Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, said Sunday that vaccine hesitation among former President Trump supporters is the result of “natural resistance to the government” and called the reluctance to use the vaccine “worrying”. to make.
On CNN’s State of the Union, host Dana Bash asked Hutchinson what he said was causing hesitation among Trump voters, noting that half of the 45th president’s supporters said they did not intend to receive a coronavirus vaccine.
“Well, I’ve thought about it a lot and I think it’s a natural resistance to the government and skepticism about it,” Hutchinson said. “But you look at the breadth of support here in Arkansas for President Trump, and you have rural voters, you have minority voters and their hesitation is worrying, not just here, but across the country.”
“And I expect that as a country we will get the vaccination rate of 50 percent of the population, but we are going to get harder from 50 percent to 70 percent, and that is about overcoming the skepticism,” he added. .
But, like National overviewJim Geraghty said earlier this week, while a recent NPR / PBS NewsHour / Marist poll showed that nearly half of Republican men said they would not choose to be vaccinated if a vaccine was made available to them. no, the same survey also showed 24 percent of all self-identified Republicans 20 percent of all self-identified Republican men have already received the vaccine.
“Self-identified Republican men made up 13 percent of the sample,” Geraghty writes. “If something less than half of the demographic really rejects the vaccine when it is offered, we look at 6 to 7 percent of the total adult population.”
Asked if Trump should be more proactive in encouraging his supporters to receive the vaccine, Hutchinson said he was “delighted” that the president recently indicated that his supporters should get the vaccine.
While Trump did not participate in a public service announcement with other former U.S. presidents urging Americans to be vaccinated, Trump did support vaccination in an interview last week.
“I do not know the story of why he was not with the other presidents in the PSA,” Hutchinson said. “Any message is useful and I think we should have our leaders, we should have sports figures, we should have different representatives of our community, including our political leaders,” he said. [the] vaccine is important. ”
Hutchinson also reiterated his plans to lift his state’s masking mandate by the end of March.
He defends the decision against Bash, who asks why the mandate will be revoked in light of evidence showing the effectiveness of mask use in mitigating the spread of the virus.
“We’re been a year on this and we know so much more today than we did a year ago,” he said. “And that’s why we had to educate people to understand the importance of the mask, and I expect that even though we take away the mask mandate, people will continue to use the mask if you can not safely give up.”