When President Joe Biden announced his intention to require workers to be vaccinated, he made a peculiar statement. It could have been another Biden malapropism, but if it wasn’t, Biden’s comment is telling.
“We’re going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers,” Biden said. “We’re going to reduce the spread of COVID-19 by increasing the share of the workforce that is vaccinated in businesses all across America.”
Biden’s statement is illogical. The entire point of the vaccine is to protect people from getting COVID-19. Except the vaccine is supposed to shield people from the virus. Yet based on what Biden said, it could be inferred that the vaccine does not work.
His stated intention to “protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated workers” defies what the experts have been advising from the beginning. If everyone must be vaccinated to protect those who already received their vaccination, how effective are the vaccines?
There is no precedent for such a ridiculous statement. President Harry S. Truman did not urge New Yorkers to get the smallpox vaccine in 1947 by saying those who were not vaccinated were a threat to those who were. In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower didn’t tell people who received the polio vaccines they needed to be protected from those who were not vaccinated. Such a statement would have brought panic and confusion.
“This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Biden has declared. That was true, but then, why is it the vaccinated who supposedly need protection? Not only are such statements wrong, but they are actually dangerous. Biden’s rhetoric does nothing but lend credence to the very thing he seeks to remedy — vaccine skepticism.
Vaccines do work, and everyone should get them. The quicker everyone does, the faster life returns to normal. However, implanting the idea that for the vaccinated to be protected, it requires the unvaccinated to get shots is just fearmongering and misinformation.
