Seth MacFarlane has never felt comfortable sharing a network with Fox News. Now the Family Guy creator has channeled some of that anger into a new PSA that he premiered on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Monday night, acknowledging that he felt the need to counter Tucker Carlson’s disinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine.
“You’ve been very critical of your own employer because the Fox network also is the parent company of Fox News,” Jimmy Kimmel noted during their interview. “And I guess you’re not a Tucker guy?”
“No, you know, that’s why we did this Family Guy PSA about vaccination,” MacFarlane replied. “Because I looked around and I saw everyone else at Fox Corp doing their part to get good science out there and be responsible with their platforms. And looking down the barrel of that kind of peer pressure, I said, gosh, we’ve got to do something too.”
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Then, after Kimmel pushed his guest to go further by highlighting the hypocrisy of Fox News hosts criticizing Biden’s vaccine mandate when Fox News itself has the exact same policy for its employees, MacFarlane seemed to realize he was on the precipice of going too far, saying, “Look, the show would be an hour if I were to go on.”
“The show is an hour, so that’s fine,” Kimmel joked in response.
After a break, MacFarlane shared the PSA—Family Guy’s second vaccination push this year—in which Stewie helps Brian debunk some of Peter’s biggest concerns.
“What he should understand is, getting the shot not only protects him, but also the people around him,” MacFarlane, as Stewie, explains. “But even more importantly, if the virus is allowed to spread through an unvaccinated population, it could mutate into a variant that the vaccines might not protect against. And then we’re right back where we started: Gal Gadot singing ‘Imagine.’ We cannot let that happen!”
As for why the same corporation that runs Fox News would let him deliver such a pro-vaccine message, MacFarlane told Kimmel, “You see on the [Fox] News side, they’re obviously in their imaginary fairyland. And then you have the entertainment side that’s like, we have to exist with these people, let’s be political and make the best of it.”
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