Biden's ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated' was bunk from the beginning

Reason’s Matt Welch writes, ”This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated. Not the vaccinated, the unvaccinated,’ Biden emphasized, on the same day that the omicron variant produced a one-day positive-case increase of 16 percent in highly vaccinated New York City. ‘That's the problem. And so everybody talks about 'freedom,' and not to have a shot or have a test. Well guess what? How about patriotism? How about making sure that you're vaccinated, so you do not spread the disease to anybody else? What about that?’

I really thought that the whole "pandemic of the unvaccinated" slogan had been retired in the age of omicron. But the president was using that more-than-mostly-false formulation less than 2 weeks ago.https://t.co/NZupW1XgSm

— Matt Welch (@MattWelch) December 27, 2021

What about that indeed. New York City's one-shot vaccination rate (of 92 percent for adults, 83 percent for kids between 13 and 17) ‘rivals any number in the free world,’ Politico's Jack Shafer observed last week, and yet somehow my vaccinated teen and boosted self spent Christmas under quarantine. The fact-checkers over at The Poynter Institute's PolitiFact generously rated Biden's ‘vaccinated…do not spread the disease’ claim as only ‘mostly’ false, despite epidemiologist quotes like ‘[the] statement is not accurate,’ and ‘vaccinated individuals can definitely infect other people."

Read the entire column.