December 19, 2021

Rather than acknowledge that we've got a right-wing propaganda problem on our hands, with outlets such as Fox "news" and others spewing dangerous anti-vax misinformation day after day and week after week, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu tried to "both sides" the issue. He refused to even acknowledge that it's members of his own party who are at fault for the low vaccination rates in the United States, and then he blamed to media for being too "polarizing." CNN host Jake Tapper was just fine with it.

Here's the exchange from this Sunday's State of the Union where Tapper asked Sununu about the number of Democrats versus Republicans who have been vaccinated:

TAPPER: So you've been pushing folks to get vaccinated for a year now. A new poll this week showed that 96 percent of Democrats nationwide say they're vaccinated but only 54 percent of Republicans say they're vaccinated.

Why do you think it is that so many Republicans are still refusing to get vaccinated? I understand... I don't want to talk about the mandates right now, but just willingly, why are so many Republicans unwilling to do so?

SUNUNU: Well, I like to be careful. I don't think it's a Democrat versus Republican, a male versus female, older versus young. I talk to young Democrat women who are school teachers and nurses are concerned getting the vaccine because they might get pregnant, which, there's no data to support that. We tell them to talk to their doctors and be smart about it.

So I don't think it's a party thing. I don't think it's a political thing. I really just think it has to be a matter... it has to be a personal choice of course.

I think the media, not to just put the blame anywhere, I think we all as a society take a bit of the blame in terms of polarizing and politicizing something that absolutely shouldn't be. It should be data driven.

We watch data. We watch trends. We're incredibly transparent among television all the time showing folks what data we're looking at. My biggest hope is that we look at the data, we engage with our doctors, we engage with our healthcare providers who know best to make that decision.

But I tend not to just look at it as Republican versus Democrat thing. As a country, we all have to get on board, get vaccinated and get our boosters and making sure we're promoting that positive message.

From there, Tapper just moved along to the next topic.

It's not "both sides" pushing dangerous lies, and the only reason any of this is "polarizing" is because one side of the aisle has decided it's politically advantageous to prolong this pandemic, no matter how many people it kills.

I'm not sure why Tapper even bothered to ask Sununu this question if he wasn't going to ask any follow up questions, or push him to actually answer it, instead of allowing him to deflect the way he did here.

Discussion

We welcome relevant, respectful comments. Any comments that are sexist or in any other way deemed hateful by our staff will be deleted and constitute grounds for a ban from posting on the site. Please refer to our Terms of Service for information on our posting policy.
Mastodon