Fox Contributor Jonah Goldberg Calls Out Laura Ingraham’s ‘Fearmongering’ Over Biden Push to Encourage Vaccines
Conservative writer Jonah Goldberg called out the outrage over President Joe Biden’s push to enlist volunteers to go “knocking on doors” to encourage Covid-19 vaccinations, casting it as part of a larger hysteria that has gripped the nation in the wake of the pandemic.
Biden’s comments, which called for the encouragement of vaccinations, not the mandate of them, sparked an outcry from conservatives, including lawmakers like Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) and pundits like Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Last week, Carlson described the plan — which, again, is merely an effort to inform people about vaccines — as an attempt to “force” vaccinations.
“I honestly think this is the greatest scandal in my lifetime, by far,” Carlson said, calling it worse than the Iraq War.
Goldberg, a Fox News contributor and editor of The Dispatch, wrote in a new Los Angeles Times op-ed that the comments from Biden “triggered a geyser of paranoia and asininity from much of the American right.”
“Besides, what’s actually wrong with going door-to-door to inform people where, how, and why they should get vaccinated?” he asked. “People go door-to-door all the time. The Census Bureau does it (and that is in the Constitution). Campaigns do it, as do churches, charities, and activist groups. Supporting local officials and volunteers to promote vaccination is a perfectly reasonable response to an ongoing pandemic — with new strains popping up — that has cost America more than 600,000 lives and trillions of dollars.”
Goldberg cited George Washington’s efforts to fight the yellow fever epidemics to reject the argument that federal action in response to a pandemic is unconstitutional.
“I’m not arguing for the feds to go knocking on doors to promote getting vaccinated — especially now that the right has primed people to be outraged by it,” he said. “But the hysteria is embarrassing.”
Goldberg also called out Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who once boasted of the success of Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, but now engages “in fearmongering over the alleged dangers of vaccines we wouldn’t have, were it not for Trump.”
While Ingraham has railed against the Biden efforts to encourage vaccinations — she called his door-to-door comment “creepy” — she has continued to praise Trump for his administration’s work on developing and distributing the vaccines.
“Operation Warp Speed was launched almost a year ago, if you can believe that,” she said on her show on May 10. “If you like the fact that we have millions of vaccines for adults who want them, you have one politician to thank. And that’s Donald J. Trump.”
In his op-ed, Goldberg went on to decry the scene of a CPAC crowd cheering Alex Berenson for celebrating a low vaccination rate.
“At a time when COVID is spiking among the unvaccinated and 99.5% of COVID deaths over the last several months are among this group, this is depraved,” he said. “It’s certainly not pro-life.”
While noting that this hysteria is not simply a right-wing problem, Goldberg argued that vaccine paranoia became “largely a right-wing phenomenon” after Biden won the 2020 election.
Read the full op-ed here.
