As a Minnesota Vikings fan, I’ve been reluctant to weigh in on Aaron Rodgers and his decision to mislead everyone about his vaccination status. For those unaware, the Packers quarterback had said he was “immunized” when asked about the coronavirus vaccine, but we’ve since learned he hadn’t, in fact, gotten vaccinated.
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But something Rodgers said while explaining himself Friday warrants further exploration, because it’s so pervasive among conservative vaccine skeptics seeking to justify their position. As with so much in politics today, it boils down to whataboutism.
In a long Q&A, Rodgers tried to argue it was actually his critics who had been dishonest (he’s a victim of “woke” “cancel culture,” you see). He also suggested his vaccine skepticism was warranted because the political roles were once reversed. He claimed vaccine skepticism was the provenance of the left before Donald Trump lost reelection, which means it’s only logical to ask questions now.
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“When Trump in 2020 was championing these vaccines that were coming so quick, what did the left say?” Rodgers said. “And I’m talking about every member of the left. ‘Don’t trust the vaccine.’ ‘Don’t get the vaccine.’ ‘You’re going to die from vaccine.’ And then what happened? Biden wins, and everything flips.”
If you talk long enough to the conservatives in your life who are reluctant to get the vaccine, you’re quite likely to happen upon a version of this argument. And there’s something behind it. It’s just oversimplified and misses a lot of very important context.
In 2020, some Democratic candidates for office expressed skepticism about the Trump administration’s handling of the vaccine and equivocated on whether they would get one.
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Now-Vice President Harris was asked whether she would trust a vaccine that was released before the election — the implication in the question being that perhaps it would have been pushed along to benefit Trump’s reelection bid.
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“I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump,” Harris said, “and it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he’s talking about. I will not take his word for it.”
Likewise, North Carolina Senate candidate Cal Cunningham (D) said he would be reluctant to take the vaccine if it were released by the end of the year because of the corruption in Washington.
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Then-New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) offered even stronger comments, saying he also wouldn’t trust the Food and Drug Administration, which approves vaccines. He said the state would conduct its own review due to that lack of faith.
“You’re going to say to the American people now, ‘Here’s a vaccine, it was new, it was done quickly, but trust this federal administration and their health administration that it’s safe? And we’re not 100 percent sure of the consequences,'" Cuomo said. “I think it’s going to be a very skeptical American public about taking the vaccine, and they should be.”
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We’ve written about these comments before. Harris’s comment in particular emphasized that she would trust “credible” sources — just not Trump personally.
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And it’s not like that came out of nowhere. Both Trump and his FDA commissioner have acknowledged Trump leaned on supposedly apolitical FDA processes.
It happened with hydroxychloroquine, which was briefly approved for emergency use (a decision which Trump claimed credit for pushing) and then deauthorized. And Trump also reinforced this even after some of the comments above. When it was looking like the FDA wouldn’t be authorizing the vaccines before Election Day, Trump suggested the White House could overrule the FDA’s tougher standards for vaccine authorization.
Cunningham’s and Cuomo’s comments were more problematic, in that they suggested even broader skepticism — that a vaccine sign-off even by health officials warranted skepticism. Cuomo’s comment notably came after Trump’s suggestion he might overrule the FDA, though, and that’s the important context for all of this.
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As The Post’s Glenn Kessler wrote in a recent fact-check of similar arguments:
[The argument] conveniently ignores the fact that Trump himself injected politics into the FDA’s approval process. Trump’s statements raised serious concerns that vaccine approval was being expedited to improve Trump’s reelection chances. In the end, the career staff won out and the vaccines were not formally approved on an emergency basis until after the election — which Trump lost. Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, especially his touting of quick-fix cures before he latched onto the vaccine, is well-documented in [Washington Post reporters Yasmeen] Abutaleb and [Damien] Paletta’s book.
The full text of Biden and Harris’s statements showed that they properly framed the issue as concern about possible political interference by Trump. Cuomo’s comments, such as his creation of an unnecessary state task force to also approve the vaccines, are slightly more problematic, but again he was responding to Trump’s assertion he could overrule the FDA.
And while Rodgers suggests politics were involved in these concerns no longer being in-play after Election Day, the context shows that cuts both ways. It’s also true that at that point, such political motivation no longer applied to force this through. There was nothing to gain politically, beyond being able to say the vaccine was approved during the Trump administration, so virtually all of the above reservations didn’t really apply anymore.
As for the idea that it was “every member of the left” saying these things or that they said people would “die” from it? That’s just false. Shortly after Harris’s comment, Joe Biden emphasized he would take the vaccine immediately, even “if it cost me the election.” Biden, too, warned about Trump politicizing the process — again, not based on nothing — but he generally spoke in terms of Trump undermining faith, rather than not trusting the vaccine, period. We haven’t seen any Democrat saying you’d die for the prospective vaccine.
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And if this were truly such a concerted effort to question the vaccine, you’d perhaps expect those who support these politicians to be anti-vaccine. In fact, Democrats remained more likely than Republicans to get the vaccine throughout 2020.
In September, shortly after many of these comments were lodged, a Pew Research Center poll showed 58 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters said they would likely get the vaccine, versus 44 percent on the Republican side. The gap in a Kaiser Family Foundation poll conducted both before and after the comments was even wider, at 77 percent for Democrats and 47 percent for Republicans.
By December, on the eve of the vaccines being approved, Democrats led in vaccine intentions 86-56.
Were some of these comments by big-name Democrats counterproductive to the looming vaccination campaign? Yes — as Biden’s course-correction reinforced. Did they say “don’t get the vaccine” or that you would die? No. And was it pervasive on the left? Also no.
As Rodgers would perhaps attest, it’s best to be upfront about all the context for one’s comments about vaccines. So there you go.