CNN Reporter Tells Anti-Vax Trump Supporter: ‘You’re Probably in the — What the Government Would Say Is the Risk Category’
Months after the Covid-19 vaccine has been made available to any American who wants one, only about half the country has been fully vaccinated. Amid this persistent vaccine skepticism and outright anti-vaccine sentiment among much of the population, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan talked to one such person in South Dakota.
O’Sullivan is in Sioux Falls this week, where MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell is holding a three day “symposium” in which he has been making wild and baseless claims about the 2020 presidential election being stolen from Donald Trump.
During an AC 360 segment on misinformation about Covid-19 on social media, O’Sullivan told host Anderson Cooper that for many Trump supporters “the vaccine is a red line.”
What followed was O’Sullivan’s interview with a man identified as Dennis. Here’s how that went:
O’SULLIVAN: Have you been vaccinated?
DENNIS: No.
O’SULLIVAN: Why not?
DENNIS: Not going to.
O’SULLIVAN: Any particular reason?
DENNIS: God gave us natural immunities to everything. Why would you wanna interfere?
O’SULLIVAN: You’re an older man than I am. You’re probably in the — what the government would say is the risk category.
DENNIS: Well, who come up with that?
O’SULLIVAN: The scientists and the doctors.
DENNIS: Who told them to say that?
[…]
O’SULLIVAN: Even though it’s the Trump vaccine, the doctors, the scientists–
DENNIS: That ain’t a Trump vaccine. He did it to please everybody that put the pressure on him.
O’SULLIVAN: He got the shot himself.
DENNIS: Who says he got the shot? He got fixed up.
O’SULLIVAN: He got the shot. He got it in January I think before he left the–
DENNIS: I don’t think he got the shot. I think he got some stuff to make him better.
O’Sullivan told Cooper he thinks this interview is an example of “the base controlling Trump,” and said that the former president “has been very, very quiet about the vaccine in many ways.” He pointed to the fact that it wasn’t disclosed that Trump had got the vaccine until well after he left the presidency.
“He knows that by pushing this vaccine by encouraging his supporters too hard to get it, that he could alienate that base,” said O’Sullivan.
Watch above via CNN
