Power Up: GOP and health officials urge Biden to steer clear of politicizing coronavirus vaccine

Republicans — and Trump voters in particular — are among those whose vaccine hesitancy could imperil the high levels of immunity required to stop the spread of the virus. Our Dan Diamond had a fascinating piece yesterday detailing the hesitancy of Trump voters to get their shots.

These vaccine-hesitant voters wanted more information from scientists and far less from politicians — including, interestingly, Trump himself. 

Experts are warning that getting the “herd immunity” required for significant improvement in Americans’ lives that the Biden administration needs to steer clear of the political football when it comes to the virus and the government’s response.

They argue that disparaging the efforts of the Trump administration is counterproductive to convincing skeptical GOP voters to overcome their opposition to vaccination. 

• “It was difficult enough that our former president downplayed the significance of the virus and now you have the new president downplaying the significance of the efforts from the former president … It’s not just counterproductive but it’s going to cause death,” GOP pollster Frank Luntz told Power Up. 
• A former Operation Warp Speed official added: “I understand for expectation setting and political narratives why you’d demonize the past administration’s work but [the Biden administration] could have very easily carved out the vaccination effort and made it solely about public health … by slashing the tires on Warp Speed, you hurt the credibility of the vaccine. This response has to stop being about scoring political points.” 

Fact check: Biden has credited the previous administration with getting the vaccine program off the ground — but he’s also called the initial vaccine rollout a “dismal failure.” More recently, Andy Slavitt, a senior adviser to the White House coronavirus team, credited Warp Speed  for developing the vaccine in “record time.” 

Slavitt added the Biden administration hasn’t been trying to “point fingers,” but other prominent administration officials have failed to acknowledge the Trump administration’s efforts. Trump himself sent a statement last week saying Americans wouldn’t be getting the “beautiful shot” for at least five years or ever without his efforts.

• Asked whether Trump deserved credit for vaccine development and rollout, White House press secretary Jen Psaki instead attributed progress to the “herculean incredible effort by science and by medical experts.”

Luntz convened a  Zoom focus group over Zoom of vaccine-hesitant Trump voters over the weekend whose opposition to the vaccine had only hardened with recent political appeals to get the shot, attended by Dan.

• “We want to be educated, not indoctrinated,” a man identified as Adam from New York, who praised the vaccines as a “miracle, albeit suspicious,” per Diamond.
• “I didn’t realize the depth of feeling that the vaccine has been weaponized and politicized,” Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who participated in the focus group, told Diamond. “That was quite striking to me.”

The group shed light on the challenge ahead for the Biden administration: vaccines are being made more widely available but face skepticism among three groups: conservatives, people of color, and young women. “We are not always the best messengers,” Psaki acknowledged to reporters last week.

Health officials in rural areas agree with that sentiment: “Leadership should come from local health care providers,” Teresa Owens Tyson, the president and CEO of the Health Wagon, a nonprofit mobile clinic operating in underserved communities in rural Appalachia, told Power Up. 

• “Second to health care workers would be ministers — we’re in the Bible Belt,” Tyson said of voices who can boost vaccine confidence. “We’ve done a lot of mitigation, too, by distributing masks to churches because here, it’s about god and family and community, and it’s very positive in most circumstances but problematic with the pandemic.”
• “There’s such distrust in the U.S. government like I have never seen in my life,” Tyson added.
• “The good news is the White House has been all over all these populations, including recognizing that they’re not beautifully positioned to reach conservatives,” John Bridgeland, a founder and the chief executive of the Covid Collaborative, a bipartisan group of political and scientific leaders working on vaccine education, told the New York Times’s Annie Karni and Zolan Kanno-Youngs.

There still appears to be disagreement over whether Trump himself can prove to be an effective participant in the effort to convince skeptical conservatives to receive the vaccine. 

Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, said Trump “should be enlisted to encourage his supporters to get a coronavirus vaccine, after recent polling showed Republican men and Trump supporters have the highest rates of vaccine hesitancy,” our colleague Amy Wang reported. Biden, however, dismissed Fauci’s suggestion during an event on Monday: 

• “I discussed it with my team, and they say the thing that has more impact than anything Trump would say to the MAGA folks is what the local doctor, what the local preachers, what the local people in the community say,” Biden told reporters. 
• “The messaging about covid-19 has been so disdainful and ignorant and minimizing that even if the former president and first lady had gotten vaccinated in public, it would have convinced some people but many not — this is a consequence of a years-long approach,” William Schaffner, professor of infectious diseases and preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University, told Power Up of whether Trump can be a persuasive messenger for vaccine skeptic conservatives. “You can’t reverse that by flipping a light switch — huge opportunities were missed here all along the line, including the acceptance and promotion of the vaccine by the political leadership.” 

HAALAND MAKES HISTORY: “Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.) was confirmed as the nation’s 54th secretary of the interior in a 51-40 vote Monday, making her the first Native American to lead a Cabinet agency,” Indian Country Today’s Aliyah Chavez reports. “When she is sworn in, Haaland will become the highest-ranking Indigenous person in an executive office across the country.”

• “Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo Nation in New Mexico and whose family ties in the country can be traced back 35 generations, will take control of a department that oversees Indian Country, 574 federally recognized Native American and Alaska Native communities,” our colleague Darryl Fears reports.
• She is expected to be sworn in tomorrow.

