GQP Criminal Negligence: The COVID-19 ‘Fourth Wave’ is Here

After the Republican governors of Florida and Texas “reopened 100%” with no COVID-19 safety precautions in March to take advantage of college Spring Break partygoers (followed by Arizona Governor Doug Ducey pathetically joining in, saying “wait, me too!“), Axios reports The fourth wave is here:

Coronavirus infections are on the rise yet again, all across the U.S.

The big picture: America may be at the beginning of a fourth wave in the pandemic. It will almost certainly be far less deadly than the previous three, but this persistent failure to contain the virus has real consequences, and will only make it harder to put COVID-19 behind us.

By the numbers: On average, roughly 63,000 Americans per day were diagnosed with coronavirus infections over the past week. That’s a 17% increase from the week before, and echoes the rising caseloads of the pandemic’s second wave last summer.

• • • Average daily caseloads increased over the past week in 25 states. The biggest spikes were in Michigan and New York [New York variant.]
    • Even as vaccinations continue to climb, new cases only declined in five states, mainly in the Southeast.

What we’re watching: Because so many seniors have been vaccinated — 73% have gotten at least one dose — this fourth wave is likely to be a lot less deadly than the previous ones.

• • • Many states have also prioritized vaccinating people with underlying health conditions, which will also help constrain the increase in severe illness and death.

Yes, but: More coronavirus is always a bad outcome, and this fourth wave is a foreseeable, preventable failure that risks dragging out the pandemic and leaving more people at risk in the process.

• • • Millions of younger Americans with high-risk medical conditions haven’t yet been vaccinated, and therefore are still susceptible to serious illness and death as the virus spreads more aggressively.
    • Hospitalizations are still rising — they’re just not likely to increase as dramatically as they have before.
    • Greater spread also fosters the growth of new variants. The variants driving this outbreak are more contagious than the original strain; future variants will likely be less susceptible to our existing vaccines.
    • Failing to control the virus now means it’ll be hanging around and flaring up longer into the future.

The bottom line: The vaccines work, and will spare us a lot of the death and suffering of previous surges. But four waves of infection in one year represents a clear failure to control the virus through any other means, and that will continue to hurt us.

Governors were warned, repeatedly, by the medical experts not to lift COVID-19 safety precautions yet because it was premature. Medical experts expected this fourth wave driven by the new COVID-19 variants to occur this spring. This was fully foreseeable and preventable, and these Republican governors ignored the science. They are criminally negligent to have “reopened 100%” with no COVID-19 safety precautions.

At some point, a prosecutor somewhere needs to make an example of one of these governors. Republican governors are unnecessarily putting the health, safety and welfare of American citizens at risk for GQP politics. Republican governors represent a pubic health threat.

A poll conducted in early March by NPR/PBS News and Marist University found Republican men and Trump 2020 voters as being the least interested in getting vaccinated, with 49% and 47%, respectively, saying they did not plan on getting the shot when it becomes available to them.

Some experts have worried that the rate of vaccinations nationally could slow, even as eligibility standards are loosened, because of hesitancy by some sectors of the population.

A new look at the data from the most recent Axios-Ipsos poll shows a strong correlation between the people who are influenced by COVID vaccine misinformation and those who are unlikely to get the vaccine. Axios-Ipsos poll: The misinformed are less likely to get vaccinated:

The poll asked whether six false statements about the coronavirus vaccines were true or false, including that the vaccine includes a microchip to track the recipient; vaccines that use messenger RNA technology promote cancer; the vaccines sterilize people who get them; and the vaccine is more deadly than the virus.

• • • The groups that outright believed the misinformation were fairly small. The bigger issue was the number of people who said they didn’t know whether it was true or false — which doesn’t count as a correct answer.
    • For example, only 3% incorrectly said it was true that the COVID vaccines sterilize the recipients, but 35% said they weren’t sure.

By the numbers: The poll also found that people who said they didn’t trust the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or public health officials to give accurate information about COVID were more likely than other groups to say they’re not going to get the shot.

• • • For example, 47% of people who don’t trust the CDC said they’re not at all likely to get vaccinated, while another 15% said they’re not very likely to get it.
    • By contrast, 44% of those who trust the CDC said they’ve already been vaccinated, while 26% said they’re very likely to get the shot and 13% said they’re somewhat likely to get it.
    • There was also a strong correlation between lack of trust in the CDC and vulnerability to misinformation: 40% of those who don’t trust the CDC didn’t give any correct answers to the six misinformation questions, while another 28% only got one to three answers right.

The bottom line: The impact of COVID vaccine misinformation is not trivial.

In 2013, Republican Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal called on the GOP to “stop being the stupid party.” Boy did that ever fall on deaf ears. Now they are in thrall to a QAnon conspiracy cult.

