Anyone Notice Where COVID Rates Are Climbing These Days? (Hint: Not In Texas or Florida)
So much for President Joe Biden’s attacks on Republican states such as Texas and Florida for threatening their citizens by not kowtowing to his dictates on mask and vaccine mandates.
As we noted weeks ago, and the mainstream press has only now begun to acknowledge, new cases of COVID peaked at the beginning of September, and have been on a downtrend ever since. Cases are falling in Texas, in Florida, and other states that dared put their residents’ freedoms above Biden’s dictates.
But while the national trend is downward, COVID cases are rising in a handful of states. And what the mainstream press definitely won’t tell you is what these states have in common: Almost every one of them is run by Democrats and has high vaccination rates.
The Johns Hopkins COVID tracker displays each state in shades of either green or red, with green indicating a downward trend and red an upswing. The darker the shade the bigger the change in either direction.
Well, take a look at the current display, shown above. The 13 states that are showing increases right now are California, Washington, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Nebraska, Maine, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. Except for a few, these are reliably Democratic states.
There’s something else worth noting. Nine of these 13 states have vaccination rates higher – and in some cases, much higher – than the national average of 56%.
In Washington, 62% are fully vaccinated, in California 59% are. In Colorado, it’s 60%, in New Mexico, 64%. The numbers are 58% in Minnesota and 57% in Wisconsin. In Rhode Island and Maine, 69% are vaccinated, and in New Hampshire, it’s 62%.
What to make of this? Nothing really, except that the problem with this outbreak isn’t the “misinformation” that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube are trying to censor — such as anyone saying the vaccines might not be as effective as advertised, that kids are being harmed by “public health” Nazis, that COVID’s risks are concentrated almost entirely among the very old and very ill.
No, the real problem is the politically driven misinformation that Biden and others on the left are peddling and that the tech giants are all too happy to allow to spread across their social networks.
Namely, that this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” that intrusive and divisive vaccine mandates are needed, that Republican governors are killing their people by not being more authoritarian.
This disease, whatever its origins, isn’t going away. There will be waves of it in the future. No one has to panic about that, or live in a bubble, or demand vaccine papers, or forever stand six feet apart from everyone else, or wear masks 24/7.
What we really need is for our leaders to stop trying to scare everyone to death and start letting people make their own decisions about their own health.
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