MINOT, N.D. — Ask Sen. Kevin Cramer about whether or not he’s vaccinated, and he won’t tell you one way or the other.
He said as much to me during an interview last month on Plain Talk Live, and he repeated his stance in a more recent interview with a website called Republican Lawmakers Review.
“One of the reasons I took the position; I did, with the survey of United States Senators on who has, or has not, been vaccinated… and remember I’m one of the five out of 100 that have not disclosed whether or not they’ve been vaccinated. Most of them took a selfie and tweeted it. I’m nothing if not an open book… But I would not disclose because it increasingly bothered me that people were being pressured and they started talking about vaccine passports,” the website quotes Cramer as saying. “Whether it’s individual companies or individual industries or governments: That is frightening to me. I just decided then and there, I would not be disclosing as a matter of principle. My communications department wrote up a nice long explanation incurring the benefits of vaccines ending with: It’s none of your business. But then I said, we’re just gonna stick with: It’s none of your business. And then again it’s not that I think people need to be afraid to ask. But I also believe it’s not any of your business.”
Later in the interview Cramer’s wife, Kris Cramer, noted that the state’s rate of vaccination had slowed to a crawl. “North Dakota’s numbers willing to vaccinate went from 6000 a month in March to 3000 end of April to like 600 and some in May,” she said, to which the interviewer, who is apparently anonymous, said: “Well, that is good news. That means people are realizing that they don’t have to get this vaccine.”