Trump Blames Lack of Trust in Biden for Vaccine Hesitancy: ‘I Can Think of No Other Reason’ Why People Won’t Get the Shot

Donald Trump criticized President Joe Biden‘s handling of the Covid pandemic on Thursday, and blamed vaccine hesitancy on a lack of trust in Biden.

“During my administration, everybody wanted the vaccine,” Trump said in a phone interview with Sean Hannity. “There was nobody saying ‘oh, gee, I don’t want to take it.’ Now they say that and that’s because they don’t trust the Biden administration. I can think of no other reason.”

He added, “When I was there, everybody wanted it.”

After going off on a tangent about how successful the U.S. military was under his watch, Trump returned to his point by saying: “We had great leaders, great generals and they did a fantastic job of the distribution of the vaccine. But there were no people — very few people — I heard of no people that didn’t want to take it.”

Polls over the past few months have shown many Trump supporters are either vaccine-hesitant or opposed to getting the shot. Trump has encouraged his supporters to get vaccinated on a few occasions (and was booed when he did so during a rally), while underscoring the importance of “freedom” to decide.

Trump then noted that in addition to helping develop the vaccine, under his administration, several therapeutic treatments were also created, including Regeneron’s antibody treatment.

Referencing the Covid vaccine and antibody treatments, Trump pondered, “How is it possible that your numbers are bigger now?”

“But I don’t read that the numbers are bigger now. You hardly hear it,” Trump said. “If that were me, it would be brutal because we did an incredible job on the pandemic. An incredible job.”

The record for most new Covid infections in a day in the U.S. did in fact come while Biden was in office, with new cases topping 330,000 in a single day in September. January 2021, pre-inauguration saw a similar spike, with cases surpassing 310,000 in a single day. However, January 2021 maintained a higher 7-day rolling average of cases than September did.

Hospitalizations and deaths likewise peaked in the pre-inauguration period in January. For months thereafter the numbers steadily dropped, but have been on the rise since about mid-July, due in large part to the Delta variant.

While the situation is still considerably better than last winter’s spike, Trump told Hannity that “it’s worse now.”

“There are more cases now, but you don’t hear the news at all,” he said. “You don’t see the death counts on CNN, you don’t see any of that. It’s an incredible job that we did and we have been given no credit.”

“But you know what? The people know and we’ve got 75 million votes,” Trump continued. “That’s more votes than any sitting president in history, and 12 million more than we did in 2016.” (Though the popular vote is essentially irrelevant, it’s noteworthy that Biden garnered 81 million votes himself).

“That’s a record. Nobody came close to that. Usually a president gets less in the second term.”

Watch above, via Fox News

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