The MAGA/Qanon cult’s latest fixation and talking point this week is “covid passports,” because the anti-science, anti-maskers of the MAGA/Qanon cult are also anti-vaxxers who do not want to be asked for proof that they have been vaccinated.

These selfish ignorant bastards profess that they have the “freedom” to do whatever the hell they want, whenever they want, wherever they want without any regard for others, or even their own family members or friends. Republicans seek to make vaccine passports the next battle in the pandemic culture wars:

Republicans are opening a new front in the pandemic culture wars, attacking efforts by the Biden administration to develop guidelines for coronavirus vaccination passports that businesses can use to determine who can safely participate in activities such as flights, concerts and indoor dining.

The issue has received an increasing amount of attention from some of the party’s most extreme members and conservative media figures, but it has also been seized on by Republican leaders like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is considered a potential 2024 presidential candidate.

“We are not supporting doing any vaccine passports in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said Monday. “It’s completely unacceptable for either the government or the private sector to impose upon you the requirement that you show proof of vaccine to just simply be able to participate in normal society.”

Other Republicans have used more inflammatory rhetoric, with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-Ga.) calling the passport idea “Biden’s Mark of the Beast” and some conservative activists comparing it with Nazi policies to identify Jews.

Why hasn’t this batshit crazy QAnon Queen been expelled from Congress already?

The hyper-charged rhetoric is directed at a nascent initiative between the Biden administration and private companies to develop a standard way for Americans to show they have received a coronavirus vaccination. The idea behind the passports or certificates is that they would be a way to ensure that people could return to normal activities without risking further spread of a virus that has killed more than 550,000 Americans.

Pshaw! Republicans don’t care how many people die, unless it is them or a close loved one. “Social Darwinism is all about the survival of the fittest, baby!”

“There’s been this pent-up opposition to lockdowns and mask mandates and so this is building on that,” said David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “Now there’s this suggestion that if you don’t get a vaccine, you might not be able to do — we’re not quite sure what. I can see how there’s a market for that concern.”

Now the effort by some Republicans to create doubt about a vaccine passport program threatens to define the Biden administration effort while it’s still in the earliest phase, blunting its ability to roll out an idea that could be a popular project and putting the administration on the defensive.

The discussion around a passport has been led by various industries, including airlines, entertainment venues and sports leagues. Biden administration officials have repeatedly said there will be no national mandate.

Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist, said the fierce opposition from many in the party spawned organically and called the news that the White House is working with the business community on vaccine passports or certificates “a trial balloon that went over like a lead balloon.”

“A healthy distrust of government when it comes to health care is nothing new,” said Gorman, who used to work for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “It’s a line of messaging that has been very successful to Republicans going back to Obamacare and the like.” [Which was totally unhinged.]

Paul Matzko, a historian and author of “The Radio Right,” a volume on how the conservative movement grew via talk radio, said a Democrat in the White House typically coincides with conspiracy theories growing on the right.

The current fervor over a vaccine passport feeds into existing conservative narratives that Democratic administrations try to track and control the population.

“This is a very old concern — this idea of globalized elites with a sinister plan for the world who are going to take away American sovereignty,” Matzko said.

“They want us to be seen, we can’t escape them, we have a mark, whether it is a passport, or a chip or a bar code,” Matzko added, explaining the various manifestations of this theory. “It’s kind of outlandish.”

Not wasting any time on this latest GQP talking point, the Arizona Republican Sedition Party in the Arizona legislature, which this week eliminated any mask mandate in the legislature, OKs barring Arizona companies from refusing to serve unvaccinated patrons, because “It’s my freedom to be an asshole!”

A Senate panel voted 6-4 Wednesday to bar companies from refusing to serve customers who are not vaccinated.

House Bill 2190 also would allow employees to refuse to comply with their bosses’ demands that they get inoculated, and without fear of being fired.

It also would specifically preclude any effort in Arizona to have what the Biden administration proposes as a universal “vaccine passport” that people could use to show they have immunity and get the products or services they want.

The measure now goes to the full Senate. If approved there, it would still need to be approved by the House, which has not seen its current wording.

* * *

The idea of the state telling businesses they can’t turn away unvaccinated customers drew derision from Rep. Tony Navarrete, D-Phoenix.

He said that many who support this legislation are the same people who have backed the authority of businesses to deny service to customers based on their sexual orientation.

And attorney Don Johnson testified that legislators are treading into areas of free enterprise in trying to tell companies what policies they can and cannot have about their employees.

“This bill would throw the boss into jail if the boss decides that this kind of safety measure is important for his business,” Johnson said. “I don’t think the Legislature should assume the obligation of telling employers how to run their business.”

