President Trump and his allies have spent years stoking disinformation and doubt in official accounts about the election, the coronavirus, and other topics. Now those efforts are making it harder to rally support around his administration’s vaccine push.
Even as Vice President Pence took the vaccine on TV on Friday and the White House called the efforts to speedily produce a vaccine “historic,” Trump supporters have become forceful proponents of conspiracies about the vaccine on Twitter and Fox. Some of Trump’s most high-profile allies, including his former attorney Sidney Powell, for example, have pushed misleading claims that the government will force people to receive a vaccination or use the vaccine to conduct surveillance of the population.
Candace Owens, a prominent Black activist and Trump ally, tweeted on Dec. 9 that “the same people that are out here yelling ‘my body my choice’ will be telling you that the government has a right to force vaccinate you for a virus that has a 99% survival rate.” Twitter spokeswoman Lauren Alexander said the tweets did not violate the company’s misinformation rules, which specifically prohibit false statements saying the vaccine could be used to harm or control populations.
Complicating matters is Trump himself. The president — who has a history of questioning vaccines — has also been notably less vocal about vaccine promotion. He has hailed his administration’s investments in vaccine development, including tweeting that the vaccine’s impending arrival was “GREAT NEWS” — but has not committed to taking it publicly. Since the election, he has used his Twitter account to primarily focus on baseless claims of election fraud rather than the covid-19 crisis.