As evidenced by the precipitous drop off in vaccination rates, the Biden administration did indeed undermine the public’s confidence in our COVID-19 vaccination campaign with their inexplicable, since-revoked decision to halt Johnson & Johnson jabs thanks to a one-in-a-million risk of blood clots. Since last month’s apex of daily vaccine administration, the average number of people getting shots in arms has fallen by a staggering 50%.
Luckily, governors such as Ron DeSantis of Florida have enacted a new, statistically proven way of incentivizing the vaccine-hesitant to get their shots: removing draconian coronavirus regulations.
According to a new UCLA study, nonvaccinated people are 13% more likely to get the vaccine if it meant being allowed to no longer wear masks. The gains in vaccine willingness based on whether or not one had to wear a mask was the greatest among Republicans, followed by white respondents and then black ones. This salience is crucial, considering that white Republicans have proven the most likely to have qualms about the vaccines.
The vaccines are safe, effective, and our key to returning to normalcy. They prevent not just sickness but also the contraction and transmission of COVID-19, and all of the technologies behind them have been extensively researched and tested by American companies and laboratories. Vaccines made in American factories are, statistically speaking, orders of magnitude safer than a virus almost surely made in a Chinese Communist Party lab.
But at every turn, public health officials undermined the faith of the masses in their judgment, beginning with “experts” such as Anthony Fauci and Jerome Adams making the calculated lie that masks did not protect people from the coronavirus and culminated in the ludicrous decision to halt the administration of Johnson & Johnson vaccines.
Given this reality, there’s no question that if removing mask mandates will get more jabs in arms, especially among those who need to be convinced the most, that is the right call.
