People Have Been Incorrectly Skeptical of the Vaccine for a Full Year Now

This didn’t just begin.

One of my favorite 2021 activities is to go back and look at the headlines from exactly one year ago. 2021 hasn’t been anything like normal, but 2020 was so absurd and terrifying and surreal on a daily basis that there’s value, I think, in looking back with some perspective on every ludicrous event. One year ago today, the President (who was Donald Trump! Donald Trump about to have was about to have his Person Woman Camera TV interview while mocking people for wearing masks, Goya beans became an actual political hot potato and Major League Baseball was about to start its truncated, fan-free season. And things were about to get even weirder. I’m not sure we’ll ever entirely process 2020.

But I did come across a fascinating story from the front page of The New York Times. One year ago, the Times was reporting on … vaccine skepticism. The skeptics of the rapidly developing vaccines weren’t Tucker Carlson viewers at the time. They were, in fact, people who hated Donald Trump and did not trust him not to rush a vaccine just to win re-election.

“The bottom line is I have absolutely no faith in the F.D.A. and in the Trump administration,” said Joanne Barnes, a retired fourth-grade teacher from Fairbanks, Alaska, who said she was otherwise always scrupulously up-to-date on getting her shots, including those for shingles, flu and pneumonia. “I just feel like there’s a rush to get a vaccine out, so I’m very hesitant.”

If that sounds like an outlier viewpoint, one should note that almost exactly a month-and-a-half later, a similar statement was made by … Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for Vice President.

“I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump and it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he’s talking about,” Harris told CNN when asked whether she’d take a vaccine that was approved before the election.

Now, while it’s probably good standard practice to be extremely suspicious of anything that Donald Trump ever says — and there were reports that he was personally trying to get the FDA to rush their approval of the vaccine — this was probably not a helpful thing…