Each week Liberty Nation straps on its Personal Protective Equipment and dives into the TwitterZone to bring you the biggest news, the most outlandish arguments, and the real Zeitgeist of what is taking place in the internet’s wildest frontier.
For the last few months, Twitter users have endlessly debated to whom the first promised vaccine doses should go. While most users agreed that frontline workers should be primary to protect them from sick patients, many on the radical left insisted that race, income, and gender should be significant factors in deciding. Thankfully, this narrative lost out in favor of vaccinating more frontline workers, schoolteachers and students, and the elderly.
Although the vaccine's distribution to the states has been coordinated by the federal government, each state has the sole authority to determine the process of vaccinating its residents. This has spelled disaster in many states overlarded with bureaucracy, such as California. The state issues the vaccines to counties, regardless of how efficiently they manage to accomplish distribution. Vaccine priorities in California even subverted the rhetoric of local politicians who insisted that "every life matters" when locking down the country through executive orders. This hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed on Twitter, with prominent conservatives correctly pointing out the fallacy of vaccinating schoolteachers whose unions refuse to allow teachers to return to in-class teaching.
For starters, California currently has more than 2 million unused vaccine doses. Early in distribution, Governor Gavin Newsom blamed an insufficient number of vaccines being divvied out by the federal government; when the factual data went public, the jig was up. Should the federal government wean California off vaccine supply due to the state's utter failure in injections? On Twitter, tales of nurses using former identification cards to get vaccines have been rampant, a perfect example of corruption in the face of central-planning snafus. According to reports, vaccines have been thrown away, based on county health department guidelines, if approved recipients fail to show up for their appointments. So Los Angeles County allegedly disposed of hundreds of vaccines daily at each clinic. Press coverage of this unsettling information forced the department to walk back its policies.
Early into the pandemic, Twitter was a radical left echo chamber, insisting that America’s lack of universal healthcare, like that in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, or Spain, would spell doom. Instead, the European Union currently lists more deaths and fewer cases than the United States, demonstrating how universal healthcare does not guarantee success in combating COVID-19. Even as multiple pharmaceutical companies competed with one another to get a vaccine out as fast as possible, the fascination with central planning reflects big-government Democrats’ naivete. If any response to the pandemic doesn’t involve government bureaucracy, it’s considered lackluster. The evidence overwhelmingly shows how this top-down approach has failed to curb the case count through endless lockdowns or a mass U.S. vaccination program.
The incoming Biden administration promises to distribute the vaccine “equitably and to hard-to-reach, marginalized, and medically-underserved communities” (whatever that means). If equity turns out to be the main goal in our new vaccination program across the country, Americans can take a glimpse at California’s catastrophe to see just how that might work out for their own state.
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Read more from Jose Backer.
