By Steve BermanWe’ve been writing about COVID-19 and vaccinations for days. I know, it gets old, and I’m sick of writing about it. But I felt compelled to deal with one more thing.
The media is still huffing “coronavirus outbreak” stories. I suspect it’s because that sells papers when it’s above the fold like the Atlanta Journal Constitution did today.
The Boston Globe led their daily email (and sent another email promoting it) with a story headlined “Cape Cod is weathering a surge in COVID cases at the height of tourism season — including many among vaccinated people.”
Despite having one of the most vaccinated populations in the state, Cape Cod now has the highest rate of new COVID cases in Massachusetts. Health officials are battling an outbreak in Provincetown that has infected at least 132 people since July 1 — most of them vaccinated — as well as a cluster in a Yarmouth nursing home, where as many as 33 residents and staff are infected, many of them already vaccinated, too.
Buried about a billion paragraphs down, the Globe admits “So-called breakthrough infections among vaccinated people are rare.”
The state health department reports 4,814 such cases as of July 17, accounting for just 0.1 percent of all those vaccinated in Massachusetts. Instances of hospitalization or deaths among such cases are even more rare.
In other words, the vaccines work, but yes, some small number of people are going to get sick. The message here isn’t even disguised or nuanced: They want everyone to mask up, pretty much forever.
I believe that the problem we’re seeing with so many red-staters reticent to receive the vaccine is not about the vaccine per-se. It’s about masks and government control. The language of the left is always couched in words like “mandate” and “checks.” The message of state control and submission to a Medical Administrative State that is paid to live and breathe the air of zero-risk is a terrible fear for people whose highest value is independence and personal liberty.
Add to that the “ah ha!” posts on social media and right-wing blogs when crap like this hits the newspapers and networks, and the blind editors at the AJC and the Globe end up making people’s minds for them: no vaccine. It is a terrible understatement to call this counterproductive. They are in fact making the case of the conspiracy mongers.
I’ll say it again: the vaccines work. If you are vaccinated, you might feel sick for a day, but the chance of you dying from it is a thousand times lower than the risk of you being run over by a cattle truck this morning.
But the chance of you getting vaccinated, and your kids having to wear masks at school, or outdoor camp, or you having to prove your vaccination status to do certain things, or you going back to mask-wearing everywhere inside again, is getting higher every day when stories like this are published.
Here’s how to own the left: Get vaccinated.
Counterintuitively, the answer is getting more people vaccinated. The more vaccinated people we have, the less “breakthrough” cases we’ll see, and the less fear the media can peddle above the fold.
It’s bad faith politics and the desire to sell papers that propels stories like the ones above to the headlines. But if people continue to hold out on vaccines, those stories will become reality, and we’ll be back to lockdowns and mask mandates. Nobody wants that, except the Faucis of the world, who are paid to want it.
I promise, that’s the last I have to say about vaccines this week.
Follow Steve on Twitter @stevengberman.
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