Why is Trump now advocating Covid vaccination?
By defending vaccines, Donald Trump would be seeking electoral recognition for having invested to produce them
With his showman style, former US President Donald Trump is known for his ability to electrify his constituency, which reveres him even after his departure from the White House. Lately, however, he has decided to antagonize some of his supporters. And he was even booed by those who used to applaud him.
Supporters of the Republican Party, to which Trump belongs, are singled out by popular polls as one of the most resistant to vaccinations. In September, a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation of vaccination data by US counties showed that, in those where Trump had the most votes, only 39.9% of the population had been vaccinated. By comparison, areas where incumbent Democratic President Joe Biden won had an average rate of 52.8% fully immunized.
Despite this, Trump made a series of public statements in the last days of December 2021 and in early January 2022 in which he recommended immunizations, contradicting his voters and his own history on the issue that polarizes American society like few others and can influence the upcoming elections in the country.
But what led Trump to this turn on such a sensitive issue, at the risk of even losing votes in an eventual presidential election in 2024?
Trump and Pro-Vaccine Propaganda
Some Republicans resist getting vaccinated
On December 21, during an interview with former anchor of the conservative Fox News network, Bill O'Reilly, Trump admitted to having received the third dose of vaccine against covid-19, in addition to stating that vaccines are safe and that they saved " tens of millions of people".
In a new appearance on Fox News two days later, Trump said he was "very grateful" to current US President Joe Biden, to whom he did not even convey the position as he considered, without proof, that there was fraud in the fraudulent election. The Republican nod to his successor came because, in a speech to the nation, Biden acknowledged that "thanks to the previous administration (Trump) and our scientific community, the US was one of the first countries to have vaccines."
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"I think he (Biden) has done something very good. There has to be a healing process in this country, and that's going to help a lot," Trump enthused.
Then, in a new interview, this time with conservative presenter Candace Owens, Trump was even more emphatic. "The vaccine is one of humanity's greatest achievements." When Owens, who has not been vaccinated, tried to cast doubt on the safety and effectiveness of immunizations, Trump didn't even allow her to finish her sentences. "Oh no. Vaccines work. Those who are getting very sick, being hospitalized, are the ones who aren't vaccinated. If you get the vaccine, you're protected."
This Wednesday, 1/12, in an interview with the OAN television network, also conservative, Trump not only defended the vaccine and claimed to have had "no side reaction" but also used the matter to attack colleagues from his own Republican party. "I got the shot and the booster shot. I hear interviews with some politicians where they're asked if they got the booster and they're like 'yeah yeah…'. The answer is yes, but they don't want to say it because they're cowards ", said the former president, acknowledging that the issue is unpopular in his electoral base.
Although he did not name names, Trump's criticism was directed at the current Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, considered in the party as a possible successor to Trump for the presidential candidacy. He has refused to say whether he was vaccinated with a third dose or not.
Trump's behavior did not only generate boos from the Trumpist audience present at one of these interviews. There was also revolt among some of his most fervent followers.
Convicted of spreading conspiracy theories, far-right radio host Alex Jones, historically sympathetic to Trump, claimed on his show that the former president was "pathetic" in his support of vaccines, as well as being "a complete ignorant." or "one of the most malicious men who ever lived." And he suggested to his listeners that it was time to "leave Trump behind".
Radio presenter Wayne Allyn Root, a card-carrying Trump player, said the former president was "right in everything" he said in the aforementioned interviews, except for vaccines, where he would need an "intervention".
Trumpist voters also expressed disbelief or annoyance to BBC News Brasil. "It was an obvious montage, I don't think he actually said it," said a 52-year-old Republican, Oklahoma City employee, who was not vaccinated, after attending one of the interviews. She declined to be identified in the report.
Trump financed vaccines and was the biggest anti-vaccine influencer of the pandemic
The Republican's new attitude on vaccines also clashes with his own record.
Although he created Operation Warp Speed, which injected more than US$ 10 billion (about R$ 60 billion) in research for the creation of vaccines against covid-19 and boosted the development of Johnson and Moderna immunizers, Trump he refused to be vaccinated publicly, as his three predecessors and his successor did.
Unlike Trump, Obama, Clinton and Bush publicly agreed to be vaccinated against covid-19
In addition, he took months to admit that he had been immunized while he was president, repeatedly played down the risks of covid-19 ("it's like the flu"), and said, already out of the presidency, that he "probably wouldn't" take the booster shot, as he was "in good shape". Trump also spread false information about vaccines and autism, an association that several US public health bodies categorically dismissed.
The former president was even identified by researchers as the main influencer of the combative anti-vaccine community, before being removed from social networks. "The anti-vaccine groups act as a kind of echo chamber for the speeches of some very relevant figures, and although Trump had an ambiguous behavior, funding vaccines and saying negative things about them at the same time, she was a central figure for this group" , told BBC News Brazil Federico Germani, a bioethics researcher at the University of Zurich (Switzerland), author of studies on the anti-vaccination community.
Why did Trump switch to advocating vaccination?
What explains, therefore, that he has changed his position and that, in recent weeks, he has defended and recommended vaccines publicly on at least five different occasions?
A political consultant from the Republican Party, who spoke to BBC News Brazil in a reserved character given the sensitivity of the topic, said that "Trump was never personally anti-vaccine, but as the topic of covid-19 became very politicized and it was negative for Trump when he left the White House, he chose not to engage in public incentives for vaccination."
