On Tuesday, potential Texas gubernatorial candidate and Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey said he is against mandating COVID-19 vaccinations for children. Just last week, the Food and Drug Administration authorized Pfizer BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine for children ages 5 to 11.
And according to a report by NPR, over 900,000 elementary school aged children will be vaccinated by Wednesday Nov. 10.
In an interview with New York Times Events, McConaughey said even though he is against vaccine mandates, he is vaccinated and received the COVID-19 vaccine, but wants to learn more information before he vaccinates his children.
“I’ve been vaccinated. My wife’s been vaccinated. We have a high risk person in our household, my mother and she’s immunocompromised. I didn’t do it because someone told me I had to — [I] chose to do it,” McConaughey said. “Right now I’m not vaccinating them. I’ll tell you that. We were slow on vaccinations before Covid.”
McConaughey also said if he was governor, he wouldn’t mandate vaccinations for children.
“There’s going to come a time though where you’re going to have to roll the dice and go where the numbers are in my favor,” he said.
Nevertheless, The University of Texas professor said he agreed with mask mandates during the height of the pandemic.
“The mask I thought that should have been a quick and easy mandate,” he said. “No harm proven and we only can prove that it can be healthy. It’s a small inconvenience for a possible long term freedom.”
And even though McConaughey hasn’t officially announced his run for Texas governor, he denounced Texas anti-choice law, Senate Bill 8 which bans abortion in the state after six-weeks. And deputizes private citizens to sue abortion providers.
“The last abortion law in Texas feels overly aggressive to me,” he said. “It doesn’t seem to open up any room for a sense of choice to be made at the right time.”
Over the past year, McConaughey has continued to call himself “aggressively centrist” and doesn’t know if he would run as a Democrat or a Republican. As rumors continue to circulate on McConaughey’s potential run, former El Paso Congressman Beto O’ Rourke teased a possible gubernatorial announcement earlier this week.
Photo: Tim Warner/Getty Images
Kennedy is a recent graduate of the University of St.Thomas in Houston where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Celt Independent. Kennedy brings her experience of writing about social justice issues to the Texas Signal where she serves as our Political Reporter. She does everything from covering crime beats, Texas politics, and community activism. Kennedy is a passionate reporter, avid reader, coffee enthusiast, and loves to travel.
