Biden’s HHS leader Xavier Becerra stated this week that it was “absolutely Washington’s business” to know who in America has not been vaccinated yet against covid-19.
Responding to Republican criticisms of the Biden White House’s planned “door-to-door” drive to coerce unvaccinated people to get the jab, Becerra stated to CNN that the government has “spent trillions of dollars to keep Americans well during the pandemic.”
“So it is absolutely the current government’s business and taxpayers’ business, if we must keep spending money to prevent people from getting coronavirus and helping restart the economy,” he said.
Becerra stated that people did not have to go to the door but he wished they would so the officials could deal with rumors surrounding the vaccine, which he says has been proven to be effective in lowering cases and deaths. According to the CDC, almost 56% of the population has been “completely vaccinated” and 67% have received one dose of the covid vaccine.
States that lean toward Republican have shown lower vaccinations, and numbers reveal Republicans are far more likely than Dems to report they will not get the covid vaccine. The topic has become part of a big debate over health policies colliding with Americans’ freedoms.
Asked by the anchor doing the interview, Brianna Keilar, if the Biden administration was thinking of pushing for more aggressive policies to get more people to take the vaccine, Becerra hedged, saying he wanted for people to have “as much choice and freedom as possible.”
“We would like to give people the idea that they have the freedom to decide. But we want them to choose to live,” Becerra said. “We hope they make the right decisions. We want those people to have the right details, but we are America. We give people a lot of choice and freedom, but clearly when more than 600,000 Americans have passed away, the best decision is to get vaccinated.”
But with many Americans not buying the narrative that deaths are being reported correctly. Given that one California county recently lowered their reported deaths by up to 20 percent, it seems like this could be a hard sell.
Author: Blake Ambrose