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As we head into another pandemic winter of rising COVID-19 cases, strained hospitals and a new variant, pandemic-fatigued Americans are wondering where do we go from here. As usual, a partisan divide has emerged on how to proceed. Democratic leaders are reverting to form, prioritizing restrictions like mask mandates and limits on businesses—measures that Republican leaders are criticizing and mocking, as is their wont.
But as a progressive Democrat and elected official, I believe both sides have it wrong. If we want to save lives, we need to focus on what actually helps people. And neither side is doing that. The Right is engaging in dangerous rhetoric, actively promoting misinformation and downplaying COVID-19 risks and the need to get vaccinated. But the Left's harmful lockdown policies and public health messaging focused on shaming the unvaccinated is turning people against each other and stigmatizing disease. Both are doing the opposite of what needs to be done to protect vulnerable Americans.
I live in a high-poverty area of Rochester, N.Y., which is how I know what lot of people don't seem to realize: that a significant number of unvaccinated people are from marginalized communities. My city is little more than 50 percent vaccinated, with my own census tract below 45 percent. Many of the people I represent aren't online, distrust the health care system, don't speak English, and have reasonable questions about vaccines.
Perhaps most significantly, they have bigger threats in their lives than COVID. My neighbors are mostly Democrats who have been failed by our government on many things from universal health care to paid leave; COVID is just the latest. Of course, it's not just Democrats; because poverty spans the political spectrum, so do people who are unvaccinated. And shaming them isn't going to make a lick of difference.
So what does work for my neighbors? This fall, we held a grand-opening for a playground in my neighborhood. The event featured free food, games, and COVID-19 vaccines. The event was a great success. We ended up vaccinating many more people than we expected, because we struck the magic formula: $100 incentives, marketing on the radio and lawn signs, accessibility, and fun.
And yet, despite of this resounding success, I have struggled to find support to scale up this model, which should be replicated many times over. And this despite the fact that the stakes could not be higher. Unvaccinated people are far more likely to be hospitalized and die from COVID, but Biden is focused on boosters for all instead of reaching vulnerable populations with more impactful first doses. His administration continually undermines vaccines through bad messaging that equates their effectiveness with masks while obsessing about breakthrough infections in healthy people.
The messaging has been so terrible and the effectiveness so nonexistent that sometimes I wonder if we are not doing the hard work of reaching the unvaccinated because deep down we think they are not worthy.
Our government told us that caring for others meant staying home and wearing masks, automatically shifting blame onto individuals, moralizing the fight against COVID, and absolving itself of systemic failures. I felt the effects of this failed approach last winter, when my mother was in the hospital with COVID-19. She had tested positive and went to the emergency room because she had low oxygen. And she didn't want me to know—she was embarrassed.
We did that: We made people ashamed of being sick.
Progressives would never approach teen pregnancy, opioid addiction and HIV the way we approach COVID, which disproportionately hurts lower-income and minority groups in both red and blue states. The Left consistently has to be reminded to consider the real harm done by lost income, social isolation, waning health and lost educational progress. We dehumanize people and ignore their concerns under the guise of trying to save their lives.
I wonder on a daily basis how many people we alienated who turned against all safety precautions as a result.
The invisibility of inequality in the Left's discourse on COVID is appalling. "Stay home, save lives" helps people like me who are well off and work from home, while sacrificing the health of workers. Lockdowns don't spare essential workers: They get exposed to the virus while making sure the rest of us eat takeout and get Amazon delivered. People who test positive and live in crowded households have nowhere to isolate.
The way we talk about COVID is sick. Most people don't know that the U.S. is an outlier when it comes to masking young children, particularly toddlers. We canceled summer festivals, even though it's well-established that outside is much safer than inside. Few people talk about good ventilation. We gave rapid tests a bad rap, which likely cost tens of thousands of lives.
These discussions should have been prominent and mainstream (some are getting there), but felt provocative and contrarian throughout most of the pandemic. The media was filled with fear-mongering, bad interpretations of studies, and lots of ominous headlines accompanying pictures of people safely enjoying the beach!
And both sides are complicit. Democrats have to stop making people angry by masking two-year-olds while adults party it up every weekend. Republicans have to undo the damage they've done to confidence in vaccines by feeding conspiracies and promoting treatments with dubious evidence for effectiveness.
Democrats have to stop shaming unvaccinated people. Republicans have to start messaging that COVID is damn serious.
Everyone has to urgently get help to those most at risk for poor outcomes from disease, while giving people the tools to live their lives.
I can hear my fellow Democrats screaming at me, "This is not a both sides issue!" To you I say, we can debate who shares the most blame for the tragic toll of this pandemic, or we can tackle this surge. Our old playbook of shame, blame and rigidity did not work. The new one needs compassion, empowerment, targeting, and a heavy dose of reality.
We simply cannot prioritize all the things, as public health is not an unlimited resource and the public has limited capacity. We are not powerless. We can choose to do the things that have the most power to save lives.
Rachel Barnhart is a Democrat serving in the Monroe County Legislature in New York State.
The views in this article are the writer's own.
