In between eating what was hopefully copious amounts of food and giving thanks, you might not have noticed a little story The Washington Post opted to drop on Wednesday morning. (Surely it’s merely a coincidence that this fascinating tidbit was published on the morning of one of the busiest travel days in America.)
The Post’s “The Health 202” newsletter included an item with the following headline: “Covid is no longer mainly a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Here’s why.”
“For the first time, a majority of Americans dying from the coronavirus received at least the primary series of the vaccine,” researcher McKenzie Beard said.
That’s quite the claim right out of the gate. Perhaps the Post didn’t want this to be a fiery topic during your Thanksgiving dinner.
“Fifty-eight percent of coronavirus deaths in August were people who were vaccinated or boosted, according to an analysis conducted for The Health 202 by Cynthia Cox, vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation,” Beard wrote.
She noted that data had been trending in this direction for a while now.
“It’s a continuation of a troubling trend that has emerged over the past year,” Beard wrote. “As vaccination rates have increased and new variants appeared, the share of deaths of people who were vaccinated has been steadily rising.”
Full disclosure: I am not a doctor, and I don’t have anything approaching medical expertise aside from “Throw a little dirt on it” and “That steak looks too raw.” I am in no way, shape or form qualified to tell you what this new revelation means in terms of the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccination.
What I am qualified to tell you is that it appears all of President Joe Biden’s contemptible fear-mongering and shaming of the “unvaccinated” looks like a particularly large misstep in an administration that has been chock full of them.
Are you surprised The Washington Post published this article?
Yes: 82% (54 Votes)
No: 18% (12 Votes)
For those who’ve chosen to forget as much about Biden as humanly possible, it was just about a year ago when the president issued an ominous warning.
“For unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death,” he said in December 2021 remarks from the White House. “For themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm.”
Setting aside the questionable antics of a president using strongman dictator-style verbiage to try to scare the country’s citizens into compliance, Biden’s big blunder came when he mentioned there was some “good news.”
“If you are vaccinated and you had your booster shot, you’re protected from severe illness and death — period,” he said.
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Period? More like a big, fat question mark.
Here’s the problem for Biden following the Washington Post story — all of that vainglorious and cocksure confidence is going to bite him in his rear.
If you’re going to threaten Americans, you had darn sure better have all your facts lined up. And don’t give us the whole “science and facts can change” spiel, either. That only works if it’s ever acknowledged from the outset, “Hey, we might be wrong.”
The left, and vaccine pushers in particular, never once acknowledged they could be wrong. If anything, there is mounting evidence they actively sought to quash anyone who dissented from their dire warnings.
To be clear, they still might not be wrong. Mathematically speaking, it would make sense that as more and more people get vaccinated, more and more vaccinated people will make up the COVID fatality total. And even if every COVID death was that of a vaccinated person, it still wouldn’t debunk the claim that vaccinations lessen the chance of death.
One thing isn’t in dispute, however: Many vaccinated people were not protected from severe illness and death.
Aside from that, the issue isn’t as much with facts (many of which I’m not qualified to analyze) as with perception.
If you are already predisposed not to take the vaccine, having an authority figure wag his octogenarian finger at you and tell you your whole family will die if you don’t get the booster will not make you any more willing to get jabbed. In fact, it might have the opposite effect.
“Why are you so adamant about me putting this foreign agent into my body?” is a legitimate question that is more than fair to ask. And it’s a question that will only grow louder now that the perception is that the vaccine isn’t as effective as advertised.
At the very least, Biden and others need to stop calling it “the pandemic of the unvaccinated.” And that’s not me saying that.
Here’s Cynthia Cox, the woman whose research begat the Post’s article:
“We can no longer say this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
Sorry, Mr. President. I’m just following the science.
