Former President Donald Trump’s admission that he received a COVID-19 booster shot received a less than favorable response from his fans.
Donald Trump was greeted with several boos after he confirmed his booster shot during a Sunday question-and-answer session in Dallas with the former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly.
According to a video tweeted by O’Reilly’s “No Spin News,” the former Fox News host says, “Both the President and I are vaxxed” and then asks Trump, “Did you get the booster?”
“Yes,” Trump says to a smattering of boos in the audience. “Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,” Trump says in the video, seemingly trying to quiet the boos. He then continued saying: “That’s all right, it’s a very tiny group over there,” pointing out the group dissatisfied with his answer.
Trump told a crowd of mostly unmasked supporters: “Look, we did something that was historic, we saved tens of millions of lives worldwide when we, together, all of us, we got a vaccine done.
This was going to ravage the country far beyond what it is right now, take credit for it … It’s great, what we’ve done is historic.”
“Don’t let them take it away. If you don’t want to take it, you shouldn’t be forced to take it, no mandates but take credit … Don’t let them take that away from you,” he added.
After a video clip of the exchange began spreading on Twitter, the spokesman for Covid communications from the Biden administration’s U.S. Department of Health and Human Services retweeted it with the cheeky message: “Be like President Trump, and get your booster shot.”
Trump had said in a Wall Street Journal interview that was published in September that he was unlikely to get the booster shot, saying that he felt like he was “in good shape from that standpoint” and “probably won’t” get the booster.
During his presidency days, Trump disclosed in early October of last year that he had contracted the COVID-19 virus. He spent that weekend in the hospital, a month before Election Day. Trump took a vaccine shortly before leaving the White House on Jan. 20.
This was not the first occasion in which he has received a bad response after admitting to getting a Covid jab. Back in October, Trump revealed he had received Pfizer‘s Covid vaccine in an interview with Yahoo Finance. Video footage also showed that it did not go down too well with his loyal base.
His comments come as a relatively large percentage of Republicans that have refused to get even initial doses of the coronavirus vaccines, and as GOP governors resist vaccine and mask mandates.
The Kaiser Family Foundation found in a recent poll that as of October, 60% of unvaccinated Americans are Republicans. Research has shown that boosters appear effective against the surging omicron variant of Covid.
On Trump’s appearances throughout the year, he urged supporters to finally get vaccinated, he has occasionally drawn catcalls for these requests. Getting the booster shot was almost certainly a wise medical decision considering that the indoor event took place amid a swift uptick in COVID cases as the Omicron variant make its dramatic debut in the United States.
While much is currently unknown about this new Covid-19 Omicron variant, including how it affects the elderly, the initial reports suggest that this new variant is relatively mild in vaccinated and particularly individuals who got their booster shots.
President Trump decided to get his first shot with his wife Melania behind closed doors at a time when other public officials were lining up to get vaccinated on live television, including his own vice president, Mike Pence, President-elect Joe Biden, and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
In March, the other four living former presidents, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter, were all photographed getting vaccinated along with their wives for a public service announcement urging Americans to get vaccinated.