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- Kayleigh McEnany blamed the Biden administration, not her former boss, for vaccine hesitancy.
- McEnany made the comments during her Fox News show on Monday.
- The former Trump press secretary said the Biden administration's messaging has changed too often.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Fox News host and former Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany called the Biden administration the nation's "biggest contributor to vaccine hesitancy" on Monday.
She also referred to the CDC as the "deep state" in her on-air comments.
-Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) August 9, 2021
Although co-host Harris Faulknery noted McEnany is not a doctor, the former White House press secretary forged ahead with bold claims that don't have much empirical 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 lamented how data on the COVID-19 Delta variant was "leaked by the deep state and the CDC," and that the Biden administration is only interested in "sacrificing our children at the alter of the teachers' union."
"They should be consistent, but consistent with the science," McEnany said, and described the Trump administration's messaging as such.
McEnany omitted the fact that under former President Donald Trump, the CDC discouraged Americans from wearing masks at the outset of the pandemic over fears of a shortage of personal protective equipment for health care workers. She also did not mention Trump's refusal to get vaccinated on camera and that the strongest anti-vaccine sentiments in polling and county inoculation data have been consistently held by Trump supporters, particularly among men.
The former press secretary did not present any polling or other data to back up her claim that the Biden administration has contributed the most to vaccine hesitancy.