matter. All the spin in the world could not stop the fact that mRNA vaccine protection eroded a little more each day.

But the political and media spin did have a serious real-world impact. It led to a widening schism, as vaccinated people grew increasingly angry at the unvaccinated. The vaccinated were no longer complacent and condescending, as they had been in the spring. Now they were frightened.

They needed an outlet for their fear. Instead of acknowledging the reality that the vaccines were no longer working as promised, they chose to blame unvaccinated people. ...

The families of vaccinated people who had died from Covid blamed unvaccinated Americans – all unvaccinated Americans, apparently – for their infections, and journalists repeated their complaints without question.

“An Iowa woman whose husband died from a breakthrough COVID-19 infection is blaming Americans who refuse to mask or get vaccinated,” the Associated Press wrote on September 14, one of many similar articles.

Instead of telling the truth about vaccine failure, Biden and other leaders encouraged this attitude.

“Our patience is wearing thin,” the man I had come to call “Uncle Joe” said on Sept. 9. Biden seemed willing to blame any problem he faced on the unvaccinated. Six days earlier he had complained they were responsible for a dismal report about August job growth. As CNBC reported...

Of course, the United States had suffered similar sorry episodes before. Southern states had legally treated African-Americans as second-class citizens for much of the 20th century. The federal government had interned Japanese-Americans during World War 2.

What made this particular episode so astonishing was not just that it ran counter to scientific facts and common sense (if the vaccines worked, why did the vaccinated need protection so desperately?) – but that the same people who held themselves up as society’s most tolerant led it.

For generations, public health leaders had preached tolerance – tolerance for drug addicts (a term that was no longer even acceptable) and alcoholics and smokers and the morbidly obese. Their problems belonged to all of us, we were told. They deserved the best possible care without a smidgen of judgement.

Yet this tolerance did not extend to people who chose not to take vaccines whose protective effectiveness was already demonstrably collapsing.