As America braces for the rollout of the first COVID-19 vaccine, a number of high-profile politicians have indicated that they will gladly take the vaccine in order to help reassure the American people that it’s safe to do so.
The movement was at least partly brought about by widespread — and ridiculously unfair — commentary from some of the mainstream media that suggested because President Donald Trump led the efforts to get the vaccine out there, that somehow it’s “dangerous.”
Of course, any reasonable person — party politics aside — can understand that while Trump authorized Operation Warp Speed and other initiatives to accelerate the creation and distribution of a vaccine, it’s not as if he was in the lab at Pfizer working on it.
With that said, according to Breitbart, Vice President Mike Pence, along with his wife Karen, will be the first high-profile people to receive the vaccine on national television. The event will take place at the White House on Friday and the press has been invited to cover it. A White House statement said Pence is hoping to “promote the safety and efficacy of the vaccine and build confidence among the American people.”
Surgeon General Jerome Adams will join Pence in receiving the vaccine.
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Pence, who has led Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force since the beginning of the pandemic, is also expected to talk about how safe the vaccine is for every American and how crucial it is that people take the vaccine when it becomes available to them.
Trump recently indicated that he would request that he and White House staffers be moved down on the list of people expected to receive the early doses of the vaccine, but apparently, Pence wasn’t part of that commitment. As of this writing, there’s no indication that the president will be joining Pence in receiving the vaccine on Friday.
Dr. Anthony Fauci recently said he believes the president should receive the vaccine, even though he’s already had COVID-19 and beaten it. “You still want to protect people that are very important to our country,” Fauci said in a recent interview while adding that he believes former Vice President Joe Biden should also be at the top of the list for the vaccine.
According to NBC News, Biden is scheduled to receive the vaccine sometime next week.
“I don’t want to get ahead of the line, but I want to make sure we demonstrate to the American people that it is safe to take,” Biden said. “When I do it, I’ll do it publicly so you can all witness my getting it done.”
Last weekend, the FDA cleared the Pfizer version of the vaccine for Emergency Use Authorization and over the past week, thousands of frontline healthcare workers have received the vaccine as the COVID-19 death toll continues to climb.
