September 12, 2021

Fox News host Chris Wallace challenged Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts (R) for opposing a mandate for the Covid-19 vaccine but not for other diseases.

During an interview on Fox News Sunday, Wallace asked Ricketts why he is fighting President Joe Biden's call for companies with 100 or more employees to require worker vaccinations for Covid-19.

"I've talked to a number of people," Rickets said. "They've told me, if they make me take the vaccine, I'm just going to be fired."

"You say it's a personal choice," Wallace pointed out. "In fact, to attend school in your state of Nebraska, children must be vaccinated against a number of diseases."

The Fox News host then listed off the diseases which include tetanus, polio, measles, and chicken pox.

"Why are those mandates that parents and your state must comply with and do comply with routinely, why is it that they're not so objectionable and such a violation of personal freedom but Biden's vaccine mandates are?"

Ricketts argued that the Covid-19 vaccine does not have a "long history" of use.

"There are still a lot of people out there that don't know what to trust," Ricketts said. "This is really an outcome of what the CDC has done because they have flip-flopped on so many issues, whether it's masks or if you have masks when you've been vaccinated and so forth. There's just a lot of people out there that don't know who to trust right now."

"That's why it should be a personal choice and not something mandated by the government," he added.

Wallace pushed back by noting that the polio vaccine was mandated as soon as it was available.

"So we're in the middle of a pandemic, there is a new vaccine that Donald Trump was largely responsible for, it's been approved -- full approval -- by the FDA," Wallace said. "Again, if the polio vaccine is OK for parents and they have to comply with it to send their kid to school, why not the vaccine for this disease?"

Ricketts insisted that the current pandemic is "very different from polio."

"Children are no more at risk for the coronavirus than they are the ordinary flu," he said. "The risk for this is just such that this is something that we shouldn't be mandating it."

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