Brooks: Biden’s ‘Partisan’ Vax Mandate Is More ‘Lame’ and Ineffective Top-Down Thinking

On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks said that while he thinks the government does have the right to mandate the coronavirus vaccine, doing “a top-down, highly partisan process from the part of government that is disliked the most, the politics that is distrusted” is counterproductive and said too much thinking in Washington is top-down thinking of “let’s get some celebrities. That will persuade them. It’s just lame.”

Brooks said, “I think the government has an absolute right to do this. Public health and the air we breathe is a common good. I nonetheless think it’s a mistake. If you go around, as I did, and we all do as reporters, you go to a town…you say, who’s trusted here? In every neighborhood, people will give you names, and they’re always the same names. Everybody knows who the nodes of community [are] in their community. And I thought it was public health 101 that you go at the grassroots level to who’s trusted in each neighborhood, and you try to get them to influence people to uptake vaccines and do anything else. Having a top-down, highly partisan process from the part of government that is disliked the most, the politics that is distrusted the most seems to me the wrong way to go.”

He added, “[I]n Washington, people think top-down. They think, oh, let’s get some celebrities. That will persuade them. It’s just lame.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett