Did you hear the news? Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama have volunteered to take a COVID-19 vaccine publicly in order to promote awareness and public confidence in the vaccine upon its approval by the FDA. How great! How wonderful! Right?
Umm, where were they months ago when former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris were publicly sowing the seeds of distrust in a COVID-19 vaccine?
“As we enter the height of election season, President Trump should assure us all that the White House will respect the independent authority of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to decide, free from political pressure, if the vaccine is safe and effective,” Biden said in July.
Kamala Harris was no better. When asked by CNN’s Dana Bash about a COVID-19 vaccine and whether “the public health experts and the scientists will get the last word” on its efficacy, Kamala responded, “If past is prologue, then they will not. They’ll be muzzled, they’ll be suppressed, they will be sidelined,” without providing any evidence of this. “Because [Trump is] looking at an election coming up in less than sixty days, and he’s grasping for whatever he can get to pretend that he’s been a leader on this issue when he’s not.”
Their rhetoric resulted in a dramatic drop in public trust in a vaccine. A Morning Consult poll in September showed only 51 percent of Americans were willing to take the vaccine, a 21-point drop from April.
The only reason three former presidents even have to do such a stunt to promote the safety of a vaccine is that the Democratic Party, led by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, politicized every single aspect of the pandemic, even suggesting, without any evidence, that President Trump could and would push ahead with an unproven vaccine against the advice of countless health experts.
It’s also no surprise that this announcement came after the election, instead of before. It would have been nice to see Bush, Clinton, and Obama addressing these concerns over the safety of the vaccine months ago. Will anything change the minds of people who have been conditioned for months to believe that the vaccine might not be safe?