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**August 2, 2021**

Kuttner on TAP

Trump's Excellent Vaccine That the Trumpers Refuse

****

I have a relative who is a medical worker at a Florida hospital. His
emergency room is now full, with people suffering from COVID. Not one of
them was vaccinated. Many of his co-workers, including nurses, have not
been vaccinated.

Presumably, nearly all of these people got the usual childhood vaccines,
for smallpox, polio, and the long established vaccines for diphtheria,
pertussis, tetanus, and typhoid. So why is this vaccine different from
all other vaccines?

The answer, of course, is Donald Trump. The anti-vax movement overlaps
with the Trump movement-which is doubly weird because one of the two
things Trump did semi-right (the other was to toss out the established
China policy) was to throw public money at a crash program to develop
vaccines at warp speed. And the program, despite several failures along
the way and billions in excess profits, basically succeeded.

So why didn't Trump puff up his chest and roll up his sleeves, bask in
the achievement, and urge everyone to get vaccinated? Because the entire
Trump movement is built on cognitive dissonance-holding two
incompatible beliefs at the same time.

In this case, the vaccine is a monumental Trump accomplishment, but the
government is not going to tell me what to do. So Trump is too cowardly
to take on contradictory prejudices he helped create.

Just as a vaccine causes the body to create antibodies against the
disease, Trump's vaccine created antibodies in the body politic
against its use. Jesus wept. (Salk and Jenner, too.)

If only there were a vaccine against magical thinking. Were it not so
tragic, it would be comic to watch politicians like Florida's Ron
DeSantis or Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell try to waltz around
these contradictions.

The only way to slow down these surges is for everyone to get
vaccinated. The longer we wait, the more people will die. Especially
Republicans.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

Robert Kuttner's latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.

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