No, Anderson Cooper Did Not Say Unvaccinated Americans Should Be Denied Social Security

CNN’s Anderson Cooper trended on Twitter Monday after users circulated a video which appeared to show him arguing in favor of stripping Social Security benefits from unvaccinated Americans. Not only is Cooper currently on vacation, but the clip was heavily edited and disseminated, presumably to draw outrage.

Some Twitter users were infuriated when a clip began to make its rounds on the platform. It showed the CNN host declare, “Social Security, you need to be vaccinated if you want to get whatever, whatever benefits they give, you need to be vaccinated.”

The tweet below was posted on Dec. 24., and since then has been retweeted thousands of times.

Anyone who has watched Cooper’s show this week knows the host is out for the holidays. CNN is of course not watched by the vast majority of Americans, so it would be unreasonable to expect everyone to be aware of that fact.

But those outraged by the viral clip could have kept the media’s fact-checkers on the sideline by doing a bit of investigating for themselves. A quick Google search of the quote unearths it was pulled from an Aug. 4 interview between Cooper and Bill Gates on AC360 that was mostly centered on the latter’s association to deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.

Cooper did in fact say on Aug. 4, “…Social Security, you need to be vaccinated if you want to get whatever, whatever benefits they give, you need to be vaccinated…” But the statement was uttered in the context of a question posed to Gates about both public and private vaccine mandates.

According to a CNN transcript, Cooper actually said:

Obviously, corporations increasingly are saying you have to be vaccinated in order to work at our corporation. Is that something you support? And do you think the Federal government or state governments, or the very least Federal government should mandate, if you want to get on an airplane, you have to be vaccinated; if you want to get Social Security, you need to be vaccinated; if you want to get whatever benefits they give, you need to be vaccinated for. Is that something that the U.S. can and should do?

Gates, however unpalatable many people might find him to be, did not advocate for pulling public retirement benefits from unvaccinated Americans in his response to the question.

“Well, certainly, if you take a case like nursing homes, where, you know, we are seeing transmission primarily through unvaccinated people,” Gates said. “There, you can make a very compelling case. If once you get far beyond that, the question is, will it work to get people to be more – to seek out the vaccine? You know, one elderly care home said hey, ‘If I require it, but the others don’t, you know, I simply just have less workers.'”