Anderson Cooper: Trump Loves Crowing About All of His Accomplishments, So Why Isn’t He Promoting Vaccines?

CNN’s Anderson Cooper said Monday night it’s perplexing why Donald Trump isn’t talking up vaccines, given they were developed during his administration and how Trump loves boasting about his accomplishments.

The former president made a brief comment at CPAC about how people should get their shots, but his recent statement on vaccines mostly touted how his administration got it done, and he got vaccinated privately in January.

Cooper opened his show with the good news about the big vaccine rollout underway across the United States, but he also brought up the problem of vaccine hesitancy — particularly among Republican men and Trump supporters.

“The former president launched the effort to speed up the testing and production of it and recently demanded national gratitude for the speedy delivery of what he calls ‘that beautiful shot.’ He’s the one who once upon a time even seemed to recognize the public health purpose of someone like him getting vaccinated or not as the situation demanded,” Cooper said.

So it’s odd, he continued, that Trump isn’t talking more about how his supporters should get the vaccine, “when you consider how willing he’s always been to weigh in on virtually anything, but especially his establishments, which this actually is.”

Cooper said that there’s certainly “reason to doubt” Trump’s effectiveness as a spokesperson because of his actions during the pandemic while he was president.

But he still asked why Trump has been mostly silent about encouraging vaccine use. “Now was it because there was no longer anything in it for him?”

You can watch above, via CNN.