President Biden is pushing against resistance when he rolls up his own sleeve, as he did the other day, and urges us to take yet another Covid booster shot to ensure a “safe and healthy holiday.”  Only 10 percent of those eligible have chosen to receive the latest booster version, the “bivalent” shot aimed at the Omicron variant.

Even among those older than 65, fewer than half have received the second booster, let alone the third — which has brought the total number of recommended shots to five. Don’t expect a rush for shots. If the President wants to understand why, he should ask Congressman Lee Zeldin.

The Republican gubernatorial candidate in New York explained the issue in his debate with  his Democratic opponent, Governor Hochul. Mr. Zeldin was asked why, since polio vaccines are mandatory for school children, he would not support mandatory Covid shots. 

The polio vaccine, he explained, prevents polio;  the Covid vaccine does not prevent Covid. He’s not a doctor. Yet he makes an apt point. The Covid “vaccine” is not a vaccine, as commonly understood by the public. Technically, vaccines are “antigens” or “proteins” which, when injected, stimulate an immune response.

The Covid shots do so. Historically, vaccines are understood to do more than that:  they prevent illness. Here is where the Covid shot and boosters have been oversold — and led to a dangerous loss of trust in public health authorities. Polio vaccination does  not mean one will get mild paralysis;  they protect outright against polio.

So it is with the long list of required childhood vaccines  — measles, mumps, diphtheria, chicken pox — to which the administration now wants to add the Covid booster. Yet the public has experienced the opposite with the Covid “vaccine,” as I can attest, after receiving five versions of the vaccine and its boosters.

It turns out that I contracted “breakthrough” Covid — and continued to test positive almost two weeks after becoming sick. Just the fact that the term “breakthrough Covid” is in common parlance, belies the “vaccine” claim. As the CDC itself notes, “People who are vaccinated may still get COVID-19.”

The significance of this under-emphasized reality goes beyond the specifics of Covid. Gaining and maintaining public trust is a crucial and delicate task for public officials. A lack of candor is fatal to trust. In the case of the Covid “boosters,” better for American officials to have come up with a more precise and accurate term.  

The shots are, in effect, “pre-treatments.” The shot mitigates illness but does not prevent Covid. Imprecise terminology follows messaging blunders that undermined public confidence.  Lockdowns were to “stop the spread.” Online learning could substitute for classroom instruction.

Candor from the start would have the right prescription. Among Western officials, only Germany’s Angela Merkel was candid, when, early in 2020, she acknowledged that 70 percent of the public would contract Covid — and that nothing could prevent that from happening.

In 1997, an outbreak of “bird flu” — an influenza transmitted to humans from chickens — struck Hong Kong. Caused by the same type of virus which causes Covid, the avian influenza sparked panic in the then-British colony as it became clear that chickens sold in the crowded city’s live poultry markets were the source.  

Like Dr. Anthony Fauci in our current pandemic, Hong Kong’s public health commissioner, Dr. Margaret Chan, who would go on to become the head of the World Health Organization, sought to reassure the public. “I eat chicken every day,” she said — to general derision at her evident exaggeration. 

Ultimately, however,  it was only candor in pre-China Hong Kong that saved Hong Kong — and the wider world — from widespread flu death. Dr. Chan ultimately decided there was no getting around the fact that live chickens were a public health threat. Civil servants were dispatched to farms and markets.

There their assignment was to wring the necks of live poultry. It was truth, not spin, that ultimately reassured the public. It is candor that we are lacking today on the part of our public health officials, and the results, including distrust and public health politicization, are plain.