Matthew Dowd Warns GOP Base Is Falling Victim to Party’s Anti-Vaccine Misinformation: ‘It’s Like They Put a Gun to Their Own Head’

Matthew Dowd, the former Bush-Cheney political adviser, warned that the GOP base is falling victim to its party leaders’ anti-vaccine skepticism and misinformation — and putting themselves at higher risk.

Appearing on CNN’s OutFront, the GOP strategist alluded to the alarming results from a recent NPR/Marist poll that found 47 percent of Trump supporters and nearly half of Republican men, 49 percent, said they would not get one of the three FDA-approved Covid-19 vaccines. (By comparison, just 11 percent of Democrats and 6 percent of men from that party had no plans to get inoculated from the coronavirus.)

CNN host Erin Burnett noted that unvaccinated people are susceptible to not only contracting the virus and being harmed or dying from it, but they can act as incubators and distributors of new variants resistant to the current vaccines.

“I was thinking today about, like if you were Charles Darwin, you would not have to Galapagos Islands, you could sail the H.M.S. Beagle up the Potomac and do a case study of natural selection and survival of the fittest among the GOP members of Congress, ” Dowd said. “Every voter and every person ought to do their own research and come to their own conclusions. But I feel for a lot of them because they have been lied to.”

Dowd was alluding to a disturbing report that roughly one-fourth of Congress has yet to be vaccinated, with some Republicans, like Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) falsely claiming that his having had the virus is better protection than the vaccine, and 25-year-old Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) publicly disavowing the vaccine because “the survival rate is too high for me to want it.”

“My guess is there is a number of GOP leaders in Congress who are saying they are not going to get the vaccine but are quietly going to get the vaccine, but never talk about it, so there’s going to be two lies,” he claimed. “One, they’re going to tell a lie of omission, in not telling their constituents to get the vaccine. And two, a lie of commission, where they’re probably going to go and get the vaccine.”

“To me this is evolution at its finest,” Dowd added, referring to the misled GOP base. “It’s like they put a gun to their own head and threaten somebody saying, ‘If you don’t do what I want you to do, I’m going to shoot,’ as the gun is pointed at their own head. It makes no sense.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.