“Enough, already! Take the damned shot! Masks in schools!”
David Axelrod is founder of the University of Chicago Institute of Politics, CNN’s chief political analyst, former senior adviser and chief strategist to Barack Obama, and host of The Axe Files. He is a political consultant and journalist by trade. He holds no medical degree, no scientific training, no epidemiological credential, and no license to decide what goes in anyone else’s arm.
In 2021 he used a million-plus Twitter following and CNN airtime to brand the unvaccinated “foolish” and “selfish,” compare shots to traffic lights and airport shoes, cheer vaccine passports on cruise ships, and announce that hospitals were stuffed with people who “refuse to be vaccinated” while he, vaccinated and boosted, didn’t fear the virus. He publicly took the shots, then turned other people’s hospital beds into a morality play.
A campaign operative who spent a career manufacturing consent treated a novel medical product like a turnout operation. He has a daughter, Lauren, with epilepsy and intellectual disability - a family that actually lives in the medical system he reduced to a slogan. CNN paid the commentator freight. The Institute of Politics gave him a university letterhead. Neither gave him a stethoscope. “Take the damned shot” is not informed consent. It is a focus group with a body count.
Axelrod ran the message. He never ran a clinic.