Bo Derek said Americans might have been more willing to take the COVID vaccine if it had been presented as something they could choose, not something they were told they had to do. She made the point during a Club Random conversation with Bill Maher, where the two also revisited the wider fight over COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
The exchange landed in the middle of a debate that is still easy to recognize because the rules were so broad in 2021. The COVID vaccine was free to every American who wanted one, regardless of which company made it or a person’s health insurance, but Maher argued that the message around it did damage of its own. He said, “I mean, why did everybody have to get a COVID shot? Even people with natural immunity,” and added that he was “not an anti-vaxxer,” only someone who wants to decide which ones he wants.
Derek’s view was blunt. She said she remembered “the build-up to, ‘It’s coming, it’s coming, it’s coming,’” and said that if the shot had simply been offered as available to anyone who wanted it, more people probably would have taken it. “But when you tell Americans, ‘You must,’ that’s a problem,” she said. Her argument turned on persuasion rather than pressure, and on the idea that a voluntary rollout would have lowered suspicion.
Maher pushed the criticism further, tying mandates to what he sees as a broader dismissal of natural immunity. He said natural immunity had long been respected, but that in COVID, officials instead said, “Just get our product in you.” He also said, “For the people who were like, ‘We’re the science people,’ well, there was nothing that was more settled science than ‘natural immunity is the best,’” before adding, “Now, the fix is in. Now, you’re telegraphing that you just wanna get your product in me as much as you can.”
The conversation was not only about vaccines. Derek also said, “I want drugs to be decriminalized,” and, “Prohibition created the mafia!” But the sharper thread was the one that returned to COVID and the line between public health and public trust. The unresolved question is not whether the vaccine existed or was available. It did. The question is whether the mandate-era approach helped or hurt acceptance, and Maher and Derek left no doubt which side of that divide they think the country should have chosen.
