Do As I Do, Not As I Say: Vaccine Edition

Endorsed by Steve Doocey. What could be better?

Ben Shapiro, Mitch McConnell, Sean Hannity, Steve Scalise, Steve Doocey all have one thing in common (besides being horrible people) they've suddenly all come out and admitted they were (or are about to be) vaccinated and are encouraging others to get the shots.  

This is after several of them, and the organizations they work for and with, have been spreading mass disinformation about the vaccines. Some are now even praising Biden's vaccine rollout. Color me stunned. You even get Bill Hemmer on Fox News dragging out Marc Siegel, one of their top medical contributors, and allowing, practically begging him, to rhapsodize about the efficacy of the vaccine.

“The vaccine works, right? We haven’t budged on that, have we, doc?” Hemmer asked.

“The vaccine works extremely well even against the delta variant, preventing infection in 90 percent of cases,” Siegel reported.

He had been set free to tell the truth without hedging around it, or Trump’s precious feelings, or insulting politics. Free at last! Of course, Fox has a vaccine mandate for their staff, but they don’t tell you about that.

What is going on? They could have been doing this months ago, helping their viewers and followers get the protection they needed. But they didn’t. Why now?

It's like the bat signal went up, and the word went out. It reminds me of the threats of lawsuits that made the networks change their tune on the Dominion voting machines, issuing awkward apologies read on air. Are they covering their asses against class actions? Are they spooked by the Dow crashing as it did this week? Worried about voters blaming the GOP for more deaths, more shutdowns and more economic pain to the country? 

Or maybe they're just trying to do the right thing.

Nah.

It's probably a combination of the money and the votes, and fear of being held even more accountable than they already are. The GOP has a lot of blood and violence that can be directly attributed to it; the mismanagement of the pandemic that resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, the stupid and selfish misinformation designed to politicize the virus which is still adding to the death toll, the encouraging of  far right violent groups and militias which have led to hate crimes against people of color and the deaths of protestors and law enforcement, bringing us the January 6th insurrection, where this has all been leading for the past several decades.

Up to now (and I doubt the right’s new community spirit will last before being shouted down by their own brain-scrubbed supporters) the right has been like people trying to kill safety inspections after major crashes, like someone decrying the use of life boats after a cruise ship sinks, or mocking the installation of fire alarms after a school burns. At every point in this pandemic they have mocked precautions, complained about the least of them, refused to cooperate when that cooperation would help save lives, and refused to acknowledge the danger their behavior was not only to themselves, but to everyone around them.

And they were proud of it, even as bodies piled up in refrigerated trucks in parking lots.

But hey! That’s in the past!

The problem, of course, is that no one will believe this nervous about-face. The people who can, who have been following the science and keeping up with the news have already gotten the vaccine. There are some who can’t because of medical reasons, and some communities who have a justified mistrust of a mostly White medical community who have not always acted in their interests in the past. Hopefully that can be overcome.

But the people these Republican leaders are talking to are the same ones who they’ve been working on hard to spread their own viral pandemic of lies since February of 2020. And it worked. Too well it worked. The GOP realized they’re losing the voters they need to keep sticking it to America. Now they’re trying to undo the done.

At this point, they've got people so worked up that only God coming down out of heaven and telling them to take it would work.

Of course, several would ask who God thinks he is to trod on their rights. Their God-given rights.

I wish it was only them that they were screwing, but we’re all on this planet together.

We’re all stuck in the Eagle’s Hotel California, on pandemic lockdown:

Welcome to Feb, 2020, we didn’t miss you but we’re not allowed to leave.