Oh No Tucker: The Vaccine-Pushing Pervs Have Made It Inside Fox News!

An important part of Tucker Carlson’s quest to sow doubt about the Covid-19 vaccines has involved casting public health efforts to encourage inoculation as somehow creepy.

When Barack Obama released a PSA calling on people to get vaccinated, at a time when everyone over the age of 16 was eligible, Carlson cast the former president as some kind of pervert.

“Barack Obama just released this creepy little video telling small children to get the shot,” Carlson warned. “Some creepy old guy telling your children, your little kids to take medicine whose effects we do not fully understand.”

We have bad news for Carlson: the creepy old men have made it inside the studios of Fox News.

“The vaccine is what’s going to keep a lot of people alive,” Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy said Tuesday. “So when you have the chance, get the shot.”

The comments from Doocy came a week after all three co-hosts of Fox & Friends revealed they were vaccinated, and encouraged their viewers to do the same. “There is so much freedom,” Ainsley Earhardt said of getting the shot.

Carlson’s fellow prime time host Sean Hannity suggested last week he had taken the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. “I do believe in science, and I do believe in vaccinations,” Hannity said.

Carlson himself has not said whether he has been vaccinated. But he has weaved a series of elaborate conspiracy theories on his show in a confounding effort to sow doubt about the vaccines, which have been reported safe and effective by the CDC. Those theories have ranged from misleading to downright wrong.

Jesse Waters and Dana Perino have also encouraged viewers to get vaccinated. Former President Donald Trump has appeared on air at Fox News to tell viewers to get vaccinated. Fox News even aired its own PSA telling viewers to get vaccinated.

A Fox News PSA and prominent hosts at the network pushing vaccines is the exact kind of “slick” and “coordinated” public health push that Carlson has repeatedly warned against. Of course, public health messaging, even from the hosts of a morning show like Fox & Friends, is a fairly innocuous phenomenon to occur during a global pandemic. Despite Carlson’s fear-mongering there is nothing nefarious about encouraging people to get vaccinated.

Unfortunately for those efforts to end the pandemic through inoculation, far more people watch prime time show Tucker Carlson Tonight than Fox & Friends.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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