To fight a Covid surge, local authorities across the US are implementing mask or vaccine mandates — as some countries go a lot farther
But in order to try to force more citizens to get life-saving vaccinations, other nations — like Greece and Italy — are also introducing their own restrictions.
Distrust of government and federal mandates runs deep in a nation born in an act of rebellion against distant authority. For many Americans, individual rights are paramount — even if they appear to infringe the freedom of others to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. People just don’t think government can tell them what to do or where to go. And, the argument that taking a vaccine helps protect everyone has low traction in some regions.
This individualist streak is one of the defining differences between the United States, in many ways still a conservative, frontier nation, and the social democracies of Europe with their greater embrace of communitarianism.
If many Americans aren’t getting the vaccine because they feel their individual rights are infringed by government advising them to do so, then federal restrictions on where the unvaccinated can go seem unlikely to work. And the diffused power of the US system means many states already have, or will, act to prevent any such restrictions. So, while some conservative politicians are now getting on board and urging their supporters to get inoculated as the Delta variant scythes throughout the heartland, the vaccinated are going to have to live with the fact that the longed-for deliverance from Covid-19 across the entire country may be months away.
Trump’s half-hearted vaccine recommendation
Trump also demanded credit — some of which is due — for the development of effective Covid-19 vaccines while he was President. But even he, with his almost mystical hold on Republican base voters, is not prepared to take a politically courageous step and unequivocally call for their use.
In the end, Sanders cloaked herself in the aura of her former boss, declaring that if it the vaccine was good enough for Trump and his family, it was safe for her. Given the vital importance of wider vaccine penetration to ending the pandemic, Republican leaders who follow suit can save lives. But the price everyone else has to pay is gaslighting by politicians who are covering their change of position.