‘Trump is not my God’: how the former president’s
only vaccine victory turned sour
A rigid anti-vaccine stance among Trump’s supporters
means Republicans can’t reap the benefits of Operation Warp Speed
David Smith
David Smith
in Washington
@smithinamerica
Sat 5 Feb
2022 07.00 GMT
She is
fiercely loyal to Donald Trump. But when the former US president came to her
home city and praised coronavirus vaccines, Flora Moore did something she never
thought possible. She booed him.
“He said
take the vaccine but we all booed and said no,” she recalled of Trump’s event
with broadcaster Bill O’Reilly in Orlando, Florida. “He heard us loud and clear
because the Amway Center was packed. We let him know ‘no’ and a couple of us
even hollered out, ‘It’s killing people!’”
There is no
scientific basis to the claim that the vaccines are killing people. In fact,
they have demonstrably saved thousands of lives. But Moore is indicative of the
extreme anti-vaccine sentiment consuming the base of the Republican party – a
monster that Trump himself can no longer control.
America is
exhausted by a pandemic still killing more than 2,400 people a day, the
overwhelming majority of whom are unvaccinated, bringing the total death toll
to 900,000.
In more
conventional times, Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, which developed vaccines in
record time, would be a source of pride for his voters. Even his successor, Joe
Biden, has praised the initiative, stating: “Thanks to the prior administration
and our scientific community, America was one of the first countries to get the
vaccine.”
But Trump’s
eagerness to claim credit has been undone by conservatives’ backlash against
Biden’s efforts to legally require worker vaccinations, which they cast as a
threat to individual freedom. The ex-president’s customary applause turned to
jeers when he encouraged supporters to get vaccinated and told O’Reilly that he
received a booster himself.
What was
arguably Trump’s most important legacy from an otherwise disastrous pandemic
response, and a divisive four-year presidency, has turned into a political
liability, threatening to turn his own fans against him. Laurie Garrett, an
award-winning science writer, observed: “It’s probably the only time his base
has ever booed him about anything. If he can no longer brag about Operation
Warp Speed, what can he brag about regarding how he handled Covid?”
The
anti-vaccine fervor has been stoked by some Republican politicians as well as
rightwing media. Last month, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a notorious sceptic,
gave writer Alex Berenson a platform to baselessly proclaim, “The mRNA Covid
vaccines need to be withdrawn from the market now. No one should get them. No
one should get boosted. No one should get double-boosted.”
The web has
also become a place for unscientific conspiracy theories to thrive. Moore, the
Trump supporter in Florida, said she gets her information from her 30,000
followers on Facebook as well as Telegram, Twitter and YouTube.
She said:
“I don’t trust the government. I don’t trust the pharmaceutical companies. I’m
active in politics here and found out lots of people were having complications
and dropping dead. There’s a lot of jobs I wont’t even take because they want
me to get a vaccine.”
The
commercial analyst, who is in her 40s, refuses to wear a face mask in
restaurants or at work. Her radical views on the issue outweigh even her faith
in Trump.
“I trust him on certain things, but he’s not my God,”
she said.
Trump
appears to have heeded the shift and recalibrated. At a rally in Conroe, Texas,
last Saturday, where anti-vaccine views were again rampant, he channeled the
crowd’s anger towards Biden’s mandate for federal government workers (a similar
mandate for businesses was rejected by the supreme court).
“It is time
for the American people to declare independence from every last Covid mandate,”
Trump said to cheers. “We have to tell this band of hypocrites, tyrants and
racists that we’re done with having them control our lives, mess with our
children and close our businesses. We’re moving on from Covid.”
He then
added briskly: “We did a great job. Operation Warp Speed has been praised by
everybody but it’s now time to move on.” Notably in the remarks he did not use
the word “vaccines” at all. It was a pivot that appeared to acknowledge the
political threat and it is enough to satisfy voters such as Moore.
The one thing Republicans could claim as a great
benefit that was saving lives, they’re now being compelled by their own base to
renounce
Laurie Garrett
She
commented: “I think he’s gotten the message that he can say he took the vaccine
and nothing happened to him and if you desire to take it, take it, but if you
don’t want to, leave it alone.”
