Former President Donald Trump last week continued to remind supporters that he has been vaccinated against COVID-19 and encouraged them to do the same.
“I believe totally in your freedoms, I do,” he told a crowd in Alabama. “You’ve got to do what you have to do, but I recommend, take the vaccines. I did it. It’s good.”
After hearing a few boos, Trump continued: “You’ve got your freedoms. But I happened to take the vaccine. If it doesn’t work, you’ll be the first to know, OK? But it is working.”
Trump has been encouraging the vaccines since day one, even while Democrats are on record opposing it.
Nationwide, vaccinations have surged with the spread of the COVID delta variant. On Saturday, the White House reported three straight days of one million doses being administered, the first time that had happened in more than two months. A full 73 percent of adults have now been vaccinated. On Friday, the nation. hit a milestone, with 200 million people having received at least one dose.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday gave full approval to the Pfizer vaccine, saying it now will be marketed as “Comirnaty.” It is one of three vaccines that were approved by the FDA for emergency use authorization before Trump left the White House under the framework of Operation Warp Speed. He touted that accomplishment during his speech in Alabama, saying his administration “handed Biden three vaccines to end the pandemic in record time.”
In January, the Trump White House website listed the development of COVID vaccines as one of his administration’s biggest accomplishments. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy went a step further, calling Operation Warp Speed one of the Trump administration’s five biggest accomplishments. Michael Goodwin of the New York Post labeled the vaccines “Trump’s greatest achievement as president.”
“Trump’s relentless pressure on private companies as well as the sprawling bureaucracy turned what many in the left-wing media and even some in the medical community regarded as a pipe dream into a lifesaving reality,” he said.
While Democrats are also now calling for people to be vaccinated, it may have been their anti-vaccine comments during the 2020 presidential election that dissuaded people. Dozens of elected Democrats said they would not get the “Trump vaccine,” including now Vice President Kamala Harris.
Asked during a Sept. 2020 CNN interview whether she’d get the vaccine if it were released before the election, Harris said, “Well, I think that’s gotta be an issue for all of us.”
Joe Biden even sowed doubt in the vaccine.
In this interview in September of 2020, Biden outright suggested it would be unsafe to take a coronavirus vaccine shot because then-President Donald Trump “continues to mislead and lie.’
“An enormous pressure put on the CDC not to put out the detailed guidelines. Enormous pressure being put on the FDA to say the following protocol will have a giant impact on COVID. All these things turn out not to be true, and when a president continues to mislead and lie,” he said.
“When we finally do, God willing, get a vaccine, who’s going to take the shot? Who’s going to take the shot? Are you going to be the first one to say sign me up?”
–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice
