Seth Meyers took apart the peculiar argument about COVID-19 vaccines that Brian Kilmeade made on Monday’s broadcast of “Fox & Friends.”
The Fox News host said he’d been vaccinated for the coronavirus, as had his colleagues, but: “If you didn’t get a vaccination, that’s your choice.”
“If you want to go cliff-diving this weekend, you don’t have to check with me. It seems a little dangerous. But I’m not going to judge you,” Kilmeade said.
Co-host Peter Doocy responded by strongly urging viewers to get vaccinated, noting that 99% of people now dying from COVID-19 were unvaccinated.
“It’s their choice,” Kilmeade interjected.
Doocy added that the Biden administration’s plans to reintroduce mask mandates in some areas were a bid to protect the unvaccinated.
“That’s not their job,” Kilmeade insisted. “It’s not their job to protect anybody.”
″Yeah, if the government was supposed to protect you, they’d have a department for it, like the Department of Defense of something,” Meyers said on “Late Night.”
“To address your cliff-diving analogy... Unlike COVID, cliff-diving is not contagious. And if it was contagious, I’d never leave the house,” Meyers added.
Fox News has faced a firestorm of criticism for its contribution to vaccine hesitancy as immunization rates lag and COVID-19 case counts soar in the U.S. due to the highly contagious delta variant. Health experts have advised everyone ― even people who are vaccinated ― to wear a mask, particularly in indoor public spaces, to protect themselves and others as the new variant takes hold.
Watch the rest of Meyers’s commentary below: