Fact-Checkers Rewrite the History of Democrats’ Vaccine Skepticism

W ith the Biden administration’s big push to vaccinate more Americans, PolitiFact, one of the media’s most consistently dishonest “factchecking” outfits, decided to rewrite history:

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been pushing Americans to get inoculated against COVID-19. But a video on social media suggests that they actually had reservations about the safety of the vaccines.

PolitiFact contends that such accusations are completely false, as Biden and Harris were merely “raising concerns about the rollout by then-president Donald Trump, not the vaccines themselves.” This is an absurd distinction, tantamount to arguing that Donald Trump is “only raising concerns about those who conducted the 2020 election, not the election itself.”

Of course, if the former president released a statement promising never to take any vaccine that was produced during the Biden presidency, it would rightly be seen as perpetuating skepticism. Conspiracy theories about vaccines revolve around the producers and disseminators of the medicine. Vaccines do not organically appear from the ether. They are made. And both Biden and Harris worked to discredit those charged with creating them.

Harris claimed, for example, that even public-health experts who vouched for the vaccine shouldn’t be believed, because they “will be muzzled, they will be suppressed, they will be sidelined, because he’s looking at an election coming up in less than 60 days, and he’s grasping for whatever he can get to pretend that he has been a leader on this issue, when he has not.” Or, in other words, any vaccine produced during the Trump presidency should be seen as unreliable.

Denying Trump credit for the vaccine production — which, far from “grasping,” turned out to be his administration’s most impressive achievement — was a campaign strategy. Biden was no better, suggesting that potential vaccines might not be “real” or “safe,” and arguing that they were “not likely to go through all the tests that need to be done and the trials that are needed to be done.” At the time Biden was offering these remarks, the vaccines had already begun passing safety trials and were beginning to be tested for effectiveness.

Indeed, neither Harris nor Biden offered a shred of evidence that Moncef Slaoui, who was heading up Operation Warp Speed — or anyone else, for that matter — was being pressured by the administration to deliver an untested vaccine before Election Day (though any decent human being would have been rooting for a quick and safe vaccine.) Slaoui had, in fact, gone out of his way to explain that vaccine production had “nothing to do with the election.” He clearly stated that “the approach is 100 percent based on facts and data and nothing else.”

Now, if your position is that Americans should question the process and officials overseeing it, then why do Democrats treat similar statements as beyond the pale today? After all, according to Dr. Fauci, attacks on public-health officials are little more than thinly veiled attacks on science itself. Biden now says similar misinformation is “killing people.” Rest assured, no rando on Facebook has the reach of the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.

Harris, incidentally, was given numerous opportunities to walk back or temper her claim that the process could be so easily corrupted. She doubled down, promising that: “If Donald Trump tells us to take it, I’m not taking it.” But, in the end, Harris did take Trump’s vaccine — the same vaccine the former president instructed his followers to take. Then, to top it off, her administration spent months trying to take credit for work of Big Pharma and the Trump administration.

Harris and Biden weren’t alone in propagating uncertainty. Let’s also remember that the bungling Andrew Cuomo, who wrote a non-satirical book about tackling the COVID pandemic, both fueled, and then predicted, the present skepticism: “You’re going to say to the American people now, ‘Here’s a vaccine, it was new, it was done quickly, but trust this federal administration and their health administration that it’s safe? And we’re not 100 percent sure of the consequences.’ I think it’s going to be a very skeptical American public about taking the vaccine, and they should be.”

Well, they are. Obviously, Biden and Harris have changed their tune. And the vaccine hesitancy among some conservatives is real. The fact is, however, there is also plenty of hesitancy among African Americans and other minorities as well. Biden and Harris knew well that Trump wasn’t cooking up a vaccine in Mar-a-Lago. They knew that vaccines were showing positive results. Still, they cynically cast doubt on the efficacy of potentially life-saving drugs to preemptively discredit the Trump administration before an election.

That’s the context.