The outrage!! Biden said the unvaccinated might die.
President Joe Biden:
"For the unvaccinated, you’re looking at a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm."
Those were fighting words.
Even out of office, Trump still shapes what a great many Americans believe.
An essay by a conservative commentator said the political messages coming from Blue America anger Red America. Especially offensive are those words from Biden. Look at the hostility!
Michael Anton's began his essay:
On December 19, 2021—less than a week before Christmas—the Biden White House issued a statement containing the following extraordinary sentence, which astonished even the Administration’s harshest critics and alarmed many inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt: "For the unvaccinated, you’re looking at a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm." It’s rare to employ this kind of undiplomatic language even against America’s global adversaries. Against American citizens? Hence so many shocked and angry responses.
I perceive Biden's words to be a neutral and descriptive warning. Anton saw it differently. He took offense. There is a message in his reaction. Vast numbers of people in Red America don't think COVID is serious. Therefore, Biden's sentence must have been a wish, not a warning or plea.
COVID is an opportunity for Americans to observe the power of leadership. Even out of office, Donald Trump remains the central figure in American politics because he remains a persuasive thought leader. He shaped how people think about immigration. He told people how to think about trade with China; about NATO; about the news media; about Black Lives Matter. He is so persuasive that he could define an economy in sharp recovery as "carnage," and people believed it. Then, two months later, with the same condition and trends in place, he said it was the greatest economy of all time, and people believed that, too. His most extraordinary feat of thought leadership is having persuaded people holding half the political power in America that an election that has been studied, audited, litigated, and found legal and appropriate by his own appointees was, in fact, flagrantly stolen from him.
There is nothing Biden does in shaping opinion that is anywhere equivalent. Biden is president, but not a thought leader.
Facts don't interpret themselves. They are given meaning and narrative. So far there are about a million "excess deaths" in the USA, about 800,000 of them closely attributable to COVID. Unvaccinated people overrun hospitals. Currently 1,500 people are dying every day, almost entirely the unvaccinated. Biden states those facts--that reality--and a GOP-oriented intellectual is outraged. How dare Biden tell us we could die from COVID!
Trump shaped our first impression of COVID: It's no big deal. A million people, in a population of 320 million, is less than 3/10th of one percent. What does that mean? It means it will probably be the other guy who dies. It does not mean the same thing as Muslims or the Chinese shooting down three or four American passenger planes every day, the same number of deaths. That would be understood as an act of war. For the Trump-influenced, COVID should be understood as a trivial danger, and a president who says it might kill the unvaccinated is showing contempt for them. A year out of office, Trump's understanding of COVID still shapes the opinion of the Trump-oriented half of America. This includes people on a deathbed.
". . . Every part of my body was racked in pain. These are the things we have to suffer, it's part of living. You have to trust your immune system. And if the alternative is that we live in fear, that we create a bogey man out of something that hopefully I'm showing that isn't anything to be afraid of for 99.9 percent of us. . ..