By  Victor Davis Hanson
The Biden Administration should look in the mirror before casting stones at others.
It was always going to be Herculean to inoculate, with an untried vaccine, a multi-ethnic nation of 330 million, across a vast continentâin an era when the media routinely warps the daily news.
Some minorities understandably harbored distrust of prior government vaccination programs.
Nearly 40 million foreign residents in America are from countries where corrupt governments had long ago lost the trust of the population.
Rural and inner-city poor were sometimes not so easily reached, much less persuaded.
Yet politics played the most obstructive role early on. Candidate Joe Biden talked grandly of reviving the World War II war production board. He deliberately omitted that it was Donald Trump who emulated FDRâs mobilization of private enterprise under government auspices.
Trump offered legal protections for companies to accelerate their research and developmentâin hopes that competition, profits, and public oversight would result in COVID-19 vaccinations just 10 months after the pandemic hit.
Yet Dr. Anthony Fauci, in the days when he still posed as a bipartisan professional, had dismissed the idea of any viable vaccination in the election year 2020. Joe Biden publicly doubted that Trumpâs vaccination efforts would either work or be safe.
In a nationally televised debate, vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris shamefully said she would never be vaxxed with any shot associated with President Trump. All that proved disastrous messaging for an already skeptical nation.
Pfizer had promised a breakthrough vaccination announcement in late October on the eve of the election. Then it mysteriously went silentâonly to suddenly announce its successful vaccination, just a few days after the November 3 voting.
Joe Biden continued the politicization of the vaccination program by bizarrely and falsely declaring on CNN that there had been no vaccinations given until he entered office. Yet Biden himself was first vaccinated on December 21 on live television.
Those who refused vaccinations were almost immediately equated in the media to Trump supporters, reviving the Leftâs clingers/deplorables/irredeemable/dregs/chumps narrative of uneducated, white, and idiotic resistance to government.
The truth was that apart from Asian Americans, whites were percentage-wise the most vaccinated of the population. Elites charged that backward southern states like Alabama and Mississippi were not just lagging in their inoculation rates, but endangering vaccinated Americans by resuscitating a now constantly mutating virus.
Again, in truth, low vaccination rates among African-American populations in the South were a chief but unspoken reason why majorities there were not inoculated.
Once the so-called Delta variant arrived in force in early summer, the governmentâs earlier assurances that the vaccinated were now free to resume a normal life lost credibility. Weekly confused and mixed messages followedâsimultaneously both downplaying and exaggerating the efficacy of the vaccinations.
In reality, most who were vaccinated were almost assured that they would not become seriously ill from COVID-19, would likely not need hospitalization, and almost certainly would not die from it.
No matter. The media-government fusion now blame-gamed unvaccinated âsuper-spreadersâ for sometimes infecting those already vaccinatedâas if the over 100 million adults still not fully vaccinated were red-state rubes who packed honky-tonk bars and motorcycle rallies.
Last summer over 1,000 medical providers had given blanket exemptions solely to BLM protestors, dangerously to mass in the streets for weeks on end to demonstrate.
Currently, two million illegal aliens are scheduled to cross the southern border in the next yearâwith legal impunity, but without vaccinations, or COVID-19 tests, or lectures from Washington.
A recent breakout of COVID-19, among even the vaccinated in Provincetown, Massachusetts, was not due to alt-right Neanderthals. It was attributable to the annual gay pride celebrations where some thousands of partiers swarmed bars, clubs, restaurants, and hotels.
Former President Barack Obama was scheduled to host 500 guests and 200 staffers at his Marthaâs Vineyard estateâwhen the government was again insisting masks be worn almost everywhere.
If the Biden Administration cannot vaccinate half of America, or assure vaccinated Americans that COVID-19 mutants wonât seriously hurt them or rekindle the earlier pandemic, then it might first look in the mirror before casting stones at others.