Michael Conroy/AP
- Trump told Candace Owens in an interview last week that vaccines protect people and won’t kill anyone.
- In response, Owens, who is anti-vax, told Instagram followers it was because Trump is “old.”
- His generation doesn’t try to find alternative information or “obscure websites” online, she said.
Donald Trump is backing the COVID-19 vaccine because he is “old,” the conservative activist Candace Owens suggested to her followers this week.
“People oftentimes forget, like, how old Trump is,” she said in an Instagram video posted Thursday. “Like they came from a time before TV, before internet, before being able to conduct their independent research.”
Her comments came after her interview with Trump last Wednesday, where the former president gave the COVID-19 vaccine his strongest endorsement yet, saying that it protects people and won’t kill anyone.
Owens has encouraged vaccine skepticism and repeatedly said that she was not vaccinated.
“Everything that [Trump’s generation] read in a newspaper that was pitched to them that they believe that that was a reality,” she said. “And one of those things was, you know, this push for vaccines and believing that people were going to die without vaccines. And so, I believe that his support of the vaccine is genuine and it’s not based on any corruption at all.”
Owens said she wanted to address questions from Trump supporters, who may be wondering where his support comes from.
She justified his opinion by saying he only reads mainstream media and doesn’t try to find alternative sources of information.
“Believe it or not, I do not believe that Trump reads or partakes in any other news sources,” she said. “I don’t believe that Trump is on the internet or that he necessarily uses the web to try to find obscure websites. I think that he just relies on typical mainstream sources. So, I don’t think that there’s anything evil going on there.”
“But he needs to have a larger conversation to really understand what’s going on and why so many people are just horrified,” she added.
Though Trump has often undermined unflattering news articles — particularly in the mainstream media — by calling them “fake news,” he is said to consistently read print newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Trump told Fox News earlier this week that he was surprised and appreciative of President Joe Biden’s recognizing his administration’s efforts to produce three COVID-19 vaccines.
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