How do you encourage vaccine skepticism? CNN, Max Boot teach us how

[C C]

https://www.acsh.org/news/2021/07/21/how...-how-15671

INTRO: If you wanted to convince someone to skip their COVID vaccine, how would you do it? You would first insult them, emphasizing how stupid their political opinions are. After that, you'd tell them there are lots of stupid people who share their views. Wrapping up your sales pitch, you'd finally stress that everyone they disagree with got the vaccine, and the only reason they haven't is because their favorite talk show hosts have duped them.

“Nobody would be so partisan as to commit such ridiculous mistakes while promoting vaccines,” you may say to yourself. But you'd be incorrect. Last week, neoconservative political commentator Max Boot participated in a CNN panel on lagging immunization rates, during which he made literally every mistake described above as he chastised Republicans for refusing COVID-19 vaccines.

CNN is a partisan cable news network, so it's not surprising that it would air a segment like this. Of course, they're not alone; Fox News does the same thing in the opposite direction, blaming all America's problems on Democrats. But on the tail end of a pandemic, CNN was unwise to allow a conservative-turned-liberal political commentator to lecture half the country about vaccines. Let's examine a few of Boot's points in detail so you can see what I mean... (MORE)

[stryder]

The one problem with such pieces is that should you extend beyond the US borders, the localised (Nationalised) political issue is no longer a factor, which makes the initial piece moot.

How I mean is that in other countries people have varying reasons for not taking a vaccine. Whether it's political or not is entirely up to them.

[Yazata]

It's ironic that before the 2020 election, governor Andrew Cuomo told Anderson Cooper that "About half the people in this country, Anderson, say that they don't trust the vaccine... that they fear that Trump politicized the approval process... no one is going to put a needle in their arm if they don't trust the vaccine."

Then in January 2021 after Biden was "elected", Cuomo's views on vaccination changed 180 degrees. Suddenly the line had become "trust science!"

Here in the United States, vaccine hesitancy is a complex thing. Different people have different reasons for their hesitancy.

But a big factor is how much it's been politicized. And that's not President Trump's fault. It's almost entirely the fault of the democrats. Trump promoted rapid development of the vaccines with his Operation Warp Speed. And the democrats recoiled, not because Trump had done anything wrong, but merely because he was Trump and anything associated with his name had become toxic in their minds.

Then Biden was "elected" and everything reversed. Suddenly Biden was pro-vaccine (as he should be, no criticism about that) and the democrats scrambled on board, while vaccine hesitancy supposedly became a Republican thing, ridiculed as "antivax", despite the vaccine having been rejected by democrats just weeks earlier because it was supposedly a Trump thing.

Bizarre.

It's shit like this make me increasingly tune out most of the media. I don't need to read anyone else's opinions, least of all Max Boot's. I already have plenty of opinions of my own.