MSNBC host Joy Reid stood by comments she made last fall that questioned the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine, justifying her months-long bout of vaccine hesitancy on the grounds that then-President Donald Trump is a “psychopath.”
“I have taken a lot of heat for having said back in September that, if Donald Trump remained president, I wouldn’t trust anything that was coming out in terms of vaccines that he was offering, and that it was difficult to trust the CDC after he had warped it so thoroughly, and that, even if he wasn’t president, it would be difficult to restore that kind of trust,” Reid said.
Last fall, Reid asked, “[W]hy would any sensible person take a vaccine Trump had anything to do with?” In November, she tweeted, “Just speaking for myself, I wouldn’t go near anything that Trump or his politicized FDA had anything to do with.”
Frankly, the fact that Pfizer was not part of "Operation Warp Speed" and took no Trump government funding makes me feel better about their vaccine. Just speaking for myself, I wouldn't go near anything that Trump or his politicized FDA had anything to do with.
— Joy-Ann (Pro-Democracy) Reid 😷 (@JoyAnnReid) November 9, 2020
Reid also amplified others who cast doubt on the efficacy of the vaccine, inviting New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on her show to discuss the issue on September 25. Governor Cuomo had said, since “there are now serious questions about whether or not the vaccine has become politicized,” he would appoint two committees of “experts” to review the vaccine before he distributed it. “I want to make sure that we know it’s safe,” he said. The president responded that Cuomo’s actions would “put New York at the end of the vaccine list” by delaying distribution.
Joy Reid tried to spin the president’s message into a threat. “Is Donald Trump saying that somehow he could withhold a vaccine from the State of New York?” Reid asked Governor Cuomo, who agreed that was precisely what the president said.
But Reid doubled down on those remarks Thursday night, saying the former president bears the blame for her campaign against the efficacy of the coronavirus vaccine.
“I said that because, in my mind, a psychopath was president. And if a psychopath is telling you, this vaccine — which is really for my reelection — is what you should take, there’s a good reason not to trust that,” she continued.
“But now there’s not a psychopath in the White House,” said Reid, who announced earlier in the program that she had just returned from a two-week vacation with Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza.
Reid then asked her guest — President Trump’s estranged niece, Mary Trump — if President Joe Biden’s election might somehow convince more people to get vaccinated.
“Do you think that there’s some way to shift, kind of, the attitudes of people who are just hesitant, based on the fact that, ‘Look, guys, there’s not a madman there now. You should really think about it’? Do you know — how do we even get to that conversation?”
Mary Trump said that the Left’s vaccine messaging is “complicated” by the fact that conservatives often point out how their shifting position appears to follow a party line — something Mary Trump felt is wholly defensible.
“The Right is very good at mirroring the Left’s strategies,” she said. “We rightly call them fascists: They erroneously and falsely call us Marxist, communist socialists, whatever that means.”
“We rightly say, ‘I am skeptical that a mass murderer can be trusted when it comes to a vaccine because he’s likely to just say it’s effective to gain voters,’ right? Whereas, now we rightly say, ‘You can trust the government in this instance.’”
“We’re in a bit of a bind, shall we say,” she concluded.
“Yes,” Reid agreed, returning to her theme that the Biden-Harris administration deserves the nation’s unquestioning trust.
“You can trust the government when it’s in the hands of someone sane,” she said. “I think that’s the point. And it’s hard, I guess, to make that point any way subtly.”
But that contradicts what Reid said last fall. At the time, Reid argued that it would make no difference whether Trump or Biden won the 2020 election because President Trump had permanently transformed the federal bureaucracy into a MAGA movement.
On September 17, Reid asked, “will anyone … anyone at all … ever fully trust the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] again? And who on God’s earth would trust a vaccine approved by the [Food and Drug Administration]?? How do we get a vaccine distributed after this broken, Trumpist nonsense has infected everything? Even if Biden wins?”
But by April, Reid’s views had changed markedly, as she endorsed the concept of private businesses denying services to anyone who remained unvaccinated by choice. “Vaccine-only access to some businesses like bars, gyms, restaurants etc. makes sense to me,” she tweeted. “If people choose to be unvaxxed, they can just miss out.”
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.