During his monologue on Tuesday’s episode of “The Late Show,” Stephen Colbert talked for a bit about the current weird spike in monkeypox cases and the related shortage — unnecessary, as it happens — of vaccines in America. And he had a cunning plan to help: Let him personally store the vaccines.
What inspired this line of joking is a New York Times report Tuesday about that shortage, which explains in part that the United States procures a sizable number of the needed vaccines from Denmark, but said vaccines are live vaccines and require intense cold to keep them useful. And apparently, facilities in the United States aren’t as cold as the ones in Denmark, which means if the government ordered too many, a lot would go to waste.
“So if all the doses were not necessary for the outbreak, their shelf life would be dramatically shortened,” one official told the New York Times.
Colbert spent some time lightly poking fun at how the U.S. has been somewhat unprepared for the demand for vaccines, in part because health officials were taking a ‘wait and see’ approach. Colbert compared that to a life guard who waits uncomfortably long before rescuing someone drowning.
Then he got to the part about how we need colder facilities to store the vaccines, because ours aren’t as cold as the ones in Denmark. “But you know what is as cold?” Colbert joked. “The Ed Sullivan Theater. Send those vaccines to me and I’ll stick them behind the desk.”
Of course we assume it’s not *only* a secret plan to hoard them for himself, but we’ll be keeping our eye on Colbert. He’s slippery.
Earlier in the monologue, Colbert talked at length about many things related to Republican tomfoolery, including an amusing series of insults against Florida congressman Matt Gaetz. You can watch the whole monologue above now, but if you want to skip to the thing we emphasized, it kicks in just after the 10-minute mark.