The morning after 18-year-old pop star Olivia Rodrigo took the White House podium to urge young people across the country to stop being so selfish and get the COVID-19 vaccine, another influencer of sorts revealed that she too would have liked to play a similar role in the Biden administration.
“There’s lots of different demographics that are vaccine hesitant for a lot of reasons, and we need to be reaching out to people in lots of different ways,” Meghan McCain said Thursday on The View. “I’m going to say it again, I don’t think the White House is doing a good job reaching out to Republicans. I don’t. I’ve offered my help. They haven’t accepted it. They don’t care.”
With her comments, McCain, who is leaving The View at the end of this month, seemed to confirm a story from a View “insider” that first appeared in Politico Playbook earlier this year. The “insider” claimed at the time that McCain offered to be vaccinated live on-air with her brother, Jimmy McCain, but the Biden team wasn’t interested. Instead, they gave The View’s moderator Whoopi Goldberg a private briefing at the White House about vaccine messaging.
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“They should have given all of The View hosts this training, not just Whoopi,” the “insider” said. A source at the White House, in turn, pointed out that Meghan McCain was not yet eligible to be vaccinated at the time she initially reached out.
And yet, there are other reasons the Biden administration may have been wary about taking on McCain as some sort of official surrogate. For instance, there was her call in February of this year for Biden to replace Dr. Anthony Fauci with someone who actually “does understand science.”
“The fact that I, Meghan McCain, co-host of The View, don’t know when or how I will be able to get a vaccine because the rollout for my age range and my health is so nebulous, I have no idea when and how I get it,” the 36-year-old pundit said at the time. “I want to be responsible and obviously wait my turn, but this rollout has been a disaster.”
Then there were her comments just this morning, moments before complaining about the supposed snub. In response to the news of E! host Catt Sadler’s rare breakthrough COVID-19 case, McCain said, “It's very scary to see someone like that who has been vaccinated who can still get COVID,” adding, “so there’s questions about the efficacy of the vaccine on top of everything right now.”
