In your mind, did the COVID vaccine work?
>> It's such an interesting question.
Because, not only that, I also did the regeneromes of the world,
we did a tremendous job on that, but we had a wet vaccine.
I really don't want to talk about it because as a Republican,
it's not a great thing to talk about, because for some reason, it's just not.
>> For some reason in.
So that is part of the Brett Byer interview on Fox News,
just the gift that keeps on giving this week.
New gems uncovered at every point in turn,
where he's trying to nail Trump on at least one thing.
And there Trump is just holding back, almost self-censoring, saying that, yeah,
I wonder why we don't talk about the vaccine, it's a complicated question.
Did it work, John?
He says it's complicated.
That's number one.
Did it work?
It's complicated.
That sounds like a scared person.
>> Yeah. Well, look, he is definitely scared.
That comes across in a variety of different ways.
The fact that he says for some reason I won't say the actual reason,
he goes on to, some people love it and some people hate it,
Republicans, and he trails off and then changes his tune.
He is clearly scared, but he also is talking about it.
He could have just immediately, as soon as the question was posed,
divert to something else.
But he really wants credit for it.
>> Right.
>> He should, it's actually a thing that he did.
>> Totally.
>> But he also knows how dangerous it is.
>> Yes.
And to John's point on how he sort of tries to weave and bob and
figure out what his line is, here is the full answer to that question.
Take a look.
>> So I have a Democrat friend who's very smart.
Hopefully he votes for me, but he's very smart.
He said, I don't understand one thing about you.
I watch your rallies, they're incredible.
You talk about beating ISIS, you talk about taxes, you talk about regulation.
You talk about everything.
But I've never heard you talk about the incredible job you did with the vaccines.
Because, as you know, I got them done in nine months, and
it was supposed to take anywhere from five to twelve years.
I broke their ass, okay?
And you know who doesn't like me too much?
The FDA.
Because they were very bureaucratic, and I got it done.
And he said, you may have saved in the world, throughout the world,
100 million people, and you never talk about it.
I said, I really don't wanna talk about it because as a Republican,
it's not a great thing to talk about.
Because for some reason, it's just not.
>> For some reason?
>> Yeah, for some reason.
Because people love the vaccines and people hate the vaccines.
But conservatives aren't, and I understand both sides of it, by the way.
I understand both sides very well.
But you have a lot of people that love the vaccines.
You do.
They happen to be more Democrat than they are Republican.
>> That's why I asked the question.
>> You have a lot of people.
There are people that say I saved 100 million lives.
I don't even talk about it.
>> [LAUGH] >> I don't even talk about it.
If you save it coz I'm humble.
Except now I'm talking about it, 100 million lives, and we'll talk about that.
It seems like 100 million is the only number that he can sort of hold in his
head at one time when it comes to COVID-19.
But there you had it, John.
He's almost saying the Democrats like him for it, Republicans don't.
He doesn't know why.
He doesn't actually say they're anti-vacs at all, at any moment does he say that?
Coz they think it causes blank, [SOUND].
No, and in fact, and this is what I picked up on, obviously, the phrase,
we broke their ass.
When Donald Trump says that, you immediately wanna take five showers or
100 million showers, in his words.
But he's saying that he hurried the FDA for approval,
which I think under the circumstances, was the right call.
It was important.
And yet so many conservatives, they're mad that they believe
that the FDA did a shoddy, fast-paced job or whatever.
They just completely sped it through, and that's why it's not trustworthy.
Who's kind of echoing and taking credit for one of the very points that some
anti-vaxers point to as to why they refuse the vaccine.
>> Yeah, they definitely say that that's one of the reasons they don't like
the vaccine.
So to whatever extent that is an honest expression of their thoughts,
they should be very angry at Donald Trump.
But Donald Trump should not be worried, they don't mean any of it.
It has nothing to do with the FDA.
Remember when they were saying, well,
I'm not going to take it coz it hasn't received FDA approval?
Then the FDA approval comes through, they don't take it.
It's all just excuses.
They don't like the idea of it, they don't wanna do it,
because Tucker Carlson barked at them for a year.
That's why.
It's not because they read about it in a scientific journal,
it's because Mark Levin shrieked at them.
That's it.
