Donald and Melania Trump secretly received the covid-19 vaccine in January
Former United States President Donald Trump and former First Lady Melania Trump received the COVID-19 vaccine at the White House in January, a Trump adviser told CNN on Monday.
It was not immediately clear which vaccine or how many doses each had received.
The revelation comes after the former president urged his followers to get vaccinated against the virus during his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, on Sunday. "How painless that vaccine is, so everyone go get your dose."
That new stimulus represents a notable change given that Trump, during his time in office, had long discounted the severity of the virus and avoided practices such as social distancing and wearing a mask.
CNN previously reported that a White House official had said in mid-December that Trump would not be given a coronavirus vaccine until recommended by the White House medical team.
The official said at the time that Trump was still receiving the benefits of the monoclonal antibody cocktail he was given during his recovery from COVID-19 in early fall, when both he and the first lady tested positive for the virus.
Trump's decision to receive the vaccine in secret, without public fanfare, stands in stark contrast to his successor and his predecessors. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were vaccinated during a television broadcast in December, and former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton volunteered to be vaccinated in front of the cameras in December to promote the confidence of the public on vaccine safety.
Former President Jimmy Carter has also been vaccinated against the virus.
During his speech, Trump, who oversaw the rapid development of coronavirus vaccines through the Operation Warp Speed task force, said his administration deserves much of the credit for the current pace of vaccinations in the United States and repeatedly referred to the covid-19 using a racist term. Never let them forget that it was us. We did this, ”he said of the vaccine development.
The former president's speech-writing team from his days in the White House had returned to his duties to help him compose his Sunday address at the conference, an adviser told CNN on Monday. Among those speechwriters was Trump's former senior domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller.
Trump's comments on vaccine development contradicted CNN's report in January that Biden and his advisers had not inherited any coronavirus vaccine distribution plans from the Trump administration.
In the immediate hours after Biden took office Wednesday, sources with direct knowledge of the new administration's covid-related work told CNN that one of the biggest surprises Biden's team had to digest during the period of The transition was what they saw as a complete absence of a vaccine distribution strategy under the Trump administration, even weeks after various vaccines were approved for use in the United States.
