NR PLUS Health Care

The Insane Conspiracy Theory That Republicans Are Trying to Prolong the Pandemic

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Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell speaks during an interview with Reuters on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., July 27, 2021. (Joshua Roberts / Reuters)

Progressive pundits promote a lunatic conspiracy theory about Republicans and vaccines.

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Progressive pundits promote a lunatic conspiracy theory about Republicans and vaccines.

C onspiratorial thinking runs deep among a certain species of progressive pundit, but even by that standard, this is nuts. Brian Beutler of Crooked Media argues that the Republican Party has intentionally “sabotaged” vaccination and pursued a deliberate strategy of “killing people” in order to prolong the pandemic and blame Joe Biden:

The GOP plan was to sabotage herd immunity and blame Dems for it. For all the praise Rs received for changing tune on vaccination after a surge was already upon us, they haven’t changed course: They sabotaged herd immunity, now they’re blaming Dems for it . . .

Republicans did as much as they could to discourage vaccine uptake. . . . But that just raises the more foundational question of why they decided to ride the anti-vax tiger in the first place. Why undermine the rollout of the vaccine in the first place? And then it becomes clear: Had the election gone differently this was gonna be the Trump vaccine, the miracle cure that ended America’s COVID crisis. Instead, as soon as it became evident that Trump would not be president anymore, undermining vaccine uptake (that is, killing people) became an instrument the right could use to make Biden fail, to slow the economic recovery, and prolong the pandemic . . .

Republicans didn’t really have a change of heart; this has been mission accomplished for them, minus the part where the public blames Biden for the mess they made.

Greg Sargent of the Washington Post approvingly shared this theory. It is obvious nonsense.


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To start with, who are the Republicans that Beutler is talking about? The only elected Republican he cites in his column is Mitch McConnell. But McConnell has been one of the most consistently pro-vaccine voices in the party throughout the COVID-vaccine debate, and even well before it. In 2015, he cited his status as a survivor of childhood polio to speak out in favor of vaccinating children against the measles. In December, McConnell tweeted out a photo immediately after he’d been vaccinated to promote “the safe, effective COVID vaccine”:

(Take one guess about how Jezebel reacted to this tweet. Really, guess before you click. You won’t be disappointed.)

McConnell expressed concern in December with anti-vaccine sentiment:

Kentucky’s senior senator also said it was “concerning” that half of Americans told a recent Associated Press poll they were unsure or would not take the vaccine. “I am disappointed to see early public sentiment that shows some hesitation towards receiving a vaccine,” McConnell said. “The only way to beat this pandemic is for us to follow the advice of our nation’s health care professionals: get vaccinated and continue to follow CDC guidelines. . . . I truly hope all Kentuckians and Americans will heed this advice and accept this safe and effective vaccine.”

In April, McConnell spoke up for vaccination at events in his state of Kentucky:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell urged his fellow Republicans to be vaccinated against COVID-19 during a visit to a western Kentucky hospital Thursday. “As a Republican man, I wasn’t reluctant to get it when I was eligible and I would encourage everybody to do that,” he said. “The sooner we can get to 75%, to herd immunity, and get our economy up and open, the better.” Flanked by Owensboro Health Regional Hospital administrators, the senator also discussed COVID-19 relief and the state’s vaccine distribution…[I]n stops across Kentucky this week, Sen. McConnell has been encouraging the Republican-leaning state’s residents to get vaccinated as soon as possible. “There may be some segments of our population that still have some reservations about this for one reason or another,” he said. “But, what I heard from these health care professionals behind me, is there’s no real good reason not to get the vaccination.”

And again, “during a tour at the state’s first mass vaccine site at Kroger Field”:

McConnell . . . spent a majority of his time pushing vaccines for everyone including Republican men. “I saw on some program last week that Republican men, curiously enough, might be reluctant to take the vaccine. I’m a Republican man. I want to tell everyone, we need to take this vaccine. These reservations need to be put aside.”

McConnell’s pro-vaccine message this week — going on Fox News, denouncing misinformation, and cutting a radio ad— was entirely consistent with his approach from the get-go.

McConnell has hardly been the only prominent Republican voice to promote the vaccine. Mike Pence publicly received his shot on live television in mid December as well, and promoted it as a “medical miracle.” In mid March, he was still promoting the vaccine as “Safe & Effective” and encouraging Americans to get it:

Kevin McCarthy also promoted the vaccine in December — knowing full well that the bulk of the vaccination work would have to continue under Biden:

McCarthy’s response to questions in March was characteristically mealymouthed, but hardly anti-vax:

When asked if he needs to do more to encourage the GOP Conference to be vaccinated, he said more than 75% of his conference has been vaccinated. “Well, there’s more than 75% now . . . plus there’s 30-40 people who have had Covid too, so you even have a higher percent,” he said, implying that he thinks they have immunity to Covid-19 with the antibodies.

