Can President Biden’s push for more vaccinations get across the red-blue divide?

President Joe Biden came to Raleigh to lead a pep rally for boosting the national rate of vaccination against COVID-19 saying, “Don’t put it off any longer. Just do it. Just do it.”

But the undertone of Thursday’s event was somber. For beyond the “we can do this” message loomed the reality of why such a presidential visit was necessary. Gov. Roy Cooper, speaking before the president, said about 55 percent of North Carolina’s adult population has received at least one shot, “but we are still not where we need to be – and that’s why we are here today.”

The Biden administration concedes it will not meet its goal of having 70 percent of the adult population vaccinated with at least one dose by July 4. Nationwide, 66 percent of the population has received at least one shot. But ten states in the South and West have more than half the adult population are unvaccinated even as the more contagious and potentially deadlier delta coronavirus variant is spreading.

A year ago, there seemed to be a universal longing for a vaccine that would not only block the disease, but end the isolation imposed by the pandemic. What an unfortunate twist that with vaccines now widely available, the president has to take to barnstorming to get a large segment of the population to accept this protection for themselves and for others.

“We have to look out for each other. We really do,” he told the crowd of mostly vaccination volunteers and workers gathered at the Green Road Community Center in Northeast Raleigh.

The president acknowledged he was “preaching to the choir” about the need to get a shot, but he hoped television would carry his message to the unconvinced – those skittish about a new medicine, those dubious about the level of the COVID threat and their need for protection and those politically hostile to a Democratic president’s call for cooperation.

“I wanted to come to Raleigh to thank everybody in this room for everything you’re doing to get people vaccinated. You’re saving lives,” he said. “That’s not hyperbole. Let me remind everybody. We lost 600,000 dead in America in about a year …. More lives lost in a year than in every major war in the 20th century and the 21st century.”

Biden spelled out a website – wecandothis.hhs.gov – and described the importance and the ease of getting vaccinated, but he also touched on the sadness that such encouragement is still needed. A nation that once pulled together in crisis now cannot get beyond its divisions to help each other. A U.S. map of state’s leading and lagging in vaccination rates mirrors the nation’s red-blue divide.

Rather than lend a hand to help boost the vaccination rate, the leader of the state Republican Party dismissed Biden’s visit as “performative politics.” State GOP Chairman Michael Whatley welcomed the president to North Carolina with an op-ed in The North State Journal that said, “Biden has continuously overpromised and underdelivered as evidenced by Biden’s Coronavirus Response Coordinator’s recent admission that the administration will fall short of their July 4th goal.”

Biden noted how political polarization has inhibited the nation’s ability to move together against its common problems and meet its common threats. “It’s never been this divided as it is today since the Civil War,” he. said, “And folks, it’s such a waste of talent and waste of time.”

And if polarization holds the nation short of stopping COVID-19 and the variants that are coming, it will be – as it has been – a waste of lives.

This story was originally published June 25, 2021 at 9:25 AM.