Ben Domenech vs. Ben Domenech: Fox News Pundit Slams Biden for Singling Out the Unvaxxed, But He Went Even Further in 2015

During the panel segment on Tuesday’s Special Report, Fox News contributor Ben Domenech reacted to President Joe Biden’s speech about the Covid-19 pandemic earlier in the day. His comments would be unremarkable for a Fox News pundit but for the fact that he accused Biden of doing more or less what he did in a column for The Federalist in 2015: call out the vaccine-hesitant.

In fact, Domenech went even further than Biden did.

In his remarks, Biden made 10 mentions of “unvaccinated” people. He correctly noted for the umpteen millionth time that the unvaccinated are at a far greater risk of being hospitalized or dying due to Covid-19. Moreover, he noted, there’s a real concern that a winter surge could overwhelm hospitals.

About the president’s speech, Domenech said,

I do think that the significant failure that I think happened once again with these remarks is treating those who are unvaccinated – for whatever reason that they’re – as if they are part of some out group, that they are the Others, that they ought to be blamed for the situation that we’re in today, even though we see every day the news about one person after another who is fully vaccinated – even those who have boosters – who are nonetheless being diagnosed as actually testing positive for this new widespread variant, which I think we can be very grateful for, as it seems to be not as deadly as others.

Those are all things that I think the president has an opportunity to unite the country on. To this point, he hasn’t been able to do that and I think it would really take a significant change in direction in the new year for him to be able to accomplish that feat.

Missing from Domenech’s remarks is the crucial point that while it’s true that the vaccinated are experiencing breakthrough cases, they are much less likely to require hospitalization or die from the virus.

Regardless, before Domenech was against singling out the unvaccinated, he was very much for singling out the unvaccinated, or at least, those who refuse to vaccinate their children. (They are often one and the same.) Writing in The Federalist in 2015, Domenech called out vaccine skeptics within the conservative movement who were “pretending there is some kind of legitimate debate about American vaccination policies.”

Here’s Domenech, targeting parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids:

If you choose not to vaccinate, private and public institutions should be able to discriminate on that basis. Disneyland should be able to require proof of vaccination as a condition of entry, and so should public schools. You shouldn’t be compelled to vaccinate your child, but neither should the rest of us be compelled to pretend like you did.

That was Domenech six years ago – sans any pandemic or other major outbreak – suggesting that public schools and private businesses should be allowed to discriminate against parents and children who haven’t been vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella.

That’s not all. Domenech suggested that if declining rates of MMR vaccination continue, the federal government should inflict material pain on families with unvaccinated kids:

If the decline in MMR vaccination continues, perhaps the federal government could take the step of making access to the child tax credit contingent upon vaccination. If we’re going to have redistributive social engineering in the tax code, it may as well be for children who aren’t carrying disease around Disneyland.

To be clear, Covid-19 isn’t measles or mumps or rubella, which these days are hardly threats because the vast majority of the public has been vaccinated against those diseases. The same cannot be said for Covid-19, which each day is killing more than 1,000 Americans – about 98% to 99% of whom are unvaccinated.

So yes, the president is singling out the unvaccinated, but so is the virus. And it’s a lot meaner than Joe Biden.

Watch above via Fox News.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.