The DeSantis Campaign Could Regret Flirting with Vaccine Skepticism

T he pro-Ron DeSantis PAC Never Back Down has earned its name. The organization does, indeed, never back down from attacking former President Donald Trump from almost every available angle. The same can be said for DeSantis’s rapid-response operation. After nearly eight years in which Republican lawmakers and GOP-aligned institutions shied away from criticizing Trump, even when it might have benefited their political interests, the DeSantis operation’s kitchen-sink approach is refreshing and necessary. But in exercising little discretion in the formulation of some of these attacks, DeSantis backers are staking claim to ground from which they will eventually have to retreat.

Donald Trump’s sit-down interview with Fox News Channel host Bret Baier provided the DeSantis campaign’s rapid-response operation, the “DeSantis War Room,” with plenty of fodder. The operation landed a variety of solid attacks on the former president over his apparent confusion about whether the federal convicts whose sentences he supported commuting through legislation should, in fact, be killed by the state. But the War Room also inexplicably committed itself to criticizing Trump for being too supportive of Covid vaccines.

In a clip of that interview, Trump explained why he doesn’t spend much time promoting the historic achievement associated with securing temporary approval for a variety of Covid vaccines, which established the conditions that justified reopening public and private institutions. “I said, I really don’t want to talk about it because, as a Republican, it’s not a great thing to talk about for some reason,” Trump said of the vaccines. The DeSantis operation pounced. “Trump once again refuses to acknowledge any of the adverse effects” of the vaccines, it insisted. Nor is this the first time this organization has engaged in vaccine skepticism, as it proudly pointed out.

Indeed, in a threaded response to itself, the War Room reminded its audience of its June 1 attack on Trump for being too supportive of his own vaccination program. It featured a clip of Trump appearing at an Iowa town hall where he was confronted by one Republican voter who claimed that “we have lost people because you supported the jab.” Trump defended himself from the charge, but Team DeSantis sided with Trump’s critic. Once again Trump “doesn’t acknowledge any of the adverse effects,” the rapid-response shop insisted.

To whom is this sort of agitation appealing? Most self-described Republicans are willing to admit to pollsters that they’ve completed the initial course of vaccination and received booster shots. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s polling from late March, only 40 percent of Republicans describe themselves as either “partially vaccinated” or “unvaccinated.” Other polling suggests that older Republican voters — a demographic that accounts for a disproportionate share of Republican primary voters and is disproportionately “MAGA” in its political sympathies — are far more likely to self-report having been boosted. Why give these voters any more reason to doubt the seriousness of Trump’s most viable challenger in the race? Only those who are so thoroughly marinated in the maximalism and irrationality that pass for discourse on the internet would be shocked to learn that the vaccines that made pandemic-era restrictions a thing of the past are quite popular with the general public.

Okay, fine. But is there any merit to the implication that there were “adverse effects” associated with a full course of one of the mRNA vaccines? It’s not an evidence-free proposition, but it has been wildly overstated in the conservative press. Basic logic would suggest that it would be difficult if not impossible to hide widespread side-effects in the population of over 230 million Americans who are considered fully vaccinated. But what about the side effects we’ve heard so much about, like, for example, episodes of potentially deadly myopericarditis in young adults? Again, given the breadth of the population exposed to the vaccine, there are ample subjects to study.

One recent meta-analysis published in the journal Science Direct found that the risk of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart wall) was more pronounced among those who contracted Covid-19 and were unvaccinated than among those who contracted it and were. That study further determined that the risk of this complication arising from the Covid vaccine was no greater than that of its arising from other vaccines. Such is the potential downside for candidates who court vaccine skeptics: Put too much stock in circumstantial evidence and you’ll find yourself tied to positions that turn out to be disproved by data collected in the future.

Donald Trump has tried to have his cake and eat it too when it comes to the efficacy and safety of the vaccine program that he shepherded to completion through Operation Warp Speed. Sometimes, he touts it as one of the greatest achievements of his administration; other times, he indulges the apprehension of his core supporters toward the presumed unknowns that surround the vaccine. But DeSantis has tried to play both sides of the issue, too: He made vaccine promotion and uptake one of the core priorities of his administration in 2020, only to empanel a grand jury in 2022 to establish the severity of the vaccines’ side effects and the complicity of the pharmaceutical companies that produced them.

The lack of any principle animating these displays is profoundly cynical. And the Trump and DeSantis campaigns are making a mistake if they think voters won’t notice the hypocrisy.

Overall, DeSantis’s record when it comes to Covid is one of his candidacy’s core strengths. But that strength is rooted in measurable, tangible achievements, not a willingness to offend the “right” people with rhetorical overtures toward voters who are just as attracted to DeSantis and Trump as they are to Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Those voters do not make up anything close to the majority of Republican primary voters, and they are not the kind of committed, reliable supporters upon whom a successful campaign depends. And if DeSantis does secure the Republican presidential nomination for himself, his organization’s flirtation with them will become a millstone around the campaign’s neck in the general election.

It is profoundly heartening to see Republican campaigns at long last taking the fight for the soul of the GOP to Donald Trump in earnest. But throwing wild haymakers at the former president without concern for the collateral damage could do more harm than good. It is important to see targeted, tailored attacks on Trump that appeal to his conservative supporters as much as they do his opponents. But if, at the end of the day, it’s Trump who ends up looking like the saner party in this debate, those attacks have doubtlessly backfired.