President Biden’s initiative to increase the rate of vaccinations in America is being received by the majority of people in the country with significant support and optimism. A recent poll asking whether voters in five swing states would favor corporations requiring employees to get vaccinated or get tested weekly found that upwards of 60% were in favor of it.
That broad-based support, however, has not deterred Fox News and Republican partisans from launching exceedingly hostile attacks on both Biden and his plan. Here’s a taste of the rancid rhetoric that Fox is regurgitating:
WATCH: Fox News attacked President Biden after he announced his new vaccine mandate, calling him a "real tyrant" pic.twitter.com/ykIxK9uaj1
— The Beat with Ari Melber ? (@TheBeatWithAri) September 10, 2021
That last friendly fellow who was insinuating that government employees be murdered was Josh Mandel, the current Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio.
Meanwhile, at Friday’s White House press briefing, Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy assumed his role as Chief of Inane Inquisitions. Seeking to trip up Press Secretary Jen Psaki (for which he has a perfect record of failure), Doocy entered into the following exchange:
Doocy: Why is it that you’re trying to require anybody with a job or anybody who goes to school to get the COVID-19 vaccine, but you are not requiring that of migrants that continue walking across southern border into the country?
Psaki: Look, our objective is to get as many people vaccinated across the country as humanly possible. And so the President’s announcement yesterday was an effort to empower businesses, to give businesses the tolls to protect their workforces. That’s exactly what we did. But certainly we want everybody to get vaccinated, and the more people to get vaccinated, whether they are migrants or whether they are workers, protects more people in the United States.
Doocy: But it’s a requirement for people at a business with more than a hundred people, but it’s not a requirement for migrants at the Southern border. Why?
Psaki: That’s correct.
Peter Doocy’s Bad Faith Question of the Day: “Why is it that you’re trying to require anybody with a job … to get the COVID-19 vaccine, but you are not requiring that of migrants that continue walking across the southern border into the country?”@PressSec shuts him down: pic.twitter.com/0r9jWS2UB5
— The Recount (@therecount) September 10, 2021
Psaki’s final response was less a reply to Doocy’s question than it was a dismissal of his foolishness as a waste of time. There are stark and obvious differences between the government’s role in making the workplaces of 100 million people safer, and the role of immigration agencies managing a few thousand temporary detainees. Biden’s focus on the former is clearly a higher priority.
That said, the welfare of the detainees has not been disregarded. All of the immigrants coming across the Southern border are tested for the coronavirus and offered a vaccination. And just like American workers, they are not forced to take it. Even so, 70% of the immigrants agree to be vaccinated. That’s a significantly higher percentage of vaccine acceptance than for Fox News viewers, which is only about 62%. That compares to 83% for viewers of CNN or MSNBC. The numbers are even worse for Trump voters (50%) versus Biden voters (91%).
Doocy’s question harbors a couple of typical Fox News hypocrisies. First of all, it’s premise is that it’s wrong to mandate vaccines. But it then it suggests that, despite being wrong, such mandates should be applied to even more people, in this case immigrants. Secondly, if Fox News were aware that vaccines actually are being offered to immigrants, the network’s xenophobes would be outraged that those resources were going to foreigners rather than American citizens. America First, and all that.
So once again Doocy has demonstrated his ignorance of the issues he raises. Either that or he is so determined to manufacture controversy that he doesn’t care how ignorant he appears. And once again Psaki has spanked him for his pathetic insolence. You would think he would get tired of this after so long. Apparently Psaki is.
NOTE: Twitter suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.
How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.