During an interview aired on Thursday’s broadcast of SiriusXM’s “The Megyn Kelly Show,” 2024 Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump responded to a question on whether he’d like a do-over on his White House supporting mask mandates by stating that no one knew what COVID was at first.
Host Megyn Kelly said, “[Y]ou shut the country down for six weeks in Spring of 2020, Operation Warp Speed –.”
Trump then cut in to say he left shutdown decisions up to the states and some did, while others didn’t.
Kelly then asked, “Operation Warp Speed, though, that was on the vaccines. They were rushed through. They have helped, but also hurt a lot of people. And your White House actually supported mask mandates. So wouldn’t you like a do-over on any of that?”
Trump responded, “Look, when this came in, nobody knew what the hell it was. … We never thought you’d have a pandemic. Nobody had any idea. We got word that bad things were happening in China, right around the Wuhan clinic. And I was the one that said it was in the Wuhan clinic and I stuck with it. And it was, absolutely, it came out of the Wuhan clinic. … And what we did was, this was brand new. Nobody knew what the hell it was. There’s dust — somebody said, there’s dust coming in from China and it’s killing people in Italy and it’s killing people in France and it’s going to kill people here. And by the way, I shut it down to China. That was a big move. I saved thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives by doing it. But honestly, nobody — I don’t blame a lot of people, because nobody knew what it was. Now we do understand it somewhat. Nobody really understands it, even now, fully. But nobody knew what COVID was.”
He added, “As far as the vaccine’s concerned, you had the original COVID, and the vaccine had an impact on that.” And that while there are some intelligent people who praise him for the vaccine, he doesn’t want to talk about it in either direction and he didn’t support mandates for it.
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