In May, McCarthy was attacked by Tucker Carlson for being too cozy with Frank Luntz’s efforts to promote vaccination. McCarthy’s pro-vaccine statement this week was stronger:

In late April, the Republican Doctors Caucus (including including Senators Roger Marshall, John Barrasso, and John Boozman) cut an ad promoting the vaccine:

https://twitter.com/RogerMarshallMD/status/1387052380089315329

As the Associated Press noted, this was just “the latest effort from GOP leaders to shrink the vaccination gap between their party and Democrats.” A mid-March NBC News roundup of “How Biden, Republicans and public health leaders are trying to persuade GOP skeptics to get their Covid vaccinations” featured extensive quotes from Iowa Republican Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks as well as detailing pro-vaccine initiatives by Florida governor Ron DeSantis and South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, noting that — at the time — “Noem’s state is third in the nation in shots administered per-capita.”

https://twitter.com/RepMMM/status/1370489251465416704

Also in April, New Hampshire’s Republican governor Chris Sununu cut a pro-vaccine public-service announcement:

The response from Democrats was to attack him for appearing in the ads:

State Democrats are charging that Gov. Chris Sununu is exploiting federally-funded public service announcements urging Granite Staters to be vaccinated against COVID-19 for his own political gain. “Taxpayer money should be spent on proven efforts to encourage people get vaccinated, not on promoting Chris Sununu’s political ambitions,” New Hampshire Democratic Party Chair Raymond Buckley said Friday. “This entire ad campaign is a craven, unethical and political waste of taxpayer money by the governor.”

The state GOP is pushing back against the accusation. “This is a ridiculous low point for New Hampshire Democrats,” said state Republican Party Executive Director Joe Sweeney. “Granite Staters should be unified in increasing vaccination rates against COVID-19 and the State of New Hampshire PSAs are just one part of a campaign that will get more Granite Staters vaccinated.”

Plenty of Republican governors have promoted vaccination. Greg Abbott of Texas called the shot “safe and effective” when he got it in December. Maryland’s Larry Hogan got his shot and gave a pro-vaccine pep talk in January. Alaska’s Mike Dunleavy was talking up vaccination in early March after his own bout with COVID. In late March, Oklahoma’s Kevin Stitt “flashed a thumbs up to reporters after getting his shot. . . . ‘I think that me being here as the governor of a state like Oklahoma, hopefully I can encourage others to follow my lead.’” Noem got her shot and publicized it in early April. In May, Charlie Baker of Massachusetts touted the success of his state in getting residents vaccinated. Jim Justice has offered incentives for vaccines in West Virginia. Asa Hutchinson has lately been holding town halls promoting the vaccine and fielding questions around Arkansas.

The list could go on; space does not even permit here a full recounting of the vigorous and noisy efforts DeSantis has made to get Floridians vaccinated. He has done so despite furious criticism from Democrats and the media when he focused distribution on the elderly and rolled out a plan to distribute the vaccine through Publix grocery stores. He added Walmart in February. In early May, DeSantis said, “My message is the vaccines protect you, get vaccinated, and then live your life as if you’re protected.” This was denounced for putting too much faith in the vaccine. In mid June, his response to concerns about the Delta variant was, “The best thing you can do if you haven’t gotten a vaccine, particularly if you’re somebody who’s older, particularly if you have any health problems, is to get a shot.” It requires a Herculean effort to look at the long train of DeSantis’s statements and actions on the vaccine as he promotes it around his state and paint him as plotting to keep people unvaccinated so that the state can be locked down again.

It’s not only Republicans currently in office who have promoted vaccination. In June, former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, now head of the Young America’s Foundation, filmed a joint PSA with his Democratic predecessor Jim Doyle to promote vaccination in Wisconsin. George W. Bush did his part, too, appearing in a joint PSA with fellow former presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama.

Then there’s the loudest megaphone of all, Donald Trump. Trump has a long history of playing footsie with anti-vax sentiment, which predates his presidency. His record, now, of promoting the COVID vaccine has been uneven, reflecting a tension between his desire to get credit for Operation Warp Speed and his natural inclination to stoke populist mistrust of the vaccine. But it is not hard to find pro-vaccine Trump messages. When Rachel Maddow claimed that “while he was president, President Trump never encouraged Americans to get vaccinated,” even the liberal PoliFact rated that claim “False,” citing multiple examples during his presidency. And he has kept saying it out of office. In a late-February speech to CPAC, he declared that “everyone should go get your shot.” Two weeks later, he put out a statement saying, “I hope everyone remembers when they’re getting the COVID-19 (often referred to as the China Virus) Vaccine, that if I wasn’t President, you wouldn’t be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all.” Blake Montgomery of the Daily Beast called it a “Sad Statement on Presidential Letterhead Pleading for Credit for COVID Vaccine.” Kathleen Parker in the Washington Post blasted Trump for the statement. Stephen Colbert mocked it as “pathetic.”

Also in mid March, Trump went on Fox and promoted vaccination, a step that the Los Angeles Times headlined as “Trump, in shift, urges supporters to get the COVID-19 vaccine”:

Former President Trump urged people to be vaccinated, saying he would recommend COVID-19 shots to “a lot of people that don’t want to get it, and a lot of those people voted for me.” In an interview Tuesday night on Fox News, Trump said that people were free to decide for themselves whether they would be vaccinated. “We have our freedoms and we have to live by that and I agree with that also. But it is a great vaccine. It is a safe vaccine and it is something that works,” he said.

