The last week has seen increased push-back against those who are still skeptical or outright hostile towards COVID vaccines. The FDA recently gave it their full approval. There’s new variants. Cases are spiking, and it’s almost only affecting the unvaccinated. Arguments against getting dosed are becoming increasingly flimsy. And on his Fox News show on Sunday, Chris Wallace pretty much thoroughly debunked an anti-vaxx governor on live television.
Nebraska governor Pete Ricketts was one of many members of the GOP who disapproved of President Joe Biden’s recent call to ramp up the fight against the pandemic. Among his priorities were demanding companies with over 100 employees to require vaccinations. Ricketts thinks it should be a personal choice. But Wallace decided to explain his state’s own laws to the man running it.
“In fact, to attend school in your state of Nebraska, children must be vaccinated against a number of diseases,” Wallace informed Ricketts. He then rattled off the diseases for which the nation has long had vaccine mandates, among them tetanus, polio, measles, and chicken pox. “Why are those mandates that parents and your state must comply with and do comply with routinely, why is it that they’re not so objectionable and such a violation of personal freedom but Biden’s vaccine mandates are?”
Ricketts’ comeback was that COVID vaccines don’t have a “long history” with the public. “There are still a lot of people out there that don’t know what to trust,” Ricketts argued. “This is really an outcome of what the CDC has done because they have flip-flopped on so many issues, whether it’s masks or if you have masks when you’ve been vaccinated and so forth. There’s just a lot of people out there that don’t know who to trust right now.”
But Wallace wouldn’t drop it. “So we’re in the middle of a pandemic, there is a new vaccine that Donald Trump was largely responsible for, it’s been approved — full approval — by the FDA,” Wallace explained. “Again, if the polio vaccine is OK for parents and they have to comply with it to send their kid to school, why not the vaccine for this disease?”
Ricketts tried to argue that COVID is “very different from polio.” He also claimed that children “are no more at risk for the coronavirus than they are the ordinary flu,” adding, “The risk for this is just such that this is something that we shouldn’t be mandating it.”
Ricketts didn’t budge, but he also never answered Wallace’s question. Maybe he couldn’t.
You can watch the exhcnage in the video above.
(Via Raw Story)