Fully-vaccinated Lindsey Graham says he has urged Trump to ‘speak up’ and promote shots for Americans after going through ‘pretty tough days’ with COVID
- Graham indicated that he spoke with Donald Trump as recently as Thursday
- He said the ex-president has been checking on him daily since he got sick
- Graham said he’s been asking Trump to ‘be aggressive’ on a vaccine message
- The South Carolina senator and Trump ally is not the first to push Trump on this
- Alex Azar also wrote an op-ed encouraging Trump to stand by the vaccines
- Graham and Trump were both vaccinated in December but Graham was re-infected recently and attended a party on Senator Joe Manchin’s boat
- This is Graham’s first interview since announcing his COVID diagnosis
Lindsey Graham said on Thursday that he has been pushing Donald Trump to speak up and press his supporters to get a COVID vaccine after the fully-vaccinated South Carolina senator was re-infected himself.
‘I’ve urged him to be aggressive and say, ”Take the vaccine,”’ Graham, a longtime Trump ally, told the Associated Press in his first interview since announcing he tested positive for a second time.
Graham indicated he spoke with Trump today and said the ex-president had been checking on him every day during his illness.
‘From a conservative person’s point of view, we should do all we can as a nation to get our economy back up and running and to protect our way of life,’ Graham said.
Trump has not been shy about taking credit for Operation Warp Speed fueling rapid vaccine development, but has been murkier in his public opinion of whether Americans should actually take it – possibly wary of the skepticism large swaths of his base have show toward the vaccines.
He said on Fox News in March that he would recommend inoculation to ‘a lot of people that don’t want to get it, and a lot of those people voted for me.’
At a Phoenix, Arizona rally in late July, Trump told a crowd of his supporters he felt some people were not taking the vaccine because they ‘don’t trust’ President Joe Biden and stressed people’s ‘freedoms 100 percent’ to do what they felt best.
He echoed the sentiment in a statement a week earlier, declaring ‘People are refusing to take the Vaccine because they don’t trust [Biden’s] Administration, they don’t trust the Election results, and they certainly don’t trust the Fake News, which is refusing to tell the Truth.’
Trump himself was vaccinated in December after an apparently severe COVID infection in October.
Graham was also vaccinated in December, and despite his reinfection called the shot ‘the antidote to the virus that´s wreaking havoc on our hospitals.’
He said he believed his symptoms would have been much worse had he not been vaccinated.