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The Rest of the Story
Fox hosts are relentlessly attacking the vaccination campaign against the coronavirus. Their nightly effort to delegitimize the vaccines is a big problem.
The vaccines are miraculously safe and effective against the virus and its variants. But if you watch Fox, you hear a stream of stories about how they may not work and may kill you if you take them, along with aggrieved rants about the Biden administration effort.
It didn't have to be this way. It’s easy to imagine a world in which Fox hosts relentlessly talked up how Donald Trump had made the vaccines possible and how if viewers got vaccinated, the dreaded masks and lockdowns would be gone forever.
But Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch has described the network as the “loyal opposition” to the Biden administration, and that includes the fight to vaccinate the public against the pandemic.
So now huge swaths of Republicans say they are not and will not be vaccinated. It's a culture war issue rather than a health one because that's the lens through which Fox presents the world to its viewers.
We're headed for a scenario in which Democrats are vaccinated and Republicans aren't, and a lot of Fox viewers end up dead because they listened to the network instead of getting shots.
The cumulative result will be more viral proliferation, more variants, until the vaccine's efficacy is reduced to nothing.
They are the reason we are where we are now, and the reason this is never going to end.
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