Will take COVID vaccine ‘over my dead body’, says Sarah Palin

Just as the United States death toll from COVID-19 surpassed 800,000 – the highest in the world, Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate, said at a right-wing event that she would rather die than take the COVID vaccine.

Speaking at AmericaFest 2021 in Phoenix, Arizona, she was met with a cheering crowd when she said, “It’ll be over my dead body that I’ll have to get a shot. I will not do that. I won’t do it, and they better not touch my kids either,” according to a report by The Guardian.

This is despite evidence obtained from large-scale trials as well as real-time data that vaccine helps bring down disease severity and deaths. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said that people who have not taken the vaccine are 14 times more likely to die, compared to those who are vaccinated. 

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During the event, she also went on to claim that the number of people refusing to take the COVID vaccine was more than those taking it. This, however, is not true. As per the figures released by the CDC, nearly 73% of those eligible have taken at least one shot in the US, 61.5% are fully vaccinated, and over 30% have received the booster dose.

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As the world battles the Omicron and Delta variants of the virus, the US is struggling to contain its hospitalisation rates and death toll, which are on the rise again. The country now comprises almost 15% of the total deaths from the disease, the highest in the world.  

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Dr Chris Beyrer, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told The Guardian, “Almost all the people dying are now dying preventable deaths. And that’s because they’re not immunized.”