As President Joe Biden continues his push to get 70% of American adults vaccinated against the coronavirus by July 4, he’s getting help from celebrities and launching massive public information campaigns.
On Wednesday, he announced that YMCAs and three other national child care providers will watch kids for free while parents or caregivers get vaccinated. The administration even set up a website — www.vaccines.gov/incentives — that shows the incentives businesses are offering vaccinated people, from United Airlines running a sweepstakes for a year of free flights to the dating app Tinder giving free “premium content” to users who show their vaccination status.
“America is headed to the summer dramatically different from last year’s summer — a summer of freedom, a summer of get-togethers and celebrations, an all-American summer that this country deserves after a long dark winter we’ve all endured,” Biden said. “We need everyone across the country to pull together to get us over the finish line.”
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Hold on a minute, Mr. President. You had me at “free premium content” and free other things, but you lost me with that “everyone pulling together” stuff. Have you seen America, lately? We couldn’t get “everyone across the country to pull together” to save a wide-eyed, meowing kitten stuck in a tree next to a hungry python — about 20% of the population would say the kitten looks like an Antifa supporter and root for the python, 15% would try to build a wall around the tree and 5% would say the kitten and python aren’t real and the whole thing is fake news.
Right now, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 62.9% of adults have received at least one shot. But demand for the vaccine has waned, even with incentives.
After more than a year of quarantine and nearly 600,000 U.S. deaths, one would think that “not dying and being able to go out and do stuff” might be incentive enough to get a shot that medical experts around the globe have deemed safe and effective. But apparently not.
A recent PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll found that about 40% of Republicans say they don’t plan on getting vaccinated, and a New York Times data analysis found the least vaccinated U.S. counties are largely places where a majority of residents voted for former President Donald Trump.
When you consider a May 17-19 national poll by Reuters/Ipsos that found 53% of Republicans believe Trump is still the “true president,” you get a sense of the kind of incentive Biden needs to offer vaccine-hesitant GOPers.
The general belief among those who still support the one-term former president is this: The coronavirus pandemic was largely overblown to hurt Trump, but Trump deserves full credit for the development of COVID-19 vaccines, which Trump supporters won’t get because getting the vaccine would validate that the coronavirus pandemic was serious, which would, in turn, make Trump look bad for not taking the pandemic seriously.
Are you still with me? Because there’s more.
These same people who hail Trump for single-handedly creating the magnificent vaccine they don’t want also believe the entire 2020 election was fraudulent, based on zero evidence, zero successful lawsuits and the ramblings of a sweaty pillow salesman. They believe it and Trump himself believes it — The New York Times reported Tuesday that Trump has been telling people he expects to be reinstated as president by August.
One day after that news broke, Americans learned of the dissolution of Trump’s short-lived and little-read website “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump,” thus adding “failed blogger” to his resume. So, yes, everything seems to point to him magically being reinstated as president soon.
Loopy? Yes. But that’s the kind of magical thinking that can help Biden hit his July 4 vaccination goal.
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To win over the vaccine-hesitant swath of Trump supporters, all the president (Biden, I mean, not Trump) has to do is offer the following incentive: “If you show proof of vaccination, I will reinstate Donald J. Trump as president in two weeks.”
This will work for two reasons:
1) It tells Trump’s legion of fans exactly what they want to hear, and as Trump proved, they will do anything as long as you keep telling them exactly what they want to hear.
2) Trump carefully trained his supporters to accept “in two weeks” as a time frame loosely defined as “sometime between never and infinity.” He promised a beautiful health care plan “in two weeks” again and again and again, and his supporters never stopped believing it was almost here. Mexico will pay for the border wall in two weeks. His wife, Melania Trump, will give a news conference explaining gaps in her immigration story “in a couple weeks.” And so on.
If Biden really wants to boost vaccination rates, he could add on a promise to officially declare “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump” the greatest blog in American history. Just so long as the incentive includes the “in two weeks” clause, everything will be fine.
Some might criticize this approach as dishonest, but I view it more as a pragmatic ploy to save that tree-trapped kitten from the hungry python and get “everyone across the country to pull together to get us over the finish line.”
It sure ain’t happening any other way.