ALSO: Biden on Monday submitted his nominees for the USPS Board of Governors to the Senate:

• “More than 9,400 minors arrived along the border without parents in February, a nearly threefold increase over last year at the same time.”
• “The American Civil Liberties Union on Monday sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas calling on the Biden administration to limit detention of migrants at the border, hold its staff members accountable and establish a humane asylum system.”
• In response to the surge in migrant crossings, the Biden administration has tasked the Federal Emergency Management Agency with finding shelters for the children. “The administration plans to shelter thousands of teenage boys at a convention center in downtown Dallas [and] open another temporary facility in Midland, Texas, at a former camp for oil field workers.”
• Happening this week: “The House plans to advance legislation that would provide protections to undocumented immigrants brought into the country as children and open avenues for undocumented farmworkers to obtain green cards. But an evenly split Senate has raised doubts about whether such bill will become law,” our colleagues Sean Sullivan and Nick Miroff report.

And the administration is facing growing criticism from across the political spectrum. Here’s what they’re saying, per Sullivan and Miroff:

• Centrist Democrats: “The Republicans will turn around and use [the border situation as] a political weapon against Democrats — that we’re weak on the border, we’re not doing enough, we’re letting everybody in,” Rep. Henry Cuellar (R-Texas) told our colleagues.
• Liberals and immigration activists: Neha Desai, an immigration attorney who recently visited a detention site, told our colleagues that while the conditions there have greatly improved from the Trump era, “it is unacceptable for children to be spending days on end in dramatically overcrowded facilities.”
• Republicans: “The security of our nation and our border is first and foremost the responsibility of our president,” Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said during a visit to a migrant processing center in El Paso. “I came down here because I heard of the crisis. It’s more than a crisis — this is human heartbreak.”
• The key quote: “The Republicans will turn around and use this for a political weapon against Democrats — that we’re weak on the border, we’re not doing enough, we’re letting everybody in,” Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar (D) told Sean and Nick. “I’ve been warning the party and the administration: Don’t let this get out of hand, because all you’re going to do is you’re going to give Republicans an issue.”

• “The tract, also known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is a virulent fable that purports to be the account of a meeting where Jewish masters concoct a plan for world domination. The ‘protocols’ they discuss reflect a variety of ancient antisemitic tropes, with a shadowy cabal orchestrating control of the banking system, the media and government in service of their own sinister ends.”
• “The Anti-Defamation League calls it ‘a classic in paranoid, racist literature.’ … It has been translated into multiple languages, fomenting antisemitic sentiment around the world — including in Germany ahead of the Nazi genocide.”

ALSO: Federal authorities have arrested and charged Julian Elie Khater, 32, of Pennsylvania and George Pierre Tanios, 39, of Morgantown, W.Va. “with assaulting U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick with an unknown chemical spray during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot,” our colleagues Spencer S. Hsu, Peter Hermann and Emily Davies report. 

• “The charges are punishable by up to 20 years in prison.”

CITY COUNCIL THROWS WRENCH IN CHAUVIN MURDER TRIAL: “The attorney for Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged in George Floyd’s death, on Monday asked the judge overseeing the case to delay the trial and reconsider a change-of-venue motion, saying he was ‘gravely concerned’ that the announcement last week that the city had agreed to pay Floyd’s family $27 million to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit had tainted the jury pool,” our colleague Holly Bailey reports. 

• Although “Cahill did not immediately rule on the defense requests, [he did] agree that the developments were ‘concerning’ … Some observers have said it is possible that Cahill could scrap jury selection and start over.”

NAH: New Yorkers don’t want Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) to resign, despite the mountain of trouble he’s in because of sexual harassment allegations and publicly undercounting nursing home deaths during the pandemic:

• But so far, “Biden has made only a passing comment on the crises that have engulfed Cuomo, and he seems to be hoping to avoid getting pulled in any further.”
• That might change today when “the White House holds its weekly call on the coronavirus with the National Governors Association, [of] which Cuomo [is the] chairman.”

TRUMP TURNCOAT SHOWS GOP HOW TO RESIST: “After a 12-year House career spent steering clear of controversy, [Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler’s (R-Wash.)] high-profile moment of rebellion against a former president made her into a potential prototype for how to cross Trump and survive,” Politico’s Melanie Zanona reports. 

• Herrera Beutler “publicly revealed damaging details about Trump’s phone call with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot … [and] became one of 10 Republicans to vote for impeachment knowing that she might lose her seat over it.”
• “I knew there were times I was gonna have to chart my own course,” Herrera Beutler told Zanona. “Maybe part of my role is to help us return to who we are.”
• “It remains to be seen whether her impeachment vote and public disclosure of the Trump-McCarthy call will hurt Herrera Beutler’s hyperlocal brand back home … [But], despite that tension, Herrera Beutler has earned praise from other corners of the GOP and is still considered a valuable asset to the party.”

Meanwhile, “the Alaska Republican Party has vowed to recruit a primary challenger against Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R), a month after she voted to convict former Trump of inciting an insurrection at the United States Capitol,” the Hill’s Reid Wilson reports.

DEATH IN THE PRIME OF LIFE: “Throughout the pandemic, the coronavirus has disproportionately carved a path through the nation’s Latino neighborhoods, as it has in African American, Native American and Pacific Islander communities. The death rate in those communities from covid-19, the illness caused by the virus, is at least double that for Whites and Asian Americans,” our colleague Akilah Johnson reports. 

• “The staggering loss of life at younger ages, plus higher overall mortality rates, is projected to have caused Latinos’ life expectancy nationally to plummet by about three years during 2020.”

VATICAN BARS PRIESTS FROM BLESSING SAME-SEX UNIONS: Pope Francis “signaled the limits to his reformist intentions, [by] signing off on a Vatican decree that reaffirms old church teaching and bars priests from blessing same-sex unions,” our colleagues Chico Harlan and Sarah Pulliam Bailey report.

TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLGAME: