Two GOP Senators on Sunday urged a more community-based approach to achieve COVID-19 vaccination compliance in states with low inoculation rates, pushing back on White House efforts that are viewed with skepticism in some states.
In separate interviews, GOP Sens. Rob Portman of Ohio and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana argued public campaigns could be more targeted — and trusted.
“I applaud the Trump administration, the researchers who worked overtime to prepare these vaccines,” Portman said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding the rise in COVID-19 hospitalizations is “a pandemic of the unvaccinated by definition.”
“The vast majority, 99% of those who are unfortunately dying now from this terrible pandemic are people who are not vaccinated,” he said. “So I do encourage people to get vaccinated. I don't think it ought to be something where, you know, we're going door to door and mandating it on people.”
“We ought to be doing a much more effective and massive public media campaign, talking about the facts, giving people the scientific facts on this,” he urged.
Portman said in Ohio, the vaccination rate is about 60%, and remains on track to possibly reach 70%.
Cassidy argued that President Joe Biden shouldn’t be the main voice advocating for vaccinations.
“You need to have your doctors, your nurse, physician's assistants speaking to the patients they normally care for,” he said. “This is good, it saves lives. What I'm trying to do, I'm trying to educate.”
“Put it on social media,” he said, which is what his state is doing, “You choose either to be vaccinated or accept higher rate of unnecessary deaths. That's the way to communicate your position, not through some partisan person who asked us to trust him.”
COVID-19 continues to kill people faster than guns, car crashes and influenza combined, a review of mortality data has shown.
The situation has improved dramatically since January, when COVID deaths outpaced heart disease and cancer as the country’s top killer, according to a Bloomberg analysis. Still, for the month of June, coronavirus was responsible for 337 deaths a day. For comparison, the historic average deaths from gunshots, car crashes and complications from the flu add up to 306 a day.
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Fran Beyer ✉
Fran Beyer is a writer with Newsmax and covers national politics.
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