"Trying to work across party lines" went out the window when the Republicans decided that "prevent absolutely anything the Democrats want to do, no matter how objectively beneficial it would be or whether it was fully supported by Republicans in the past" was a viable and acceptable method of getting re-elected.
“If the public-health professionals, if Dr. Fauci, if the doctors tell us that we should take it, I'll be the first in line to take it — absolutely," the California senator said during the first and only vice-presidential debate.
"But if Donald Trump tells us we should take it, I'm not taking it." -Kamala Harris
Let’s not act like both parties don’t do the exact same thing, eh?
What does this quote mean to you? It is saying that if immunologists and epidemiologists do not recommend a vaccine but Donald Trump does then she wouldn't take it. As far as I know Donald Trump is not a scientist, that seems reasonable?
I'm not politically minded so I'm confused as to how you're interpreting that.
I take it as nothing more than it was, a political jab...if not a bit of a dangerous one from a public health perspective. It is, however, a perfectly illustrated point of "other side = bad."
She didn't say that if the FDA didn't approve it and Trump somehow magically bypassed the process and put it out there for people to take that she wouldn't take it. She implied that if the FDA approved it and Trump said people should take it that she wouldn't.
Debates are debates and people say stupid things, but that was far from the only moment of vaccine hesitancy to happen on the left just because Trump was president. Now, of course, it's flipped - and both show just how tribal America has become.
The moderator's question was "If the Trump administration approves a vaccine, before or after the election, should Americans take it and would you take it?"
Harris's answer was the right one, and the same one I would have given. An unqualified "yes" would be saying you'd take a vaccine approved by the administration even if the medical community wasn't confident in it, and the phrasing of the question was designed to elicit that clarification.
And let's not pretend it's surprising that her qualification was even needed; We're talking about the same president who used the presidential soap box to urge people to try curing and preventing COVID using Hydroxychloroquine despite no such recommendation from health officials or the medical community at large.
