Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, a proponent of the coronavirus vaccine, said he will work to counter misinformation about the shots by mounting an ad blitz in his home state of Kentucky.
”There is bad advice out there, you know. Apparently you see that all over the place: people practicing medicine without a license, giving bad advice. And that bad advice should be ignored,” McConnell told Reuters in an interview published Wednesday.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky on Tuesday issued new guidelines that call for even fully vaccinated people to wear masks indoors in areas where coronavirus cases are on the rise because of the highly infectious Delta variant.
“Not enough people are vaccinated,” said McConnell, who survived polio as a child. “So we’re trying to get them to reconsider and get back on the path to get us to some level of herd immunity.”
The 79-year-old McConnell, who has publicly promoted vaccines ever since, said in the interview that he plans to run 60-second ads on more than 100 radio stations in Kentucky to promote the vaccine.
He’ll pay for the ad campaign with funds from his re-election campaign.
Many health experts and politicians have blamed the unvaccinated for allowing the coronavirus to spark another surge of cases.
Last week, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey blasted people refusing to get a shot for the increase of coronavirus in her state. “It’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks. It’s the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down,” said Ivey, a Republican.
“Almost 100 percent of the new hospitalizations are with unvaccinated folks. And the deaths are certainly occurring with the unvaccinated folks,” she told reporters. “These folks are choosing a horrible lifestyle of self-inflicted pain.”
“I was encouraged by what the governor of Alabama said,” McConnell said.
According to the CDC, 57 percent of Americans over 12 have been fully vaccinated.
In Kentucky, 51 percent are vaccinated.