In politics, you’re either on message or you are losing. Let’s get to it.
Welcome to On Message, a weekly look at where the battle lines are drawn and who is winning the war of words.
This week… Turning the Aircraft Carrier Around
As the COVID pandemic comes back on stage for an encore, the communication behind the pandemic, the rush to blame someone and the failure to control misinformation have been fascinating.
Frustrating. Infuriating. But fascinating.
After the initial rollout of the vaccine infection numbers across the country and here in Utah declined significantly. Daily infection rates dropped into the low hundreds, mask mandates ended and life was, for the most part, back to normal.
Of course, there was concern about low vaccination rates overall. As I pointed out in our previous episode, we came just short of the 70 percent vaccination rate by Independence Day. But, overall, the pandemic seemed to be fading into the past.
The one lingering storyline was the annoyingly high number of people who were refusing to get vaccinated. Setting aside exemptions for religious beliefs or medical conflicts, vaccinations allow for a certain percentage to hold out, but not half of us.
By July 4th, less than half the country was fully vaccinated and only 55 percent had even one dose administered.
Whether wholly accurate or not, the narrative was setting in: the far-right was anti-vax, the far left was very pro-vax and the middle was relatively split between those who were willing to get vaccinated and those who maybe just weren’t making it a priority. As life returned to normal, the motivation to get the Faucci Ouchie diminished.
It seems the one thing we could all agree on during the pandemic (that shutting down society was the worst) was not enough of a motivation to put this all behind us once and for all.
Thanks for the effort, medical science.
Over the past couple of weeks, there’s been a narrative shift.
The Delta variant of the virus became a more serious threat with reports saying 90 percent of those who were now being hospitalized and dying were those who had not been vaccinated.
The CDC director wins the messaging game by coining the phrase “pandemic of the unvaccinated. “
That was followed by reports that Fox News, (the Ringo Starr behind the drumbeat of antivax information) was actually requiring its employees to be vaccinated.
Before you could say “hydroxychloroquine” suddenly we had Fox pundits and Republican lawmakers preaching the need to get vaccinated.
In Utah, Senator Mike Lee joined that chorus, as well. Our senior senator stuck to the theme that the government shouldn’t mandate that you get a vaccine, that we should be gracious to all regardless of their choice and then explained why he got the vaccine.
That’s as close as I’ve seen Republicans get to hitting the right message but the needle they are trying to thread is one of their own making.
From the get-go, Republicans could have and should have taken the position against the government mandating that citizens get a vaccine while playing up the patriotism of doing your part to help our nation recover quickly.
They could have played up the obvious economic advantage and boost to capitalism that comes with being the first country in the world to get vaccinated and get life back to normal.
Instead, somehow, we let the vaccine turn into a political football and now we’re trying to turn an aircraft carrier around as quickly as possible.
So, will the new GOP talking points be enough to get the MAGA crowd vaccinated? Only time will tell. If they can, it’s a testament to the potency of their propaganda machine. As the Delta variant surges and primarily targets those who opt-out of the vaccine, we can only hope it helps prevent needless suffering and death.
That’s it for this week.
More On Message in the next issue of the Utah Political Underground.
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