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- McConnell will run minute-long ads on Kentucky radio stations urging people to get vaccinated.
- The Republican has consistently urged Americans to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
- But McConnell has refused to reject vaccine skepticism in his own caucus.
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Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell will run minute-long ads on more than 100 Kentucky radio stations urging people to get a COVID-19 vaccine, Reuters reported on Wednesday.
"Not enough people are vaccinated," McConnell, a Polio survivor who got his shot last December, told Reuters. "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 ads will be paid for with McConnell's campaign funds. The GOP leader argued that misinformation about COVID-19 and the vaccines is to blame for Americans refusing to get the vaccine.
"There is bad advice out there," he said. "Apparently you see that all over the place: people practicing medicine without a license, giving bad advice. And that bad advice should be ignored."
But he didn't mention that many lawmakers in his party are promoting such misinformation, refusing to say whether they've been vaccinated, and otherwise sowing skepticism about the scientific consensus around the virus.
Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican who's said he won't get vaccinated, has spread misleading information about the shots, making false claims about the potential risks associated with vaccination. He's also said Americans shouldn't trust the government's guidance on vaccines.
"It creeps me out that the government is wanting to push a vaccine in everybody's arm, even those people that don't need it," Johnson said recently on a conservative podcast. "Sorry Uncle Joe, I'm not signing up for that program. I don't trust them. … It's creeping me out because it's not rational."
In reference to COVID-19 vaccines, Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota said he doesn't think it's his job to "encourage people to do something that they don't want to do."
Almost half of House Republicans have refused to say publicly whether they've been vaccinated. Conspiracy theory-promoters like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert have urged Americans not to get vaccinated, calling the shots "experimental" and deriding them as "Fauci ouchies." Former president Donald Trump and former first lady Melania Trump secretly received their vaccinations before leaving office in January, a fact that was only reported months later.
Kentucky's vaccination rate is below the national average. About 52% of Kentuckians have gotten at least one dose and about 45% are fully vaccinated, while about 57% of Americans overall have had their first shot, according to data compiled by The New York Times.
McConnell has escalated his consistent calls for Americans to get vaccinated, and recently warned that the country could face another debilitating wave of infections if vaccination rates don't pick up. This comes as the delta variant, which is much more infectious and dangerous than other strains of COVID-19, is surging across the country.
"These shots need to get in everybody's arms as rapidly as possible or we're going to be back in a situation in the fall that we don't yearn for - that we went through last year," he said earlier this month. "This is not complicated."
Some other Republican leaders, particularly governors, have strongly promoted the vaccines. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey said last week that it's "time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks" for the ongoing pandemic, and later argued in a Washington Post op-ed that many unvaccinated Americans "are being lied to" by anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists. Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson recently blamed "false information" for "hardened" resistance to vaccines in his deep-red state.