Center for Vaccine Development director Dr. Peter Hotez said Monday on MSNBC’s “All In” that Republican lawmakers and Fox News were responsible for 200,000 needless COVID deaths.
Discussing his new book, Hotez said, “We’re looking at 200,000 Americans, who needlessly died, needlessly perished, because they refused a COVID vaccine, after vaccines were widely available during the Delta and Omicron waves in the last half of 2021 and 2022.”
He continued, “It was politically motivated. It happened started in the CPAC conference in Dallas in 2021. The conservative conference said first are gonna vaccinate you and then they are going to take away your guns and Bibles.”
He added, “Then, what they did was the pile on, from members of the House Freedom Caucus, who openly promoted anti vaccine rhetoric. Marjorie Taylor Greene, talked about the medical brownshirts using Nazi analogies. Jim Jordan, Senator Ron Johnson holding so called vaccine injury roundtables, Rand Paul, the governor of Florida, and then amplified every night on Fox News during the Delta wave.”
He concluded, “These 200,000 were victims. They were victims of this predatory movement. That is why we need to talk about it, because it’s too often pitch does another box to check and some kind of culture war. This is different. It’s not that we care about, at least I do not care about, whatever you want to call conservative, although it’s not very conservative, or far right views, even extremist views. But, somehow we have to find a way to uncouple the anti-science, anti-vaccine from the rest of it. This stuff is killing too many people.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
