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So the American right wing is going bonkers now over big bird getting vaccinated against COVID-19 and Ted Cruz and others are just furious of …the idea here is as vaccines, the Pfizer vaccine has now been approved for those five to 11 years of age, to use every resource available, to get people… vaccinated and, uh, help us get a step closer to getting out of this pandemic, which I mean, I want to do.
Sometimes I wonder who actually wants to get out of the pandemic because they say, don’t do the things that will help us get out of it. But we’ll put that aside for now. Uh, so the big thing was that, um, a big bird tweeted on Saturday that he got the shot, he got vaccinated and big bird, of course, through Sesame Street has been around since 1969, et cetera, et cetera.
And Big Bird said, my wing is a little sore, but it’ll give my body an extra protective boosts that keeps me and others healthy. And initially people on Twitter went crazy in the comments. You can look at the comments and see just how bonkers people were going. But then people like Ted Cruz said that this is government propaganda. Others were talking about this as a tool for brainwashing children.
Newsmax host, and former Trump advisor. Steve Cortes said that it’s evil propaganda. And unfortunately it’s not just been a reaction about the propaganda aspect. It has also led to some responding to the Big Bird vaccination by repeating false claims about COVID like kids don’t really get COVID or if kids get COVID it’s never serious. Or if kids get COVID, they can’t spread. COVID all things which have been debunked, at least in absolute terms, which is often the way that the Right speaks.
This is really an example of the right, just wanting to sort of like own the libs at any cost. They don’t want to legislate. They’ve abandoned actually running on policy. I’ve said before, the right has become essentially a party of “oppose what the left does.”
Talk about cultural issues, propose almost nothing other than vague and often meaningless initiatives to investigate this or to explore that and not really actually do anything that is helpful for people. Now, as we saw when there is policy to vote on, in this case related to COVID, and it’s a Republican policy, they go for it.
The same policy under a Democrat, they oppose it. Just think back to our three COVID stimulus packages under Donald Trump. Ted Cruz, and other Republicans went along with Donald Trump’s first COVID stimulus and Donald Trump’s second COVID stimulus.
Joe Biden was then elected to office and Joe Biden wanted to pass something very similar and no Republicans voted in favor of it.
They came up with different reasons — why we don’t need it anymore, or it includes the possibility that undocumented immigrants will get the money, which was a possibility under the Trump plans as well. Or whatever the reason is.
What they wanted to do was just own the libs. As they see it, obstruct, obstruct, obstruct attack, attack attack, and not actually do anything for the American people. The Big Bird thing is basically the same thing. This is the opposite of what they could be doing in order to get us out of this pandemic. The vaccines have been tested. The Pfizer vaccine is fully approved, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they just want to get in the way.
Now, the problem that they are running into is that this is increasingly a Republican virus now in 2021 in the United States.
I’ve explained before, back at the start of the pandemic, where were we seeing the most cases in deaths? Well, it was sort of the misfortune. It was chance or odds or whatever you would call it, that there are some urban areas in the US that had lots of direct flights to the places where the virus originally had hotspots: China.
So Boston, JFK, Newark airports, lot of nonstop flights back and forth from China. As well as flights back and forth from European cities that were early nodes of the virus: Italy, Rome, Rome, Italy, Germany, et cetera. And so early, you saw that concentration in Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey to some degree, California, San Francisco, et cetera.
Now we know how the virus spreads. We know how to limit the spread of the virus, and we have fully available vaccines. Today we see a cumulative death rate in Trump-voting counties that is almost 50% higher than the cumulative death rate in Biden-voting counties. Even within the Biden voting counties, it is sensible to believe that the deaths are still skewed to the Trump voters in the Biden voting counties. Why? Because 40% of adult Republicans are unvaccinated, but only 10% of adult Democrats are unvaccinated.
So when you see Ted Cruz come out and say, no Big Bird vaccination propaganda, or whatever, understand that it’s another attempt to just own the libs as they love to do.
But its starting to affect their voting base. We don’t yet know how big does that death gap need to be before it makes a difference in elections, but we’ve looked at the numbers.
It’s plausible that if this continues to be more of a Republican killer than a democratic killer in the U.S., this could make a difference in Florida’s next gubernatorial election. As an example, because the last one was relatively close. So Republicans would be well-served if they care about winning, if they don’t care about people dying, okay, fine. They don’t care. But if they care about winning, they should look at the numbers and see that overwhelmingly, this is a virus that is killing their voters. Will they? I don’t really know.
