YOU CAME TO THE WRONG PLACE FOR COHERENCE, SON:

One of the best arguments against Biden's plan is that it's unfair to people who, through prior infection, have developed natural immunity to the virus. McCarthy estimates that 40 million Americans are in this category. But by his own calculation, that leaves another 50 million who have been neither vaccinated nor infected. Furthermore, studies show that vaccination boosts immunity even in people who were previously infected. But the central problem with accepting natural immunity as an alternative to vaccination is that the immunity would have to be verified. That would require an antibody test or access to the employee's medical records, both of which Republicans oppose. At a press conference in Florida on Tuesday, DeSantis and other critics of Biden's plan accused the president of ignoring natural immunity, yet they vowed to tighten COVID privacy rules because "your medical health records are your business, not the government's."

Another common refrain among Republicans is that if unvaccinated people lose their jobs, their children will suffer. J.D. Vance, the Trumpist author who's running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, says vaccine refusers won't be able to feed their families. But McCarthy, Abbott, and other Republicans say just the opposite: that mandates will hurt employers because jobs are so abundant that vaccine refusers will just quit and easily find other work. At the press conference in Florida, DeSantis accused Biden of threatening people's livelihoods, but other speakers said the mandate would fail because workers who opposed vaccination already had other job offers.

Despite their outcry over mandatory vaccinations for COVID, Republicans express no objections to vaccine mandates for other diseases, such as polio, measles, and hepatitis. When they're asked why, they suggest that COVID isn't as worrisome. It's "very different from polio, [which] has very devastating effects," says Ricketts. This is spectacularly false, and Republicans know it. At the DeSantis press conference, Rep. Kat Cammack--who has belittled COVID and downplayed the importance of vaccination--insisted that as a matter of loyalty, unvaccinated first responders should be allowed to keep their jobs, since they had bravely risked their lives by coming to the aid of numerous people infected with the virus. But if the virus posed such a risk to these heroes, why wouldn't it pose the same risk to anyone whom they, as carriers, later encountered? And for that reason, shouldn't they be vaccinated?

Politicians on the right also argue that COVID vaccines, unlike vaccines for other diseases, should remain voluntary because they're widely distrusted. But this argument is circular, because the same politicians are inciting that distrust. Last week, in a statement against Biden's mandate, Sen. Ron Johnson said the president had failed to "answer basic questions regarding [COVID] vaccine safety." On Monday, Rep. Ronny Jackson told Fox News viewers that the vaccines' long-term effects were unknown and that Jackson had agreed to get a COVID shot only under duress. On Tuesday, the first speaker at DeSantis' anti-mandate press conference asserted, falsely, that "the vaccine changes your RNA." DeSantis, standing next to him, said nothing.

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