Arizona’s QAnon Queen and anti-vaxxer, Sen. Kelly Townsend, R-Mesa, said creation of these documents could lead to violations of various federal laws.

Those include the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, whose key provisions protect individual medical records. Allowing businesses to demand to see someone’s “vaccine passport,” she said, would essentially force them to disclose some of that information.

Another issue, said Townsend, is that this is not even a vaccine that’s been approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration. Instead, all the versions are currently being distributed under an “emergency use authorization,” essentially a procedure allowing the FDA to allow the use of unapproved medical products in an emergency.

And now, Townsend said, there is a push to have people prove they agreed to take this vaccine to participate in commerce.

“For those who can’t, or won’t, does that not create a different class of society where those with the vaccine have privileges that those without do not have?” she asked.

Townsend, who once compared efforts to ensure that school children are vaccinated to communism, said the whole push for vaccination is wrong.

“I’m afraid for our society,” she said. “I’m afraid for where we’re going because we have completely abandoned all sense of human rights because we’re afraid of a virus. It’s time to say ‘no.’ ”

“I’m somebody that has a respect for an individual to choose whether or not they want to inject something into their body,” the bill’s sponsor, by Rep. Bret Roberts, R-Maricopa, told the Senate Appropriations Committee.

“I don’t think it’s right for a business to basically have the capability of refusing service to individuals and having them participate in commerce and things of that nature simply because they choose not to do so,” he said.

Roberts told colleagues he thinks of this in the same way as old movies where someone approached a checkpoint and constantly was asked for their papers. This would be “tenfold worse,” he said.

Roberts is making a Nazi comparison. I’m sure that the Anti-Defamation League would not be amused by his comparison of life under the Third Reich to what amounts to a minor inconvenience for him. Nothing like diminishing Nazi horrors to make a false equivalency. It is not “tenfold worse,” you ignoramus.

“You want to go to a concert, you want to go to a movie, you want to buy a ticket for anything, you just go in and buy a candy bar, a soda, they can ask you for your papers,” he said. “Practically speaking, mechanically speaking, that’s just unacceptable, and that’s not a line I want to see crossed in the state of Arizona.”

Sen. Sean Bowie, D-Phoenix, said the legislation appears to even preclude companies and institutions that hire doctors and nurses from requiring them to be vaccinated.

Roberts acknowledged that’s the case.

Perhaps, Roberts said, there needs to be some provision to allow the employers of first responders like ambulance attendants to get vaccinated for at least things like Hepatitis B, which can be spread through things like blood or body fluids from one person to another.

Paul Waldman explains, Don’t believe conservative fearmongering over vaccine passports:

[S]ome on the right clearly see this as an opportunity to stir up culture-war anger and continue their revisionist history project around the covid-19 pandemic.

How can you tell? Because so much of what they’re saying about vaccine passports is so dumb.

[C]all me crazy, but I’d say 550,000 Americans dying of the coronavirus is a tad more “dystopian” than getting your smartphone scanned on your way into the gym.

And if you’re worried about your movements being tracked, I have some very bad news about that phone in your pocket.

Oh the hypocrisy:

Conservatives, furthermore, are happy to require people to show a very specific ID before they’re allowed to vote. They would also like to see every employer use a federal government database known as E-Verify to check your citizenship status before they’ll hire you; Republican hero Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill mandating just that in Florida.

So if I’m a restaurant owner, should I have the right to say, “Since we’re still in a pandemic, for the next six months I’m only allowing in-person dining for those who have been vaccinated”? If you cry, “But you’re infringing on my freedom!”, I’d respond that you’re free to refuse the vaccine (or to get takeout), but I’m also free to make sure my restaurant is safe for my customers and staff.

And yes, in the short term, life could become more pleasant for those who have been vaccinated, granting them privileges not available to the refusers. Which is exactly the point.

In part, the objections are just something else for conservatives to complain about, a way to claim once again that they’re being victimized and oppressed. [It’s what they live for.] But this is also yet another battle in the war over our collective pandemic memory.

They’d like everyone to believe President Donald Trump did a great job managing the coronavirus pandemic, it was never a big deal in the first place, only wimps are willing to sacrifice for our collective well-being, and our greatest political heroes should be those who ignored and denied it. That’s not even mentioning the QAnon faction, which will no doubt see a vaccine passport as the Mark of the Beast [See Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, above].

To be clear, I remain skeptical about the practical challenges in rolling out a vaccine passport system quickly in this vast country. Perhaps it would only bring the end of the pandemic a tiny bit closer. But just as I’ll be making my appointment to get vaccinated the first day I can, if a vaccine passport does get created, you can sign me up.