Trump's performance in handling the pandemic was one of the topics on which the Republican had the worst evaluation during the election campaign. No wonder, his rival, Joe Biden, competed with the premise of ending the pandemic in the country. Struggling with a new record wave of cases and hospitalizations, caused by the omicron variant, are the Democrats who now have the pandemic as one of their weaknesses.
Joe Biden monitors American vaccination; Pandemic has become a sensitive topic for Democrats
"Everything for Trump is about beating his chest and saying that under his leadership, Americans were in a better condition. So he wants to rescue that legacy of having done Operation Warp Speed and having brought the vaccine to Americans", evaluates the Republican consultant.
Trump is currently working both to regain a majority in Congress in the midterm elections at the end of 2022 and to contest the presidential election in 2024.
In this effort, he would also be in tune with the behavior of public opinion and with the messages that came from the polls in 2020. While resistance to vaccines has fallen, albeit slowly, in the country, there is a strong rejection among Americans, especially among Republicans, about government decisions that oblige certain professional groups to be vaccinated on pain of dismissal. According to a survey by the YouGov Institute conducted in October, about 70% of Republicans are against mandatory vaccination measures imposed by the Biden administration and currently being considered by the Supreme Court.
"I believe the main reason behind the change in Trump's tone is that while mandatory vaccines remain extremely unpopular on the right, the size of the Republican Party's very fiery anti-vaccine portion is getting smaller. Many people remain unvaccinated, but there are less fervor about it. Trump is being cautious in saying that he thinks vaccines are effective and people should get them if they want to, but they shouldn't be forced to. This approach has the benefit of softening his image for suburban voters who are not on the far right, an audience he lost to Biden in 2020," says Clayton Allen, director of US policy analysis at Eurasia Group Consulting.
While he knows that this move to appeal to the moderate electorate could irritate some of his most extreme base, Trump's calculation is that in a bipartisan environment (there are only two competitive parties in the US election), they would have no other option of choice. candidate to replace him. And they would go to the polls to support him, despite the fact that voting is not mandatory, because they fervently reject the Democrats and still maintain many points of convergence with the Trumpist agenda.
Allen also notes that the behavior of other Republicans, such as Senator Mitch McConnell or Texas Governor Greg Abbott, suggests that vaccines have increased in value among voters. "All of them have said that the vaccine is the best defense against the pandemic, although they maintain that the decision to immunize yourself is a personal one. Certainly their polls indicate that voters are more and more appreciative of vaccines, and that they can reach 2024 as a resource viewed as very valuable by Americans. In that case, Trump would never fail to give them his victory lap."
The position of the Republican Party contrasts with that of other rights around the world inspired by Trumpism. The most notorious case is that of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who continues to claim that he has not been vaccinated and recently criticized Anvisa, the technical body responsible for evaluating and authorizing vaccines in Brazil, by saying that its servers are "vaccinated" .
Are GOP voters dying more in the pandemic?
Finally, there are those who believe that Trump's comments may reflect genuine concern for his own health and that of his constituents.
According to calculations by University of Zurich economist David Yanagizawa-Drott, with more than 700 days since the start of the pandemic, the death rate in Republican-majority American counties is 28% higher than in Democratic-majority counties. "And the gap (of mortality lines between Democrats and Republicans) continues to widen," he noted in a Jan.
"We now know that Trump had a very serious case of Covid-19, which may have changed his perspective on the severity of the disease," said political scientist Michael Traugott, an expert in political communication at the University of Michigan (USA). Traugott mentions recent revelations made in a book by then Trump's chief of staff Mark Meadows. "His oxygen levels have dropped to about 86%, a dangerously low level for someone his age," Meadows wrote in his book "The Chief's Chief," released in December and untranslated in Brazil. In general, the minimum blood oxygenation considered normal is 95%.
Vaccine resistance among the Republican electorate, in a country with the highest absolute number of deaths (nearly 850,000), has led economists and statisticians to try to find out if Covid-19 has killed this group more than Democrats, which could , ultimately, impact the outcome of a close election as is often the case in the US.
According to calculations by University of Zurich economist David Yanagizawa-Drott, with more than 700 days since the start of the pandemic, the death rate in Republican-majority American counties is 28% higher than in Democratic-majority counties. "And the gap (of the mortality lines between Democrats and Republicans) continues to widen," Yanagizawa-Drott noted in a Jan. 3 post on Twitter.
Contacted by BBC News Brasil to comment on the electoral implications of these data, Yanagizawa-Drott preferred not to comment.
But Brazilian economist Bernardo Guimarães, from Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), tried to deepen the investigation and calculated that an accumulation of 250,000 more deaths on one side could, for example, imply the loss of a seat in Congress for the party with lower. "Of course, the American system, with the electoral college, is complex, there are areas where a large loss of votes to one side or the other would not make any difference. But it is plausible from a mathematical point of view that the fatalities of the pandemic can directly affect the result by eliminating masses of voters," Guimarães told BBC News Brasil.
It is possible that Trump's motivations for the change in direction regarding vaccines will never be fully clarified. But an obvious fact is how secure he seems to be in his new position. In front of an audience of booing Republicans at the end of December, he made an impatient gesture with his hand and said, "Stop it, stop it. It's just a small group of people, right there."
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