Donald Trump Gets Vaccinated. Now Anti-Vaxxers Call Him an Enemy and a Traitor

The former US president had criticized the idea of booster shots and called it an "operation to make money for Pfizer."

Many supporters of former US President Donald Trump among followers of QAnon and other conspiracy theories have stopped supporting him and begun criticizing him after learning that he got a COVID-19 booster shot, Rolling Stone reports.

Trump first got vaccinated while he was still president. Unlike Joe Biden, he did so privately and preferred not to advertise it, so as not to lose the support of vaccine opponents.

In August 2021, the former US president criticized the idea of booster shots and called it an "operation to make money for Pfizer." In September he softened his stance, saying he was not against boosters but would not get a third shot himself.

However, on December 21, at a meeting with supporters in Dallas, Trump said he had already received a booster shot.

The hall greeted these words with disapproving murmurs. Trump simply waved his hand and said the murmurs came "from a very small group" of people on the left side of the hall, and repeated his claim that the US under his leadership "saved tens of millions of people around the world by creating a vaccine."

A few days later, the former president went even further and called the COVID-19 vaccine "one of the greatest inventions of mankind." The outlet writes that Trump's words provoked serious disapproval among people in groups where ultra-right conservatives communicate.

Now commentators believe that after this, Trump and the Republican Party have lost their "moral superiority" and deserve no more trust than Joe Biden and the Democrats.

Trump's supporters have also been reminded that they "forgot that this whole coronavirus catastrophe was initiated and promoted" during his own presidency.

In anti-vaccine communities, a video spread showing a group of activists being refused entry to the "Trump Grill" restaurant, owned by Trump, in Trump Tower in New York because they had no vaccinations. This was perceived as a "betrayal" by the former US president.

Alex Jones, a well-known coronavirus denier and author of the Infowars project, has placed Trump among the "enemies": "We are fighting here against Bill Gates, Fauci and Joe Biden, and now Trump has joined their team."

Ron Watkins, one of the founders of QAnon, refrained from directly criticizing Trump, but after his words about the booster called on anti-vaxxers to "stand firm," "not be afraid" and "never submit."

Although not all of Trump's supporters who share conspiracy-theory ideas were disturbed by his words about the booster shot, attorney Lin Wood, who was one of the central participants in the campaign of lawsuits demanding the overturning of the 2020 election results, urged restraint in criticizing the former president: "I believe that we must wait until ALL the facts are known before judging the strategy and tactics the president is using to achieve victory."