It was only in late 2021 where certain people realized vaccine skepticism was lucrative and the Republicans needed something to rile up their base for the upcoming elections did vaccine skepticism become a thing.
Democrats were criticising Trump for rushing the vaccine, and flaming vaccine scepticism, helped by mainstream media.
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2671R8/ September 17, 20201
Democrat Biden warns against rushing out coronavirus vaccine, says Trump cannot be trusted
Not exactly.
> Biden, who leads the president in national opinion polls, has questioned whether Trump is pressuring agencies like the FDA to sign off on a vaccine to boost his re-election prospects. At the same time, Biden has been careful to say he wants to see a safe vaccine as soon as possible.
> "There has to be total transparency, so scientists outside the government know what is being approved," Biden said. "I’m saying, trust the scientist."
"Trust the scientist" != "flaming vaccine skepticism"
In the US, there were two - the first, via OSHA, affected all employers with > 100 employees. Employees would need to be vaccinated or tested weekly and required to wear a mask. This was overturned by the Supreme Court.
The second, via CMMS required vaccinations for all health care employees if Medicare or Medicaid money is involved. SCOTUS allowed that one.
This is revisionist history. I remember many Democrats being staunchly anti-"Trump's rushed vaccine" and it was only when their party came into power did they turn into human pincushions nearly overnight, "believing in science" and not being able to get enough jabs into them.
The vaccines, of course, were one and the same.
So if the people that literally couldn't wait to get their shot, got it 4 weeks earlier, that would have been deemed rushed and too early to be safe? But four weeks later it's perfectly safe?
No, this is about political tribalism and not actual vaccine safety.
This isn't remotely true - it was on the expedited path and was always forecast to be ready in Q4 2020 or Q1 2021. The "few weeks" was whether they would be approved before the election or after it - which had clear and obvious political implications. Rather than resting on the laurels of having created Warp Speed and helped usher the the vaccine through development and approvals in under a year, they were leaning on the science teams to approve it to improve his election prospects. There were tons of articles in real time about the entire debacle;
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/23/politics/trump-fda-coronaviru...
https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-donald-trump-mark-m...
https://time.com/5887777/rushed-vaccine-democrats-republican...
> Unsurprisingly, the degree to which Americans are concerned about the President’s influence rushing the vaccine process falls along political lines. About 85% of Democrats and 61% of independents said they were concerned, compared to 35% of Republicans, according to the Kaiser poll.
There's a big difference between anti-"Trump's rushed vaccine" and anti-"Trump rushing vaccine".
> After May 1, 2021, when vaccines were available to all adults, the excess death rate gap between Republican and Democratic voters widened from -0.9 percentage point (95% PI, -2.5 to 0.3 percentage points) to 7.7 percentage points (95% PI, 6.0-9.3 percentage points) in the adjusted analysis; the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters. The gap in excess death rates between Republican and Democratic voters was larger in counties with lower vaccination rates and was primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio.
The right wing media outlets would be praising it and claiming that it was everyone's patriotic duty to get vaccinated.
The left wing media outlets would be pushing out articles and documentaries about how vaccine compliance is rooted in implicit white supremacy.
In 2013, 38% of Democrats and 22% of Republicans supported Obama's missile strikes on Syria. In 2017, 37% of Democrats and 86% of Republicans supported Trump's missile strikes on Syria.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/04/gop-voters-love-same...
The political parties aren't simplistic mirror images of each other. The Republicans are the ones that really flip mindlessly based on whoever is in power (and then once their guy is no longer in power -- like Bush -- they turn on him years later and forget they ever supported those policies at the time).