About 34 million people have fallen ill with COVID-19 in the U.S. and nearly 610,000 have died. Protection is readily at hand, but is going to waste in storage and in some cases while millions refuse to avail themselves of it.
Americans, usually among the most responsive people on the globe when confronted by a widespread and out of control contagion, have resisted accepting a highly effective vaccine out of doubts about its safety. Some believe the pandemic is a false narrative, while other think government-sponsored inoculation is a violation of their constitutional right to privacy.
It is small wonder that Anthony Fauci, director of the U. S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, will likely appear in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most consecutive days of mind-bending frustration.
Fauci, who also serves as chief medical advisor to the president, has been the most outspoken for the COVID-19 vaccine, appearing almost daily on network and cable talk and interview shows expressing his bewilderment and shock that fewer than 60 percent of the nation has received the vaccine while large swaths of the country continue to ignore a proven lifesaving, rapid and painless procedure .
He’s become a flash point for harsh criticism and relentless assaults from some elements of the media who’ve accused him of peddling false information about the disease’s severity and the vaccine’s efficacy. His pleas for greater vaccine acceptance have been dismissed by those who see government’s involvement as a conspiracy to exert greater and insidious control of the private lives of Americans.
Fauci and the Biden Administration have been castigated for efforts to send emissaries into neighborhoods where vaccination rates are the lowest to knock on doors and urge the unvaccinated to agree to the protection.
Rather than recognize the door-to-door effort as a worthy attempt to stop the spread of the most serious public health crisis in a century, critics demeaned and derided it.
Congressman Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, for instance, told the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas the effort was a plot by government to confiscate guns and Bibles from people’s private homes, a dangerous quasi paranoid notion.
At the same conference, his like-mind conspiracy promoters Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia belittled those participating in the outreach effort as “needle Nazis” and “medical brown shirts.” The audience cheered.
How effective their attacks will be is unclear, but the mere fact that wild theories and personal insults have gained a foothold – however tenuous – in Congress is stunning.
How does Fauci refute what to most is sheer lunacy? Denying a government plot to confiscate guns and Bibles merely serves to give it additional attention.
Copyright 2021 Carl Golden, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.