NIH Director Makes Impassioned Plea on Vaccines: This Can’t Be About Your Political Party, ‘Love Your Neighbor and Roll Up Your Sleeve’

Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, has great concern about the polls that show almost half of Republican men and Trump supporters saying they won’t get the coronavirus vaccine.

Collins made it clear recently how perplexing it was to see masks — a common-sense mitigation effort in the middle of a pandemic — becoming so politicized.

And on MSNBC Tuesday, he expressed similar dismay when Katy Tur asked him about vaccine hesitancy among Republican men.

“Isn’t this weird?” he asked. “If you were an alien that just landed on the planet and you looked to see what was happening with the pandemic, and you were trying to find out who’s accepting the vaccine and who isn’t, and it turned out your political party was a major factor in whether you decided to roll up your sleeve or not? Does that make any sense?”

He implored everyone to look at the data and do the right thing for themselves and others:

“When you look at what we know about the vaccines that have been approved in the U.S. — Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson — the evidence for safety and efficacy is overwhelming. Why would you say no to something that might save your life and might actually keep you from giving this to somebody else more vulnerable than you? This is about something we have to do together. This is the time to love your neighbor and roll up your sleeve.”

Collins kept emphasizing the urgent need for everyone to get vaccines to stop mutations from being even more widespread.”

“For heaven’s sake, let’s not leave those vaccines on the shelf when they could be stopping this really diabolical virus from killing more people.”

You can watch above, via MSNBC.

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