Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, 89, has received his COVID-19 vaccination.
The Fox Corp. chairman and News Corp executive chairman was vaccinated at his local general practitioner surgery “after he received a call saying he was eligible,” according to a statement provided by a News Corp representative on his behalf. “He has been isolating in the U.K. since the summer, with his wife Jerry Hall Murdoch.”
Murdoch in the statement thanked the National Health Service (NHS), the publicly-funded healthcare system in the United Kingdom. “I would like to thank the keyworkers and the NHS staff who have worked so hard throughout the pandemic, and the amazing scientists who have made this vaccine possible,” he said. “I strongly encourage people around the world to get the vaccine as it becomes available.”
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The Guardian reported that the mogul got his jab in Oxfordshire on Wednesday.
Earlier this week, the U.K. government said that nearly 138,000 people have been vaccinated in the first week of the country’s vaccination program. Britain was the first country to approve the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and is in the early stage focusing on people over the age of 80. In its broader first vaccination stage, the government wants to offer the free and voluntary jabs to everyone over the age of 50 and younger adults with health conditions, or about 25 million people overall.
Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson, one of the big-name hosts of Fox Corp.’s Fox News, had on Thursday urged viewers to be skeptical about the effort to get people vaccinated, mentioning that a health care worker in Alaska had had an adverse reaction to the vaccine but responded to standard treatment quickly. “So how are the rest of us supposed to respond to a marketing campaign like this? Well, nervously,” he said, according to a transcript. “Even if you’re strongly supportive of vaccines, and we are even if you recognize how many millions of lives have been saved over the past 50 years by vaccines, and we do, it all seems a bit much, it feels false, because it is. It’s too slick.”
In other U.K. vaccine news, Ian McKellen earlier on Friday also received his coronavirus vaccination, saying he felt “euphoric.”
