At long last, medical centers across the country this week began vaccinating priority personnel and initiating the process of liberating the nation from this coronavirus scourge. Anti-vax skeptics abound, as they do with all vaccines, even though this vaccination campaign should have been different. High levels of participation are essential to ensure the virus goes into remission and breaks a 10-month chain of death and economic destruction.

The biggest impediment to that effort is the very science-averse movement that President Donald Trump cultivated during the presidential campaign. Instead of being a champion of the very medical science that saved his life after he was infected, Trump instead championed stubborn ignorance couched as a defense of freedom.

There's a double irony here: The only route to real freedom is through containment of the virus, which requires vaccination rates of around 75% of all Americans. And in spite of all Trump has done to discourage gatherings and mask-wearing, he was the driving force behind the astonishingly fast development of the new vaccines now being distributed. This is the one chance he has to solidify his legacy by urging his supporters to be patriotic and get the shot.

Instead, Trump is grousing about the election result, playing golf and doing pretty much everything he can to turn the nation's attention away from the vaccination campaign — which started in earnest on Monday, the same day as Joe Biden's Electoral College confirmation as president-elect.

Trump won't even deliver a message consistent with his own National Security Council about the need for White House personnel to get vaccinated quickly as a symbol of trust in the vaccine. "The American people should have confidence that they are receiving the same safe and effective vaccine as senior officials of the United States government on the advice of public health professionals and national security leadership," council spokesman John Ullyot stated Sunday evening.

Trump later tweeted his rejection of that recommendation, adding, "I am not scheduled to take the vaccine, but look forward to doing so at the appropriate time."

The White House had hoped before the election to secure actor Dennis Quaid and country singer Billy Ray Cyrus to help promote the vaccination campaign, but even that has been put on hold. Now it's not clear what the promotion plan is. Recent news about the extremely high reliability rates of two vaccines is helping nonetheless, with a Pew Research Center poll indicating that around 60% of respondents now express a willingness to be vaccinated.

That's still not enough, though. Without enthusiastic White House promotional help, the herd-immunity threshold is likely to remain elusive. Trump's inability to bury his election-loss bitterness long enough to help pull America back from the pandemic abyss underscores exactly why he was never fit to hold the office in the first place.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

Photo credit: PhotoLizM at Pixabay