NYT’s Ezra Klein on Vaccine Hesitancy

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Can I ask you the democracy question, the minority-majority question, because you work a lot on that? You heard what I was talking about with the French member of Parliament. You just heard me play what President Biden has said. How long can a population, a majority put up, with a holdout minority, a significant minority, being mollycoddled, being coddled at the expense of the majority?

EZRA KLEIN, CO-FOUNDER, VOX: Well, that’s an interesting question. I’m not sure I think about it exactly like that, because you’re dealing with a lot of states. This is very local, the way it’s playing out. You have places like where I live in San Francisco, very, very, very heavily vaccinated, and you have places in the country that have a majority who aren’t vaccinated. You have very different political trends around this. So, in California, the state government is making — is creating basically a vaccine mandate for state employees. In Florida, the governor there, who is considered a likely Republican presidential candidate in 2024, is making it illegal for individual employers to have their own vaccine mandates. So part of what’s happening here is, you have very different situations in different counties and in different states. And it is the collision of these differing majorities, these differing publics, these differing political constituencies that ends up really mattering here. But, as people often say, the virus does not care about your party affiliation. And the virus does not care about your ideology. The virus is happy to infect the Republicans and Democrats alike. So one of America’s great weaknesses in this entire pandemic is our political division.