The Orange Man aka Big Cheetos Dust aka That Ain’t Your Money aka Big Soft Top held a rally (surprise, surprise) in Alabama—mostly because he loves rallies and also because he loves getting a bunch or racist whites together in a large place during COVID-19 season—and was booed for telling the crowd of trailer home enthusiasts to get vaccinated.
“And you know what? I believe totally in your freedoms. I do. You’ve got to do what you have to do,” Trump said, NBC News reports. “But I recommend take the vaccines. I did it. It’s good. Take the vaccines.”
Boos rang out from the maskless crowd because nothing says freedom like having unprotected face sex with COVID-19 air.
“No, that’s OK. That’s all right. You got your freedoms,” Trump said because somehow COVIDiots have conflated not wearing a mask with freedom. “But I happened to take the vaccine. If it doesn’t work, you’ll be the first to know. OK? I’ll call up Alabama, I’ll say, hey, you know what? But [the vaccine] is working. But you do have your freedoms you have to keep. You have to maintain that.”
From NBC News:
Covid cases and hospitalizations are surging in large parts of the South because of the highly contagious delta variant of the coronavirus. Cullman, where the rally was hosted, is experiencing a rise in cases that has matched its previous peak from late December. The city declared a Covid state of emergency Thursday to provide extra emergency support for the rally.
Alabama has the lowest vaccination rate in the U.S., with just more than 36 percent of its population having been fully inoculated, according to an NBC News tracker. Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, has said “the unvaccinated folks” are to blame for Covid’s resurgence in the state.
Nationwide, the overwhelming majority of Covid hospitalizations and deaths are among unvaccinated people, The New York Times reported this month.
Turns out that Republicans are the second-least-likely demographic group to be vaccinated and the first likely to attend a concert in a forest.
“While 57 percent of Republicans have received at least one dose of a vaccine or say they will get a shot as soon as possible, 40 percent say that they never will or will do so only if it’s required or that they are still in wait-and-see mode. The 40 percent total is the second highest among the 23 demographic groups surveyed,” according to a Kaiser Family Foundation vaccination tracking poll released this month.
Trump has endorsed vaccination shots before but has always followed his endorsement with a line about understanding Americans and their freedom of not wanting to get vaccinated, which is kind of like not endorsing it at all.