Nick Offerman Makes Impassioned Plea at Hearing for More People to Get Vaccinated: ‘Medicine Doesn’t Care Who You Voted For’

Actor and comedian Nick Offerman testified at a congressional hearing Wednesday to encourage more Americans to get vaccinated.

A House Energy and Commerce subcommittee held a haring Wednesday about building confidence in the covid-19 vaccines. As of this post, close to half the U.S. has gotten at least one dose of the vaccine, and over half of all adults have been fully vaccinated.

There are still concerns about vaccine hesitancy, an issue Offerman took great pains to address in his opening testimony.

He opened by fully acknowledging he is not an expert, and said he wants to speak from the perspective of a layman “to represent the rest of the citizens who are not epidemiologists and doctors, but feet-on-the-ground hands-in-the-dirt people across our country whose lives and livelihoods have taken a pounding from this pandemic.”

“Ignorance is an area in which I can claim some authority,” he said.

Offerman called the vaccine a gift “from the world’s greatest scientists and thinkers and activists” and the product “of human ingenuity.”

Some vaccine hesitancy is borne from concerns the process was rushed. Offerman assuaged those concerns and said, “You can rest assured the hustle was not applied to the safety of the vaccine.”

He talked about people in his own family who have not been vaccinated and ended with this direct plea:

I urge anyone who has not yet been vaccinated to catch my enthusiasm and hear the smart people who are about to speak. Medicine doesn’t care who you voted for. We amazing humans have created a vaccine that serves the common good. The vaccine doesn’t take sides, unless you count alive vs. dead.

Offerman famously played staunch libertarian Ron Swanson on Parks & Recreation, and said in an recent interview his character would not want to get a vaccine, but ultimately “he’s a good guy” and “once a good guy sees that he’s taking care of others and that it’s for the common good, of course he would get the damn vaccine.”

You can watch above, via C-SPAN.