Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison has walked back comments he made about making the coronavirus vaccine mandatory for the country, CNBC reports.
What happened?
On Wednesday, Morrison said he expected to make the COVID-19 vaccine “as mandatory as you can possibly make it.”
He said there would be “a lot of encouragement and measures to get as high a rate of acceptance as usual.”
However, he later walked back those comments when speaking with Australian radio station 2GB even though he thought there had been an ”overreaction” to his words.
- “Can I be really clear to everyone? It’s not going to be compulsory to have the vaccine, OK?”
- “We can’t hold someone down and make them take it.”
What about the U.S.?
Will the United States create a national mandate for people to get the COVID-19 vaccine? Dr. Anthony Fauci said it’s highly unlikely, according to The Hill.
- “I don’t think you’ll ever see a mandating of vaccine, particularly for the general public.”
- He said he would “be pretty surprised if you mandated it for any element of the general public.”
However, Fauci said some businesses — like health care services and frontline workers — might require their employees to get the vaccine before they return to work, as I wrote for Deseret.com.