McConnell keeps promoting shots as daily vaccinations in Ky. fluctuate around 10,000; first sweepstakes drawing is Friday

McConnell in Louisville on Monday
(Photo by Yasmine Yumaa, WFPL)

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, on a tour of Kentucky during a Senate recess, continued to promote vaccination against the coronavirus.

“I was a polio victim when I was a kid,” McConnell said Monday. “It took 70 years to develop a polio vaccine, two of them, that worked. Our country, as a result of the CARES Act and the $50 billion we put into Operation Warp Speed, developed not one, not two, but three highly effective vaccines in less than a year.”

Those efforts that produced a “modern medical miracle” will be useless if people don’t get vaccinated, McConnell said at a press conference in Louisville.

Asked what he would say to vaccine skeptics, a majority of whom are Republican white men like him, McConnell replied simply, “Take it.”

The state is offering three $1 million prizes to vaccinated adults and 15 postsecondary-education scholarships to vaccinated youth 12-17 to encourage shots. The deadline for the first drawings, which will be held Friday, is 11:59 p.m. Wednesday. For details, go to vaccine.ky.gov.

Daily numbers of coronavirus vaccinations in Kentucky have increased the last four days, after a decline that took the seven-day average below 10,000. Monday, it stood provisionally at 10,540, subject to adjustment, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data processed by The Washington Post (for the interactive version of the chart, click here):

Washington Post chart, adapted by Ky. Health News; click on it to enlarge. Interactive version here.