A Republican just inadvertently revealed that his party is running the same scam on vaccines and voting: Columnist

Fox News host Chris Wallace exposed the scam Republicans are running on both voting and vaccinations, according to a new analysis.

The broadcaster interviewed Nebraska's Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts, who said parents mistrusted coronavirus vaccines because federal health officials had "flip flopped" on their recommendations, and Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent called out his comments as a scam.

"Catch the sleight of hand there?" Sargent writes. "Ricketts treats it as a natural fact of life that people lack confidence in federal officials overseeing national vaccination efforts, then uses that as justification for opposing vaccine mandates. But Ricketts himself essentially endorses the idea that people have good reason to lack confidence in the feds on vaccines."

Republicans are trying to pull off the same scheme with elections, Sargent argued.

"We've seen the same on election outcomes," he writes. "Many Republicans have employed the canard that voters "lack confidence" in the 2020 outcome, and in elections more generally, to justify escalated voter suppression everywhere. Some have even used this to justify sham post-election 'audits' and to justify efforts to subvert Biden's electoral college votes in Congress. Of course, these things are themselves designed to further undermine that very 'confidence' in our electoral system."

Although some Republicans have defended voting outcomes and vaccinations, and President Joe Biden's administration has made some missteps in their pandemic response, Sargent said GOP leaders are demonstrably trying to undermine public confidence in efforts to control or end the pandemic.

"This deserves scrutiny on its own, as a form of deceptive bad-faith conduct in public service that is itself a big contributor to our crises," Sargent writes. "It shouldn't be merely accepted as a background condition of our politics that's natural and inevitable, one whose consequences it is only upon Democrats to overcome."