That's the whole thing.
I have to say as dirty as it did feel, I do like that expression now.
Whenever you beat the estimated time for a task,
you get to declare that you busted their asses.
I guess you broke their asses.
Look, to whatever extent there are Republicans that agree with him
that he got the vaccine made faster, I would love to sit them down and
have them explain in their own words what they think he did.
That a vaccine that he says was gonna take five to twelve years,
which nobody was saying, instead got done in two and a half months or whatever.
>> Yeah. >> He funded the vaccine.
That's what he did.
And I wanna hear a conservative say, yeah, if it had been Bernie or Hillary,
they wouldn't have.
They're willing to totally remake American society, lock everything down,
mass everything, but they weren't going to put the money into it.
They love taxing and spending on everything, but
they weren't gonna fund the vaccine.
That is his actual claim to why he deserves unique credit for that.
And ,obviously, anybody, if Louie Gohmert was president,
the vaccine effort was gonna be funded.
It's just such a stupid claim to make.
>> It is stupid because simultaneously, he was casting doubt on the entire thing.
That it was even a thing, that COVID was even real and that it wasn't just a case
of injecting bleach into your body and that they were on it, but not really.
Go live your lives, enjoy Easter.
Or all the many times he made sure that Americans were as unsafe as possible.
So it'll be fascinating,
and we're gonna cover it, of course, the Republican primary when he and
Ron DeSantis are doing this race to the bottom of how many body counts they had.
But for now, Trump is repeating that he saved 100 million people.
Not clear where he came up with it.
He's been saying, this was August of 2021,
I think if we didn't come up during the Trump administration with the vaccine,
you could have had 100 million people dead, just like you had in 1917.
You take the Spanish flu, 100 million people, up to 100 million people,
I think we'd be in that territory.
Yeah, he doesn't know what territory he's in at any time.
>> Wait, Francesca, that's weird.
Wait, he made that up in 2021?
I thought his Democratic friend told him that he saved 100 million people.
That's so weird.
>> Weird this is the same number.
Wow.
The Democrats are pulling strings for him.
Obviously, 100 million people, luckily, we did not reach 7 million deaths worldwide.
Over 1.1 million in this country, and still dying, by the way,
but he's right about the base.
Look, 44% of people who identify as Republican or lean Republicans say parents
should be able to opt out of childhood vaccines, up from 20% in 2019.
In contrast, the vast majority of Democrats and those who lean Democratic
support requiring vaccines for public school students, little changed from 2019.
So that's just vaccines writ large.
Then here,2021, unvaccinated adults are now
more than three times as likely to lean Republican as Democrat.
Is this the hill they're gonna die on, John?
I say RFK Jr. Sort of facetiously, but also not.
There are many people making a massive amount of money and
building their own profile based on their anti-vac stances.
And, yeah, they tend to lean Republican.
And I remember Anna has pointed out before,
a lot of other people have pointed out, the margin of error,
the margin of votes by which Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden and
in which states, there's a lot of voters unaccounted for.
Because a lot of them could not vote because they were dead.
>> 100%.
Yeah.
So look,
we definitely understand why right wing media decided to pick this up and lie that
they were against the vaccine when basically all of them have the vaccine.
And not just conservatives,
why people who had not identified as conservative decided that in the pursuit
of right wing eyes and money, they would start to push this stuff.
And if they had to move their other positions to be more right wing for
it to be consistent, they were willing to do that.
But for the viewers, for the regular conservatives or
whatever, it's in a lot of ways, it's like the perfect lie.
Because conservatives are hyper focused on purity and cleanliness,
they've been told that this is the thing that makes you pure.
If you get it, you're dirty.
So values-wise, it's good.
It allows them to, in a really shallow way, pretend that they're critical of big
pharma or something when supporting candidates who are perfectly fine with
maintaining the status quo of health insurance and all that.
It's secret information, too.
The sheep think you're supposed to take it, but I learned on 4 Chan that it's bad.
So I'm intellectually superior to you because I have access to secret
information.
Also, I don't just bow down to the big government.
I'm thinking for myself.
It really plays in to all of the right wing thing of wanting to feel
,simultaneously, like a genius and a hero and a victim and
an aggrieved minority all at once.