Candace Owens claims Trump supports COVID vaccines because he's 'old' and 'came from a time before TV'

Conservative millennial commentator Candace Owens spent Christmas weekend arguing on Twitter with less-conservative millennial commentator Meghan McCain over an interview Owens conducted with former President Donald Trump last week. In the interview, Trump stood up for the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines after Owens suggested they didn't work.

The Owens-McCain spat quickly devolved into personal insults — McCain called Owens an "anti-vaxxer," and Owens called McCain fat — but Owens used subtler means to dismiss Trump's vaccine boosterism, arguing he's "too old" to find the "obscure websites" where people do their own research on the vaccines.

"People oftentimes forget that, like, how old Trump is," Owens said on an Instagram Live post Thursday night. "He comes from a generation — I've seen other people that are older have the exact same perspective, like, they came from a time before TV, before internet, before being able to conduct their independent research." Trump, who famously had his own reality TV show, never lived in "a time before TV," but he also doesn't use a computer.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Trump's vaccine support isn't "evil" or "based in any corruption," Owens told her followers, but "he needs to have a larger conversation to understand what's going on and why so many people are horrified by his remarks."

In the same Instagram broadcast, Owens talked up colloidal silver as one way to ward off the coronavirus, telling one follower she takes a "teaspoon a day" or "more when I'm sick." Colloidal silver "has no valid medical purpose and plenty of potential dangers," including organ failure in extreme circumstances, The Daily Beast notes, citing the Mayo Clinic. "But colloidal silver's most famous side effect is argyria — a condition that turns users' skin a bluish-gray color, usually permanently."

"In the year since the first shots began going into arms, opposition to vaccines has hardened from skepticism and wariness into something approaching an article of faith for the approximately 39 million American adults who have yet to get a single dose," The New York Times reports. "Unvaccinated Americans this year have made up the vast majority of severe cases and deaths from the virus," and "health experts say the roughly 15 percent of the adult population that remains stubbornly unvaccinated is at the greatest risk of severe illness and death from the Omicron variant."