Joe Biden Is Done Coddling Conservatives and Their Anti-Vaccine Bullshit

Republican lawmakers, their pals on Fox News, and various other conservatives with major platforms say and do a lot of things these days that elicit the response, “What the f--k is wrong with you?” Describing the people who attacked the U.S. Capitol as peaceful “patriots.” Telling viewers to call child protective services on the parents of children wearing masks. Claiming Democrats are part of a satanic cult that eats children. All of these things are insane, but few are as enraging of late than the sustained campaign by vocal conservatives to convince Americans not to get vaccinated against a contagious disease that has killed 605,000 Americans and counting, a variant of which is significantly more transmissible and can result in more serious cases to boot.

For months, the Joe Biden administration’s approach to anti-vaxxers—of which Biden’s predecessor is one!—was to basically treat their fearmongering and outbursts like a toddler’s tantrums and ignore them, presumably thinking that acknowledging them would make things worse. But with new infections up, vaccination rates slowing down, and virtually all COVID-19 deaths among the unvaccinated, the federal government is taking a new tack: approaching anti-vaxxers like the dangerous hacks they are.

The Biden administration is casting conservative opponents of its COVID-19 vaccine campaign as dangerous and extreme, adopting a more aggressive political posture in an attempt to maneuver through the public health conundrum. The White House has decided to hit back harder on misinformation and scare tactics after Republican lawmakers and conservative activists pledged to fight the administration’s stated plans to go “door-to-door” to increase vaccination rates. The pushback will include directly calling out social media platforms and conservative news shows that promote such tactics. [Anthony] Fauci took some of that messaging to Sunday cable news shows, including underscoring the idea that door-to-door vaccination efforts are an attempt to remove barriers to access and that 99.5% of deaths due to COVID are among people who are unvaccinated. “Those data kind of hits you right between the eyes,” Fauci said of the fatalities. Beyond Fauci, Press Secretary Jen Psaki has pushed back on Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene—a lawmaker she once said she’d not mention from the podium—who compared the administration’s vaccine campaign to Nazis. Jeff Zients, the White House’s COVID response director, rebuked Republican Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, who contended falsely in a tweet that government “agents” were going door-to-door to “compel vaccination.”

According to reporters Natasha Korecki and Eugene Daniels, Biden-allied groups like the Democratic National Committee will also “engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages.“ In a statement, White House spokesperson Kevin Munoz said, “When we see deliberate efforts to spread misinformation, we view that as an impediment to the country's public health and will not shy away from calling that out.”

On Sunday, Fauci responded to the idea perpetuated by Fox News that the administration’s door-to-door effort to convince people to get vaccinated would somehow involve a federal agent in a white lab coat jamming a needle into people’s arms, saying, “The big misinterpretation that Fox News or whomever else is saying is that they are essentially envisioning a bunch of federal workers knocking on your door, telling you you’ve got to do something that you don’t want to do. That’s absolutely not the case, it’s trusted messengers who are part of the community doing that—not government officials. So that’s where I think the disconnect is.”