On the simmering fury in the blue states

The lockdowns failed, the vaccines (at best) fell far short, and everyone knows the truth; now the CDC just may be dumb enough to provoke parents AGAIN by putting mRNA shots on the childhood schedule.

Oregon and New York are among the bluest of the blue; they were supposed to be cakewalks for their Democratic governors this year.

Yet New York is close, and Oregon a tossup, thanks in part to a centrist third-party candidate - even as the prospect of a true national red wave has faded since May, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

(Look at those eyes. She’s not crazeeee at all!)

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Here’s what I think is going on.

In red states, abortion is a real issue, and a serious drag on many Republican candidates. Access to abortion turns out to matter to a lot of women, even conservative women. Hate me if you like for saying so, but the August referendum in Kansas offered all the proof anyone could want. 59-41 for abortion. In Kansas. (It is no accident that Republicans have become far quieter on the issue ever since.)

But in blue states the abortion rights debate is purely symbolic. Whether Lee Zeldin or Kathy Hochul is governor of New York, abortion is going to be legal. Ditto in Oregon. And everyone knows it. All those protestors in Central Park can have a D&C a day and two on Sunday, yay!

So blue state voters can focus on other issues.

And I suspect that in New York and elsewhere anger at the Covid countermeasures - vaccine mandates, lockdowns and especially school closures - has not gone away; it’s simmering just below the surface.

The best evidence for this remains the stunningly low rate of mRNA Covid vaccinations for children under 12 and especially under 5, despite massive media and advertising campaigns. Parents are demonstrating in the most profound way that they are no longer buying what public health authorities are selling.

Now the Centers for Disease Control looks like it is about to spring a new provocation on parents by adding the Covid shots to the recommended childhood schedule and thus opening the way to school mandates for the mRNA shots. Unpopular will not begin to describe this plan (which, as I wrote yesterday, may be more about protecting the vaccine companies from liability than anything else).

Nor can the left pretend the prospect of mRNA shot mandates for schools is merely theoretical for Democratic lawmakers. California tried to add them, and New York City seriously considered them.

If I were a Republican candidate in a blue state, I would have ads about school Covid vaccine mandates ready to go today, assuming the the CDC vaccine committee is foolish enough to throw this chum in the water. At a time when countries all over the world are now rejecting mRNA shots for kids, can our public health “experts” really be this stupid? Or this beholden to the mRNA companies?

Experience suggests the answer is yes.