“Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough said Monday amid rising COVID-19 cases and the threat of the Delta variant that it’s time for teachers, nurses and police officers to get vaccinated or “look for another job.” And Scarborough told his co-host Mika Brzezinski he thinks it falls to President Joe Biden to begin this mandate with public school teachers.
“Joe Biden needs to make the tough choice right now,” Scarborough said during Monday’s edition of his MSNBC program. “And he needs to start in his own political backyard. And he needs to tell the teachers union that he’s going to require every public healthcare person get it, but also starting– every public school teacher needs to be vaccinated. If you remember last year, they kept saying, ‘We can’t go back to school’ — earlier this year, ‘We can’t go back to school until we’re all vaccinated.’ That’s all we heard, right? OK, well we have the vaccinations now. We’re starting to hear some rumblings of, ‘Maybe we can’t go back to school this fall because it’s not’– no, no, no, no, that’s not an option. That’s not an option. Our kids stayed home last year from school and the results were absolutely devastating, even more devastating for the truly disadvantaged.”
Scarborough says with the availability of the vaccine, Biden now needs to say, “if you are a public school teacher, or you teach at a public university, as a condition of your job, you have to get vaccinated.”
“‘We are not closing schools this fall; children will not be staying at home this fall looking at Zoom classes. They are going to be in because their teachers are going to be vaccinated.’ That’s what Joe Biden needs to start [saying],” he continued. “He needs to start there today. And then he needs to talk about health care officials who are taking care of senior citizens.”
“Here we are, six, eight months later and I’m see statistics that 40-45% of health care workers in nursing homes are not vaccinated. Are you kidding me?” Scarborough said. “You’re putting the lives of senior citizens at risk. Everybody has the freedom to do what they want to do, but the government has a responsibility to step in and say that those other 40% of staff that work at nursing homes, you get vaccinated, or you find another job.”
He concluded: “It’s time for Joe Biden, it’s time for Democrats, it’s time for serious Republicans, to start ignoring the ground noise and start focusing on the signal. And the signal is this, if you’re a school teacher, if you’re a nurse, if you’re a cop, you need to get vaccinated. And if you don’t, you need to look for another job.”
You can watch Scarborough’s comments in the video above around the 30-minute mark.
Leave a Reply