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The Fox News host and former Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Monday called the Biden administration the nation's "biggest contributor to vaccine hesitancy."
She also referred to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as the "deep state" in her on-air comments.
-Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) August 9, 2021
President Joe Biden has promoted the COVID-19 vaccines both before and after taking office. His administration recently confronted Fox News about its coverage of the shots.
While Biden made increasing vaccinations a priority for his administration from the start and credited President Donald Trump's Operation Warp Speed, a large number of congressional Republicans have either declined to get the vaccine or refused to say whether they've gotten it.
Biden, unlike Trump, received the vaccine in public and on camera.
While cohost Harris Faulkner noted McEnany is not a doctor, the former White House press secretary forged ahead with claims that don't have much evidence to support them.
"The biggest contributor to vaccine hesitancy is the Joe Biden administration," McEnany said. "This talk of mandates, Dr. Fauci being all over the map on masks - first it's one, then it's two, then it's zero if you're vaccinated, now we're back to one - this contributes to people having distrust of the federal government."
She said data on the Delta variant was "leaked by the deep state and the CDC" and that the Biden administration was interested only in "sacrificing our children at the altar of the teachers union."
"They should be consistent but consistent with the science," McEnany said, describing the Trump administration's messaging as such.
McEnany didn't mentioned that under Trump, the CDC discouraged Americans from wearing masks at the outset of the pandemic over fears of a shortage of personal protective equipment for healthcare workers. She also did not bring up that Trump refused to get vaccinated on camera, or that the strongest anti-vaccine sentiments in polling and county inoculation data have been consistently held by Trump supporters, particularly men.
The former press secretary did not present any polling or other data to back up her claim that the Biden administration contributed the most to vaccine hesitancy.
