Opinion | The Viral Lies About Covid That Keep Killing Us – The New York Times

Next up: the claim that vaccination is ineffective. If the booster shots work, why dont they work? tweeted Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee.

What they were getting at, presumably, is the fact that Omicron is producing a number of breakthrough infections, while carefully ignoring the overwhelming evidence that even when vaccinated Americans do get infected they are far less likely than the unvaccinated to be hospitalized or die.

Finally, theres the claim that its all about freedom, that remaining unvaccinated should be treated simply as a personal choice. For example, the administration of Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has used that argument as the basis for a lawsuit seeking to block federal vaccine mandates. The Abbott administration has also appealed for federal aid to help Texas which has a strikingly low vaccination rate in part because Abbott has prevented private businesses from imposing vaccine requirements cope with a surge in Covid cases and hospitalizations. Need we say more?

Alert readers will have noticed that these Republican claims, in addition to being false, contradict one another in multiple ways. We can ignore Covid thanks to vaccines, which by the way dont work. Vaccination is a personal choice, but giving people the information they need to make that choice wisely is a vile attack on their dignity. Its all about freedom and free markets, but this freedom doesnt include the right of private businesses to protect their own workers and customers.

So none of this makes any sense not, that is, unless you realize that Republican vaccine obstructionism isnt about serving a coherent ideology, it was and is about the pursuit of power. A successful vaccination campaign would have been a win for the Biden administration, so it had to be undermined using any and every argument available.

Sure enough, the anti-vaccine strategy has worked politically. The persistence of Covid has helped keep the nations mood dark, which inevitably hurts the party that holds the White House so Republicans who have done all they can to prevent an effective response to Covid have not hesitated, even for a moment, in blaming Biden for failing to end the pandemic.

And the success of destructive vaccine politics is itself deeply horrifying. It seems that utter cynicism, pursued even at the cost of your supporters lives, pays.

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Opinion | The Viral Lies About Covid That Keep Killing Us - The New York Times