Biden Shows How Not to Improve Vaccine Rates

Let’s say you’re Joe Biden.

For entirely valid and legitimate reasons, you staked much of your presidency on getting the country vaccinated. You had a very good start, but then things started to stall right as a new, more contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus was spreading.

This is a problem. I don’t just mean it’s a political problem. (I’ll get to that.) It’s a public policy problem. Like national defense and law enforcement, fighting a pandemic is probably one of the few things political thinkers, conservative or progressive, in the past would have agreed was the task of government.

At least until recently. Now, to listen to many of Biden’s conservative critics, getting people vaccinated is just another liberal scheme, like the Green New Deal or pushing critical race theory. That’s really the only explanation for why the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference cheered when told that the Biden administration failed to hit its vaccination targets. It’s a bit like cheering when a war goes poorly because it will make the Democratic commander in chief look bad.