When West Virginia was deep in the covid-19 pandemic, Gov. Jim Justice surrounded himself with public health experts and urged state residents to get vaccinated — so much so that he got his own shot live on camera, named the vaccination effort after his own beloved dog and traveled around the state to give away prizes for people getting immunized.
“Getting vaccinated or getting boosted stacks the deck to keep you out of the hospital – I’m living proof,” Justice said after his own recovery from covid-19.
Earlier this year, the governor vetoed a bill passed by the state Legislature that would have provided loopholes to school vaccination requirements, siding with people who judged that “this legislation will do irreparable harm by crippling childhood immunity to diseases such as mumps and measles.”
In his next role, Justice will be a member of the U.S. Senate, where he will have constitutional advice and consent authority over Trump administration nominees like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has called covid shots “a crime against humanity” and claimed children did not need covid vaccines.
In an administration briefing today, Justice seemed more certain about Kennedy as a nominee than he is about the effectiveness of vaccines.
“I’ve never met him, but I can tell you this. We’ve learned a lot, haven’t we. I mean, really and truly, gracious goodness let’s be really fair — you know all of a sudden this pandemic hits and not one of us had ever seen anything like it. Donald Trump scrambled in every possible way that he could to get us the vaccines. And Donald Trump and all his administration promoted those vaccines like crazy and we all jumped behind it, and I was 100% on board,” he said in response to a MetroNews question.
“Now we learned more don’t we? Now we learned, really and truly, in many ways, that there’s medical knowledge that maybe, just maybe, they didn’t help much. On the other hand, we were so frenzied that our folks in our nursing homes or whatever, God knows we saved a potful of lives. And that’s all there is to it. And we saved them, like it or not like it no matter what anybody says, we saved an awful lot of lives because they were vaccinated. And I was a proponent of that. And I do think we did the right thing there.”
Justice, without specifying any updated and reliable guidance to the public, said there is new information.
“You know, I may have an adversarial opinion from the standpoint of our new appointee, and everything, but I will just say this: Today we know so much more,” he said. “We know so much more today.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention has acknowledged that after vaccination symptoms such as fever may demonstrate normal signs that the body is building immunity. But the CDC has maintained that reports of serious adverse events after vaccination are rare.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has maintained that he is not fully against vaccines. But he has a long and broad history of representing vaccines as inadequate or unsafe. He at one point led the anti-vaccine nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense. Kennedy said in a 2023 podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.”
As an incoming senator, Justice will play a role in whether Kennedy is ultimately given authority as secretary of Health and Human Services, which is over agencies like the CDC.
Justice, a Republican who is a longtime ally of President Donald Trump, seemed in his remarks today to be ready to defer to what the incoming president wants.
Broadening his comments Senate confirmation of some of Trump’s other unorthodox appointments, Justice said he is open minded to selections that include former Congressman Matt Gaetz as attorney general, former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, and Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth as defense secretary.
Gaetz, a Republican who resigned from Congress shortly after being named as Trump’s pick for attorney general, has been under an ethics investigation about whether he was involved with the sex trafficking of a 17-year-old girl.
Gabbard, a National Guard veteran, did not serve on the House Intelligence Committee while in Congress. Gabbard has expressed sympathetic views toward Russia and participated in secret meetings with the president of Syria, a regime that is a close ally of Russia and Iran.
Hegseth has been co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend. He is a veteran of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through the Army National Guard, but he has little direct experience with the Defense Department, a sprawling bureaucracy.
“Really, Donald Trump — and I am supportive a thousand percent — he’s got to appoint the team that, absolutely, that he believes in. And we’ve got to absolutely be fair about this. And we’ve got to give ’em time to get their feet underneath ’em and do the job that I know they’ll do. Absolutely I am supportive of his choices because I’ve got that level of faith him him, and I absolutely believe with all in me — and I’ll support all the choices and everything — but I do think that every one of these folks deserves a fair shot. That’s all there is to it,” he said.
“I’ll do it objectively. I’ll promise you that. But I don’t know how we can stand and say because he was one way he won’t be fair and won’t be objective. Or she won’t be fair and won’t be objective or anything. I don’t think that’s fair right now.”
Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican who will be West Virginia’s senior senator at the start of the coming year, has also expressed willingness to consider Trump’s nominees.
Capito serves as the ranking member (and soon-to-be chairman) of the Senate Labor-HHS Appropriations Subcommittee. While Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination will not go through this subcommittee (it will go through Senate HELP Committee), the Labor-HHS Subcommittee is responsible for overseeing the funding for Health and Human Services.
“It is the president’s prerogative to nominate cabinet secretaries, and he has the right to nominate the team he would like to carry out his agenda. As I always have, I will examine each nominee fairly. We will do our job in the Senate under our new Leader, Senator John Thune, to quickly consider the president’s nominees and implement the agenda demanded by the people of West Virginia and the nation,” Capito said today in a statement provided to MetroNews.
“As the person most responsible for funding the department, I will seek to have a very close working relationship with the secretary and will ensure they understand the priorities West Virginians have.”