By Brian Dickerson, Detroit Free Press
In a nod to polls suggesting that many citizens of MAGA nations remain reluctant to vaccinate themselves against the virus he once dismissed as a hoax, Donald Trump recommended Tuesday that his supporters should roll up their sleeves.
If they feel like it, that is.
“It is a safe vaccine, and it is something that works,” Trump told Maria Bartiromo in a Tuesday evening appearance on “Fox News Primetime. “I would recommend it, and I would recommend it to a lot of people that don’t want to get it — and a lot of those people voted for me, frankly.”
But in a good-people-on-both-sides codicil that was pure Trump, the ex-president gave pandemic skeptics an escape hatch, adding: “We have our freedoms, and we have to live by that, and I agree with that also.”
Got that, sons of liberty? There’s a safe, free medical treatment available that may save your life, but you have a sacred right not to take it.
This is essentially the creed championed by the late Dr. Jack Kevorkian, even if Trump’s support came two decades too late to keep Kevorkian out of prison. (The ex-president may not be in the vanguard of the right-to-die movement, but he’s still light years ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court.)
Finally listening to Dr. Fauci
I don’t mean to belittle the significance of Trump’s decision to endorse the vaccine, even if he was the last of the five living ex-presidents to do so. His remarks on Bartiromo’s program came a day after the other four — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama — appeared together in a TV ad urging Americans to vaccinate themselves against the virus.
Trump’s thumbs-up also tacitly acknowledged the good counsel of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who suggested in a TV appearance last Sunday that it “would make all the difference in the world” if the ex-president would participate in a vaccination campaign aimed at his suspicious followers. “This might be the first time Trump took Fauci’s advice to heart.
But in cautioning that those who continue to eschew the vaccine are guilty only of exercising their right to autonomy, Trump is perpetuating what another of his former health advisers, Dr. Deborah Birx, recently cited as a cardinal sin of the Trump administration’s COVID-19 policy.
In a candid and revealing interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation” program earlier this year, Birx said Trump and his advisers had weakened the CDC’s critical directive to wear masks by suggesting they were an unnecessary inconvenience for most Americans.
“We were asking people to wear a mask to protect others from them,” Birx said, adding that Trump had diluted the message by “mixing data that didn’t have anything to do with the relevance of masking as a public health measure to changing into masking as a personal protective measure.”
Staying on (the wrong) message
This is the same homicidal confusion Trump indulged this week when he ignored the fundamental truth that Americans who exercise their freedom not to be vaccinated are putting more than their own health at risk.
As Birx explains it: “Of all people over 70 who get this virus, 10% of them succumb to this virus. One in 10 … If you knew that your parents had a one in 10 chance of dying from a virus, as I do, you would do everything to protect them.”
That is very different than the stingy pivot Trump made this week, which is that his supporters should feel free to ignore the public health consequences of their individual choices.
In other words: The vaccine is safe, so I encourage you to take advantage of it, but only if you feel like it, because this is America: We can all die if we want to, and if we take a few innocent bystanders with us, well, that’s just the price of living in the freest nation on earth.
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