GOP Rep. Madison Cawthorn (N.C.) on Friday argued against President Biden’s proposed “door-to-door” pro-COVID-19 vaccine campaign, claiming the same methods could be used to “take” people’s guns and Bibles.
Cawthorn made the assertion in a Friday interview with conservative news outlet Right Side Broadcasting Network at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas.
“Now, they’re starting to talk about going door to door to be able to take vaccines to the people,” he said, referencing remarks Biden gave from the White House this week.
“Think about the mechanisms they would have to build to be able to actually execute that massive of a thing,” Cawthorn continued. “And then think about what those mechanisms could be used for. They could then go door to door and take your guns. They could go door to door and take your Bibles.”
Biden on Tuesday called on local communities to ramp up the pace of coronavirus vaccinations, explaining, “We need to go to community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood and oftentimes door to door — literally knocking on doors — to get help to the remaining people protected from the virus.”
While White House press secretary Jen Psaki clarified this week that they were encouraging volunteers at the local level, rather than federal employees, to go door to door promoting vaccines, Republican leaders in several states have pushed back on the suggestion.
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R) wrote in a letter to the state’s Board of Health and Environmental Control on Friday requesting that it “issue direction to agency leadership and to state and local healthcare organizations prohibiting the use of the Biden Administration’s ‘targeted’ ‘door to door’ tactics in the State’s ongoing vaccination efforts.”
The governor argued in the letter that “enticing, coercing, intimidating, mandating, or pressuring” citizens to get vaccinated would undermine trust in the government.
Jeffrey Zients, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, on Thursday condemned misinformation on the administration’s vaccine distribution effort, calling it a “disservice to the country and to the doctors, the faith leaders, community leaders and others who are working to get people vaccinated, save lives and help end this pandemic.”