[robbedpeter]

Medical advice should be provided by doctors, not politicians, activists, or bureacrats. Doctors have specific ethical training and guidelines by which they're qualified to make judgments about safety and relative risks for individuals.

Consider that polio vaccination was never framed and exploited by political parties playing despicable red vs blue games with the public. The results, driven by information campaigns devoid of partisan politics, were a nearly universal state of vaccination, driving the disease more or less extinct. Trust in doctors and medical institutions was high and relatively untrammeled by partisan games.

The second that coronavirus vaccination became a political shibboleth for team blue, the current state of vaccine resistance became inevitable. Both parties are responsible for a lot of unnecessary death and suffering because of their willingness to never let a good crisis go to waste.

Throw in the general decline and corruption of institutions, lack of trust in public health agencies and even doctors in general, and you've got a mess of hyperpartisan unvaccinated conservative folks being shrieked at by the clueless but vaccinated team blue, and nobody credible or trusted able to bring the situation back to something resembling sanity.