No, Matthew McConaughey Did Not “Come Out Against Vaccine Mandates”
Not even for kids, even though Twitter sent me a notification telling me he did and The Hill started hyperventilating about McConaughey’s opposition late last night.
Here’s a screenshot from the piece The Hill is Tweeting about, with at least some of their dramatically intrusive pop-up advertising cropped out of the way:
It takes a LOT of squinting to see a blanket anti-mandate sentiment in McConaughey’s relatively mild observation that he hasn’t had his own kids vaccinated yet. And it turns out that even that piece of the widespread reportage isn’t fully accurate, because the oldest, at age 13, has already had his shots … as has everybody else in the family, except the two youngest kids (8 and 11), who have been eligible for … about a week?
The Hill skipped over this part in both Tweet and article, but Insider provides a bit more context:
Leaving aside the question of why anybody even asked M. McConaughey about vaccine mandates for anyone, since he isn’t a public health expert and isn’t claiming to be (he doesn’t even play one on tv!), the only way you get to the kind of mouth-frothing “MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY IS AGAINST VACCINES” commentary that has taken over my Twitter feed in the past 24 hours is by deliberately engaging in the same kind of fundamentally dishonest “if-we-don’t-have-a-controversy-we-make-a-controversy” reporting that similarly accompanied the long-awaited passage of the infrastructure bill in the House last week, and a host of other issues that stood a damn good chance of remaining basically innocuous until somebody in the newsroom got a look at them and decided there was a political telenovela to be had out of them.
Here’s an example, from NPR, of press framing this historic legislative victory in terms of a defeat:
And this is a problem not just because it’s unfair to McConaughey, whose allegedly anti-mandate stance is … remarkably subdued ––
“I couldn’t mandate having to vaccinate the younger kids,” McConaughey said. “I still want to find out more information.”
–– and who mostly seems baffled by the generally bewildering public response to science in general and immunizations in particular:
(It’s worth noting that the FDA and the CDC agree with him, inasmuch as the federal government has just now issued an emergency use authorization of the Pfizer formula in a reduced dosage to permit vaccinations for children ages 5–11 but has not yet even fully approved that shot, and Moderna has recently announced a delay on filing an EUA request for their similar vaccine for the same age group.)
It’s also a problem because neither public health nor public policy is a WWF match, and trying to frame serious discussions about issues like accessible broadband, climate change, and paid sick leave the same way Ed McMahon might announce a showdown between Hulk Hogan and Rowdy Roddy Piper (I don’t know if those two ever fought each other or not, and I don’t care; you get the gist) isn’t just irksomely hyperbolic: It turns every engagement into a battle –– one in which the most click-bait-ready performance wins, by virtue of netting more reportage. It substitutes showmanship for substance, and it creates the discursive illusion that a direct confrontation is the default –– perhaps the only — framework by which to structure any discussion, and even when we agree more than we don’t (does anybody seriously think “I’m not in favor of mandating a vaccine for children that’s still under EUA?” is a controversial position to take?).
As a side effect, this setup also means that we are either forced into approaching our allies as adversaries, or obliged to decline engaging them altogether.
If the only interaction is a confrontation, then there’s not much incentive to go picking fights with your friends.
The reportage, in this case, could have emphasized McConaughey’s exasperated “Hell no” and “We all got to get off that narrative,” response to vaccine conspiracy theories. That framing would have been at least as accurate, and more in keeping with McConaughey’s previously established support for public health measures like mask-wearing. It might even have opened up the opportunity to discuss reintroducing sanity to national politics, and what McConaughey might or might not have to bring to the table in that regard.
But that wouldn’t have made for a good cage match. So we get “Matthew McConaughey Comes Out Against Vaccine Mandates” for kids that not only do not exist, but have yet to even be proposed.