None of this is to deny that the American Right has had an anti–COVID vax problem. There has been vocal resistance to the vaccine among a significant segment of Republican voters, especially the most MAGA sections of the electorate. Leading voices in right-leaning media have stoked that sentiment, particularly Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham on Fox News. Some Republican politicians have promoted vaccine resistance, too, and others have pandered to it. Some pro-vaccine Republicans have been less vocal than they could or should have been. Others who have promoted voluntary vaccination have nonetheless opposed heavy-handed steps — such as vaccine passports and cruise-ship vaccine requirements — that the most aggressive pro-vaccine advocates would prefer.

It is also true that Republicans have stepped up their talk about this issue in recent weeks. That is not surprising. In the spring, we had rapidly rising vaccination numbers and falling caseloads, and many of the political controversies about vaccines were focused on adequate supply. As vaccination growth has stalled due to resistance, public attention has turned to persuasion. Politicians react to events, and they also react to criticism. Film at eleven.

But there are four glaring problems with attributing vaccine hesitancy and resistance to a conspiracy by Republican politicians to talk down vaccination on Biden’s watch. One, if you’ve read this far, it should be obvious that if this were a conspiracy to thwart vaccination, it was a very badly organized one given how many prominent Republicans have said and done so much to promote the vaccine.

Two, Beutler is conflating elected Republicans with people in right-wing media and the grass roots. It is one thing to criticize Tucker Carlson for being a loud representative of the Right as a movement, but it is entirely another to claim without a shred of evidence that he is secretly coordinating messages with the very Republicans he blasts on his show as sellouts in bed with Big Pharma to foist the needles on us. The reality is that anti-vax sentiment on the right is much more a bottom-up, demand-driven message than a top-down one. People like Carlson are doing this for ratings and because it appeals to their instincts, not for political strategy. That does not excuse the people who pander to that sentiment or feed it, but they are not its creators.

Three, it is not even close to being true that popular resistance to vaccination is predominantly a Republican phenomenon. Republicans may be overrepresented among people who are unvaccinated, and even more so among those who refuse to ever get vaccinated, but there are lots of unvaccinated people who very clearly do not take their marching orders from Tucker Carlson. One example: As Jim Geraghty notes, 40 percent of the people who work for New York City public schools and public hospitals are unvaccinated. There are copious data showing that black and Hispanic Americans are less likely to be vaccinated and more likely to be resistant:

  • The Washington Post, in November: “Coronavirus vaccines face trust gap in Black and Latino communities, study finds. . . . If offered a coronavirus vaccine free of charge, fewer than half of Black people and 66 percent of Latino people said they would definitely or probably take it, according to a survey-based study that underscores the challenge of getting vaccines to communities hit hard by the pandemic. . . . 14 percent of Black people trust that a vaccine will be safe, and 18 percent trust that it will be effective in shielding them from the coronavirus.”
  • Time, in December: “Fueled by a History of Mistreatment, Black Americans Distrust the New COVID-19 Vaccines. . . . A poll released by the Kaiser Family Foundation on Dec. 15 revealed that among racial and ethnic groups, Black Americans are the most hesitant to get a vaccine, and continue to remain skeptical.”
  • NPR, also in December: “Many Hispanic And Black People Say They Are Skeptical About COVID-19 Vaccine.”
  • Brookings, in January: “Skepticism and mistrust challenge COVID vaccine uptake for Latinos.”
  • WebMD, in February: “Black Vaccine Hesitancy Rooted in Mistrust, Doubts. . . . African Americans have nearly the lowest rates of vaccination among any ethnic group.”
  • McClatchy, in March: “The White House is planning to launch a major paid media campaign aimed at convincing reluctant Americans — notably Black and Latino Americans — to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.”
  • Politico, in June: “Biden’s vaccine push fails to gain traction with African Americans. . . . More than five months in, even a blueprint that’s worked with other ethnic and racial groups isn’t doing enough to win over Black Americans. . . . The slowdown has put Black Americans behind the pace set over the past month by other racial and ethnic groups tracked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

Of course, not all black Americans are Democrats, and there is likely a fair amount of overlap between the vaccine-resistant segment of the Hispanic population and the shift of some Hispanics to Trump support. But clearly, these are not demographic groups that traditionally listen to Republican leaders when making life decisions.

Fourth, if Beutler assumes that talking down vaccines must be all about sabotaging political opponents, it raises questions about the motivations of Kamala Harris, Andrew Cuomo, and the many other Democrats who were sowing doubts about vaccines when Trump was in office.

Some Republican leaders have been strong, vocal, and consistent promoters of the COVID vaccine. Some Republicans have been loudly skeptical. Many others lie along a spectrum in between. Only someone thoroughly addicted to bad-faith accusations of conspiracy could paint this as a coordinated, premeditated plan to keep vaccination numbers down just to hurt Joe Biden.

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