McConnell implores unvaccinated Americans to get shots 'as rapidly as possible'

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is pleading with unvaccinated Americans to get their COVID-19 shot — or else, he warns, history is going to repeat itself.

On Tuesday, McConnell, a polio survivor who has encouraged vaccinations before but not with quite this intensity, said it "never occurred" to him that after "three highly-effective vaccines were developed in under a year that we'd have difficulty getting Americans to take the shots. But that's obviously where we are." High-profile members of McConnell's own party, as well as conservative news hosts have, for months, erroneously denounced the COVID-19 vaccines as unsafe and ineffective.

McConnell added that he wants to "underscore in the strongest possible manner I can ..." that "these shots need to get in everybody's arm as rapidly as possible, or we're gonna be back in a situation in the fall ... that we went through last year."

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As misinformation surrounding the coronavirus vaccines continues to spread, the Biden administration has urged hesitant Americans to abandon partisan inclinations and treat what the country is seeing now as a "pandemic of the unvaccinated." The highly contagious Delta variant now accounts for 83 percent of known U.S. COVID-19 cases, and the increase is "primarily occurring in areas with lower vaccination coverage," per The Wall Street Journal.