Politics- Sen.
Bernie Sanders recalled an iconicmeme in a push to get more Americans vaccinated. - "I am once again asking you to get vaccinated," Sanders tweeted Monday.
- The line came from a presidential campaign ad that went viral in 2019, in which Sanders asked supporters for donations.
Sen. Bernie Sanders revived an iconic meme from his 2019 presidential campaign to urge Americans to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
The senator from Vermont's presidential bid may not have gotten him to the White House, but it did win the Internet, after a screenshot from a campaign advertisement posted in December 2019 went viral, in which Sanders asked supporters for donations to meet the Federal Election Commission fundraising deadline.
"As the FEC fundraising deadline for 2019 approaches, I am once again asking for your financial support," Sanders said in the video.
-Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) December 30, 2019
The latter half of the line gained traction in early 2020 "with memes imagining various scenarios in which monetary donations are being requested," according to Know Your Meme, an unofficial database that tracks various internet phenomena.
On Monday, Sanders recalled the iconic line in a tweet: "I am once again asking you to get vaccinated."
The tweet comes as the Delta variant surges in the US as a plateau in vaccination rates slowly tick upward. As of Monday, about 70% of adult Americans have at least one dose of a COVID-19
Aside from urging Americans to get the shot, the senator has repeatedly called for US pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson, to relinquish intellectual property rights to COVID-19 vaccines, which could allow vaccines to be produced globally.
"We have got to obviously make sure that every American gets vaccinated as quickly as possible," Sanders said in May during an appearance on NBC News' "Meet the Press." "But not only do we have a moral responsibility to help the rest of the world, it's in our own self-interest. If this pandemic continues to spread in other countries, it's going to come back and bite us at one point or another."
Pharmaceutical companies have since opposed the calls, and the World Trade Organization failed to agree on a proposal to issue a temporary waiver on the IP rights.
Sanders is among nine other Senate Democrats who urged President Joe Biden to temporarily waive IP rights to the vaccines so vaccines could be produced locally by other manufacturers, Reuters reported in April. The Biden administration later announced its support for the temporary waiver, saying "extraordinary circumstances" call for "extraordinary measures."