The number
of anti-vaxxers in the Republican base is hard to estimate. The Guardian
interviewed half a dozen Trump rally attendees last week and found that most
had got the shots. They included Jered Pettis, from Phoenix, Arizona, who had
changed his mind on the topic.
“We were
totally anti-vaccine, didn’t really believe in it, didn’t want to get it,” he
said. “Then a friend got it pretty severe: he could hardly breathe and felt
like his head was going to explode. He didn’t go to the hospital but he was
very, very sick to the point where he told me, ‘Hey, Jered. I’m very thankful
for every breath of air that I get now’. After I had seen and heard one of my
best friends go through that, I changed my mind in a heartbeat.”
Pettis
received two Pfizer doses, then caught the virus just over a month ago. “So
thank God, because I would have been a lot sicker than I was. It was almost
like a mild cold. I could just imagine if I was not vaccinated.”
The
50-year-old exterior designer describes the recent booing as “absolutely
ridiculous” and believes that Trump deserves credit, not criticism, for the
vaccines. “Even though you may be anti-vaccine, you’ll change your mind if you
get sick or you get somebody around you that dies.”
Even so,
deep-seated suspicion of the vaccines could deprive Republicans of what might
have been a powerful boast going into November’s midterm elections. Garrett,
author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance,
points out that counties that voted for Trump in 2020 have a far higher
mortality rate than counties that voted for Biden.
“The
Republicans are in a bind,” she said. “They are experiencing a higher death
rate in their ranks and it is directly linked to their positions on Covid. The
one thing they could claim as a great benefit that was saving lives,
vaccination, they’re now being compelled by their own base to renounce.”
Vaccine
scepticism has never been a solely rightwing stance. Some libertarians on the
left have opposed profit-driven big pharma and championed holistic alternatives.
But on Covid-19, at least, this group appears to be significantly smaller than
the conservative holdouts.
Garrett
said: “All the polls are showing tremendous partisan differential in everything
to do with vaccines and it has been increasing steadily for the last two years.
It’s very much driven by the rightwing myths and narratives around Covid.
“There
still are some of those ex-hippie types that don’t want to get vaccinated, but
if you look at the breakdown on political sentiment about vaccination, willingness
to get a third booster or even a fourth if it becomes available, it’s so
Democrat. It’s incredible” Garrett said. “I never thought in my life I would
see something like this. It is an absolute partisan divide and it’s widening.”
About nine
in 10 Democrats and six in 10 Republicans have been vaccinated, according to a
Kaiser Family Foundation survey, while 62% of Democrats and just 32% of
Republicans have been both vaccinated and boosted. The trend suggests that
Republican candidates for the midterm elections are likely to follow Trump’s
lead in attacking Biden’s mandates rather than celebrating Trump’s vaccines.
Giving up on Trump is like giving up on their dreams.
Trump was their savior.
Monika McDermott
But if any
Republican can outflank Trump on the issue ahead of the 2024 presidential
election, it may be the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, who has refused to
say whether he received a booster. The New York Times reported that Patrick
Ruffini, a Republican pollster, found Trump’s lead over DeSantis closing to
just nine points among party members who like both men.
Monika
McDermott, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York,
said: “They can get disgruntled with Trump, certainly, and DeSantis is the
obvious choice for people who are anti-vax. But giving up on Trump is like
giving up on their dreams at this point. Trump was their savior. Trump brought
about the wholesale remasculization of that portion of the American psyche.”
Indeed,
despite the possible split with his Make America Great Again movement on
vaccines, Trump remains by far the biggest beast in the Republican jungle and
this week announced that he is entering 2022 with a staggering $122m in
campaign funds.
Joe Walsh,
a former Republican congressman active on social media, said: “I talk to the
extremists all the time and I agree with Trump’s people that they’re locked
with him. They’re not going to anybody else.”
Walsh finds
that 90% of the base are anti-vaccine, do not believe Biden won and either have
no problem with the 6 January insurrection or regard it as a patriotic day.
“You could
not as a Republican candidate run for office if you told people to get
vaccinated or if you said Joe Biden won fair and square,” he added. “If you
said either one of those two things, you couldn’t win a Republican primary.”
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