Trump absent as top leaders get vaccine to assure public
WASHINGTON — Vice President Mike Pence and the leaders of the House and Senate received their first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine Friday as they tried to reassure the American public that the shot is safe. Pence, in a live-television event, celebrated the milestone as “a medical miracle” that could eventually put an end to a raging pandemic that has killed more than 310,000 people nationwide.
Conspicuously absent: President Donald Trump, who has remained largely out of sight five days into the largest vaccination campaign in the nation’s history.
“I didn’t feel a thing. Well done,” Pence told the technicians from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Friday morning as he became the highest-ranking U.S. official to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech shot, the first authorized in the U.S.
Later, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, tweeted photos of themselves receiving the vaccine from the Capitol physician, who urged all members of Congress to join them.
The public displays come as top U.S. health officials are trying to persuade regular Americans who may be skeptical of the vaccinations to get them to pave the way for the end of the pandemic.
A recent survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that only about half of Americans want to get the vaccine as soon as possible.
Another quarter of the public isn’t sure, while the remaining quarter say they aren’t interested. Some simply oppose vaccines in general. Others are concerned that the injections have been rushed and want to see how the rollout goes.
Trump has been largely absent from the effort to sell the American public on what aides hope will be a key part of his legacy.