Politico | Coronavirus: Donald Trump’s supporters begged to get vaccine by Operation Warp Speed’s Moncef Slaoui
- ‘There’s a whole fringe of the population that listens to the president very carefully,’ the scientist says
- Top disease expert Anthony Fauci says both Trump and President-elect Joe Biden should get inoculated as a matter of national security
This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Nick Niedzwiadek on politico.com on December 15, 2020.
The scientist leading the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed beseeched the president on Tuesday to use his platform to promote the newly arrived coronavirus vaccines to his core supporters.
“There‘s a whole fringe of the population that listens to the president very carefully, and therefore he has an important role,” Moncef Slaoui said on CNN. “I know he has been very supportive of the vaccine development, so I hope he will be, of course, as supportive of its usage.”
While President Donald Trump championed the vaccine‘s arrival on his Twitter account, the amount of public attention he has devoted to the development has been dwarfed by his fixation on casting doubt on the integrity of the presidential election he lost and his attempts to overturn its results.
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White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said on Tuesday that the president “has great confidence in” the new vaccines, but declined to say whether he would do so in public.