The Tide Has Turned Against the ‘Unvaccinated Asshole’ as Delta Variant Surges

Tommy ChristopherAug 7th, 2021, 2:59 pm
 
A woman holds a sign reading Will Not Compply as she joins hundreds of other demonstrators gathering to protest against mandated vaccines outside of the Michigan State Capitol on August 6 2021 in Lansing Michigan

Emily Elconin, Getty Images

President Joe Biden and his administration appear to have joined a wave of people who have lost their patience with what one awesome mayor called “the asshole unvaccinated” this week. The kid gloves have come off.

The vaxxed have been fed up with the unvaxxed for a very, very long time — really, since before there were vaccines, and most of these same people were maskholes raising hell in Costco and superspreading every chance they got.

But public health officials, particularly the Biden administration and its Covid team, have spent months worrying about being “constructive” in dealing with unvaccinated people, eschewing mandates and insisting that “trusted messengers” would help them come along.

And even before that, Dr. Anthony Fauci spent a year humoring maskhole concerns about liberty, consistently pushing back against the idea of a national mask mandate during the Trump administration, until Shep Smith dragged him into reluctantly agreeing it would be a good thing.

The strategy made a certain amount of sense, under the reasoning that mandates and shaming would run the risk of hardening resistance without accomplishing much else — especially when vaccinations were cruising along at a brisk clip. That became less tenable as vaccinations slowed, the Delta variant exploded, and resistance hardened just fine all by itself.

The week of August 2 may go down in history as the week that the government finally caught up with the rest of us and also ran out of f*cks, as the kids say, and took off the gloves where the unvaccinated are conerned. And it’s about time.

The ripples actually began last week, when Biden made a slightly unvarnished observation while discussing mandating vaccines for federal workers and contractors.

“That’s under consideration right now, but if you’re not vaccinated, you’re not nearly as smart as I thought you were,” Biden said.

That mandate was announced two days later.

Biden’s rather gentle dunk got the outrage treatment from the RNC, but it came just a few days after Republican Alabama Governor Kay Ivey took aim at the unvaxxed in more explicit terms, saying that “it’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the vaccinated folks. It’s the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down.”

Going into last weekend, it was very clear that with the Delta variant surging and vaccination rates just reaching the goal President Biden set for July 4, shit was getting real.

At the beginning of the week, one local official spoke what many of us have been feeling for a very long time, labeling the superspreading hoarde “the asshole unvaccinated,” after which he tried to apologize for it but wound up calling them assholes again.

Eventually, the pressure from local unvaccinated … well, you know … forced West Lafayette, Indiana Mayor John Dennis to apologize.

On Wednesday, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy — my governor — gave some anti-vax hecklers a piece of his mind.

“These folks back there have lost their mi–you’ve lost your minds! You are the ultimate knuckleheads and because of what you are saying and standing for, people are losing their life. People are losing their life, and you have to know that. Look in the mirror. Look in the mirror!” Murphy said, taking it to a nationwide 11, or a Jersey 4.

And rather than be berated into an apology by the plentiful idiots in the state, the official New Jersey Twitter account amplified the moment, aptly calling it a “mic drop.”

The White House has not been quite so Jersey as Murphy — or that Indiana mayor who out-Jerseyed Jersey — but this week saw a marked shift, from Fauci in particular.

While the White House has been pressing the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” message for several weeks now, and the president has unspooled a series of policies aimed at meeting the urgency of the moment, Fauci has dramatically ramped up the pressure on the unvaxxed.

In a series of interviews this week, Fauci sounded the alarm that not only are the unvaccinated endangering themselves, they are increasing the likelihood of a variant that could “push aside” the Delta variant, and resist vaccines.

Fauci told Katie Couric that “if we allow there to be smoldering infection into the fall, and into the winter because those 93 million people are not getting vaccinated, for the most part, my concern would be you may allow a variant that we haven’t even recognized yet to come along and in fact be better at transmitting and more serious than the Delta.”

It’s a powerful message that says “It’s not just about them, it’s about you!”

And the President is now openly mocking DeSantis, who has become the face of The Resistance — To Ending the Plague.

Only time will tell if anything can get through to these “ultimate knuckleheads,” although we may never know if tougher talk has an impact. It looks like the Delta variant has been pretty persuasive all on its own.

The more desperate we all get not to descend into another year of death under a new Covid superbug, the more we will see the animosity toward the unvaccinated grow — deservedly so. But the hardness of the heads involved tells me we’re going to end up having to mandate, not cuss, our way out of this.

 

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

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