(LifeSiteNews) – Populist podcaster Tucker Carlson interviewed former biology professor and COVID dissenter Bret Weinstein on May 7, during which the latter said that President Donald Trump is still unwilling to reconsider his support for the COVID-19 vaccines.
Almost two hours into the episode, Carlson asked Weinstein about the current situation with the controversial shots. In response, he pointed out that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention’s (CDC’s) COVID-19 page still recommends that “[e]veryone ages 6 months and older should get a 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccine.” It claims the shot “helps protect you from severe illness, hospitalization, and death.”
“Everybody tells me that there’s no way forward by reaching President Trump, that he can’t hear it,” Weinstein said. “And maybe I’m gonna have to learn that myself. We are nowhere good with respect to the mRNA shots. We are still recommending them for tiny children who don’t stand to benefit at all.”
He believed that undoing the recommendation “could be done effectively, instantaneously, if the president was on board.” As for why the president was not, Weinstein said “the president has a certain amount of pride in Operation Warp Speed. And I think he feels mistreated over the rejection of Operation Warp Speed as an accomplishment. And that has caused him to dig his heels in.”
“And as I see it, that is unnecessary,” he continued. “The president is in no way responsible for the appalling content of these shots. He’s not a biologist. He listened to people who knew the material far better than he did, and they lied to him. That’s entirely separate from the question of whether or not Operation Warp Speed was an accomplishment, whether he succeeded in bringing a shot to the public in record time, which he did.”
Carlson asked if any members of Trump’s Cabinet could “act independently,” such as Secretary of Health & Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s most prominent vaccine opponent.
“I believe [Kennedy] absolutely would if he had the power,” Weinstein said. “I believe it must be a White House decision because Bobby knows the horror of these shots as well as or better than anyone. And so I think he must feel that he can’t get there, or maybe he’s working there overtime. But every month that we wait, more children are being injected with these things.”
Trump joining with Kennedy during the campaign caused many “COVID accountability” activists to hope for a change in direction. But during his confirmation hearings Kennedy called Operation Warp Speed an “extraordinary accomplishment,” and since taking office most of the secretary’s activities have focused on other issues, such as conventional vaccines and food additives.
Weinstein surmised that “maybe what might open [Trump’s] eyes to this is the plight of the vaccine-injured, which to me is one of the starkest horrors I’ve ever witnessed.”
“So if we extrapolate over all the nameless people who were injured,” he said. “People who were told by their doctors that they were imagining their pathologies until they discovered Facebook groups with hundreds or 1000s of other people experiencing the same thing. Facebook groups that were then cancelled by Facebook under the direction of the government, right? It’s an entirely separate crime.”
“What I’m hoping, is that the revelation of that crime will allow President Trump to see that although the destruction that came from the shots is in no way his responsibility, he is in danger of making this his responsibility by not responding to the fact that we’re continuing to injure new people, and we are pretending that the vast number of injuries we already have are mysterious, which they most certainly aren’t,” Weinstein said.
Yet for the past four years, Trump has refused such appeals about the evidence against the COVID shots, which were developed in record time by the first Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative.
Since leaving office, he repeatedly promoted the shots as “one of the greatest achievements of mankind,” even accusing hesitant supporters of “playing right into their [the left’s] hands,” all the while stressing that he never supported mandating them. The negative reception to such comments got him to drop the subject for a while, though in July 2022 he complained that “we did so much in terms of therapeutics and a word that I’m not allowed to mention. But I’m still proud of that word, because we did that in nine months, and it was supposed to take five years to 12 years. Nobody else could have done it. But I’m not mentioning it in front of my people.”
In January 2023, he dismissed potential safety issues by suggesting that “problems” were in “relatively small numbers,” while stressing that “some people say that I saved 100 million lives worldwide.” At the time, mRNA technology pioneer and prominent COVID establishment critic Dr. Robert Malone revealed that he once filmed a video meant to encourage Trump to change his mind on the subject but it had “no impact.”
That June, Trump brushed off an audience member who told him “we have lost people because you supported the jab,” answering that “everybody wanted a vaccine at that time,” “I was able to do something that nobody else could have done,” “I never was for mandates,” and “there’s a big portion of the country that thinks that was a great thing.” He repeated that answer in an interview the same month with Fox News’s Bret Baier, lamenting that “as a Republican, it’s not a great thing to talk about, because for some reason it’s just not” and stressing he has no regrets about his administration’s overall COVID response.
When pressed on the vaccines’ performance in a September 2024 interview with Sharyl Attkisson, Trump reiterated that “I think I did an amazing job with Covid,” while granting, “I think they’re doing studies on the vaccines that we’re gonna find out. And it’ll come out one way or the other.”
Many hoped that might signal a turnaround, but no such reversal has happened so far. At one of the first White House events of his second term, Trump hosted three of America’s top artificial intelligence executives to announce a $500 billion partnership to build AI data centers across the United States, during which Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison suggested AI could be used to rapidly develop new mRNA-based vaccines personalized for individual patients.
Last month, the Trump administration replaced the Biden administration’s dedicated COVID.gov website with a White House landing page detailing several of the most prominent falsehoods previously promoted by the medical establishment, including about lockdowns and the true origins of the virus, while omitting the vaccines.
In addition to the CDC’s recommendation, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration website’s COVID-19 page is still active as well, along with recommendations to vaccinate. The HHS website also has various COVID-related content, although some items, such as the “Let’s Get Real” page about vaccinating children for the virus, appear to have been taken down.
