The Covid-19 vaccine messaging from the White House is taking on a noticeably morbid turn. Coming up on a winter holiday season of gatherings and travel, with the omicron and delta variants swirling, the Biden administration is taking a decidedly in-your-face tone with messaging aimed at persuading unvaccinated individuals to get the jab or risk certain illness and death.
The only problem, of course, is that messaging this blunt and patronizing is sure to backfire. If health bureaucrats can’t yet figure out how to persuade all Americans to get vaccinated, more messages of “you’re probably dead” aren’t going to do much to move the needle.
The current message now? If you’re vaccinated, good for you, we’ll get through this winter season. If you’re unvaccinated, the message from the White House is very clear, you and your family are in for a “winter of death”:
Who is this for? Unvaccinated Americans are not going to be persuaded by messaging like this. https://t.co/he3jvfEgnz pic.twitter.com/ZI365x4hlB
— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) December 20, 2021
Very reassuring from Biden who all-but declared “mission accomplished” over Covid-19 back in July.
This strikes me as a message of panic. Despite Biden’s promises to “shut down the virus” instead of the country, the virus seems to be winning. Couple this “you’re dead” message with Kamala Harris’ admission that the Biden administration didn’t see any of this virus resurgence coming and you can see why they’re panicking:
“We didn’t see Delta coming. I think most scientists did not — upon whose advice and direction we have relied — didn’t see Delta coming,” she said. “We didn’t see Omicron coming. And that’s the nature of what this, this awful virus has been, which as it turns out, has mutations and variants.”
Harris made the comments during a wide-ranging interview with The Times in her ceremonial office, touching on immigration, women’s health, the criticism she has received for her management style and her role as a history-making leader.
She’s being somewhat honest, and she’s taking heat for it from within her own administration. They didn’t see these exact variants coming, that’s true, but people like Fauci have warned for months about variants, and “variants of concern” have popped up now and then. What they gambled on and lost was hoping there would be no variant that could break through the existing regimen of vaccines, at least not this soon.
Here’s the White House Covid Response team from a couple of days ago declaring the upcoming “winter of death”:
https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1471916627562315781
At the moment, though, even individuals who are fully vaccinated plus a booster still seem to be catching and spreading Covid-19. Just look at the NFL and other sports teams with over 90% vaccination rates, they’re still testing positive for it.
People ranging from prominent CNBC host Jim Cramer to several United States Senators, all vaccinated and boosted, recently announced positive tests to name a few. The list keeps growing. Saturday Night Live shut down their live show over the weekend due to an outbreak. Again, all were vaccinated and boosted as per New York City mandates.
Perhaps the overall point here is that the virus isn’t going away, even in populations of extremely high vaccination rates, and it’s time for the government to treat it as an endemic illness. Threatening death didn’t persuade people who wanted to travel and leave their homes back during the lockdown of 2020, it’s not going to persuade them now.
Maybe we should be fast-tracking drugs like Paxlovid and other therapeutics instead of only focusing on vaccinations? Stop using an all-or-nothing approach and start using the full array of available weapons against Covid-19.
The government has no control over an airborne virus, they never really did. They do, however, control the response, and so far it has been lackluster and confusing, to say the least.
