Totally agree. I’ve been thinking the same, and it’s odd to me that he didn’t go that route to begin with. You’d think he’d be all over it.

The vast majority of anti-vaxxers I know are more on the Green side. The Trump supporters got the vaccine as soon as they could.

I'm in California and I have the same experience as you but the data nationally shows otherwise.

Which one? I'm looking at https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/the-red-blue-divide-in-covi... at the moment.

July 6 - 46.7% Biden, 35.0% Trump.

This is reported by the way, right?

Doesn't that confirm what I said? That's, in Biden counties, 46.7% of people are vaccinated and in Trump counties, 35% of people are vaccinated.

Those numbers are vaccination rates in red vs. blue counties where the blue counties have higher rates than the red counties.

That interpretation is supported by the way the article is framing the data in the conclusion.

> Although there has been an overall significant slow-down in COVID-19 vaccination rates in the U.S., these findings show a widening divide of communities at risk for COVID-19 along partisan lines. A key component of any effort to boost vaccination rates among Republicans will be...

That's also a correlation of a correlation, which can be extremely misleading. It might be, for example, that Biden supporters in Trump-dominated districts are less likely to get vaccines.

> give Trump credit for operation lightspeed

Your idea wouldn't work. MAGAs hate liberals, and whatever liberals say appears to them like the voices of the grown-ups in the Peanuts cartoons. Maybe they pull out a few phrases to parody.

We've had over a year of near-continuous propaganda from the Republicans. Masks threaten your freedom. COVID is just the flu. No one dies from it, they put it down on every death certificate. Vaccinations kill you, not COVID. Vaccinations spread COVID, that's the new one.

Giving Trump credit for it would change nothing, even if the MAGAs heard it, and they wouldn't.

> which I think he deserves

It astonishes me that after years of watching Trump lie and lie and lie and lie, rambling and incoherent, often contradicting himself from day to day, watched eighteen months of him lying about COVID including that first key year where he did everything he could as President to prevent an effective response to COVID, that people somehow believe that he's secretly a competent administrator who "gets things done".

What Trump "deserves" is to spend the rest of his life in jail. His deliberate mishandling of COVID resulted in hundreds of thousands of needless American deaths: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Is Trump not responsible for Operation Warp speed? The program that spent billions of dollars to stockpile untested vaccines while they were going through testing so that we'd have an ample supply to distribute in the event they were approved (on an accelerated time scale)?

Operation Warp speed is why, while everyone else is still struggling with supply, everyone the US who wants a vaccine can get a vaccine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed

Unsurprisingly, the Biden administration did the exact opposite of what I suggested. Further entrenching COVID as a partisan issue.

> In January 2021, White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced that the program was expected to undergo a restructure and renaming under the Biden administration. Also in January 2021, Dr. Moncef Slaoui, former Operation Warp Speed lead, was told not to use the name Operation Warp Speed anymore.