A viral video on social media showed how left-wing comedian Stephen Colbert’s views on the coronavirus vaccine magically changed after former President Joe Biden won election in 2020.
The video contrasted what Colbert said on CBS’ “The Late Show” in the summer of 2020 with what he said in the summer of 2021, after Biden’s predecessor, President Donald Trump, had left office.
In the summer of 2020 Stephen Colbert aired a sketch warning people to be skeptical of vaccines and Big Pharma.
Eleven months later when Biden was President, Colbert was dancing for the vaccine.
Colbert is one of the most partisan, shameless shills that America has ever seen. pic.twitter.com/sbuI5Ug3HC
— MAZE (@mazemoore) May 29, 2025
In July 2020, Colbert showed a fake pharmaceutical ad suggesting that COVID vaccine-producing pharmaceutical companies were “taking advantage of you in the national crisis” and “put[ting] their profits ahead of your health.”
In June 2021, on the other hand, Colbert danced happily in promotion of the COVID vaccine that these same pharmaceutical companies had just finished producing.
Critics have wondered what changed.
What’s known is that during the summer of 2020, the Trump administration was busy promoting Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership to accelerate development of the COVID vaccine that Colbert seemed to express so many doubts about.
By 2021, the vaccine had been completed and the then-Biden administration was busy expanding access to the same vaccine, increasing vaccination rates, and addressing vaccine hesitancy.
Based on this, critics have suggested Colbert’s simply “one the biggest hypocrite fools humanity as ever seen.”
Colbert is one the biggest hypocrite fools humanity as ever seen. He is a JESTER. Nothing but a scam artist. Ridicule this clown at every opportunity. He has earned it.
— Andy Plummer (@realandyplummer) May 29, 2025
Past evidence suggests Colbert’s critics may have a point.
In 2020, for example, Colbert bashed then-President Trump’s immigration policies, calling it immoral to vote for him because a couple hundred illegal immigrant children had been separated from their families.
Yet after President Biden assumed office, he never said anything despite widespread evidence that hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant children were unaccounted for.
A Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General report published in April confirmed that Biden administration “DHS officers failed to enroll over 233,000 migrant children who crossed the border since January 2021 in immigration proceedings, increasing their risk of trafficking and exploitation,” according to a news release published by Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office.
Another example that seems to confirm the hypocrisy allegation involved “Late Show” staffers being arrested for illegally entering the U.S. Capitol to film a comedy segment for the show in what critics described as an “insurrection.”
After the fiasco, Colbert defended the staffers.
“My staff was just doing their job,” he said. “Everyone was very professional. Everyone was very calm. My staffers were detained, processed, and released.”
He also lashed out at conservatives who’d likened his staffers’ behavior to the committing of an “insurrection.”
“Drawing any equivalence between rioters storming our Capitol to prevent the counting of electoral ballots and a cigar-chomping toy dog is a shameful and grotesque insult to the memory of everyone who died,” he said.
Critics assailed Colbert after the stunt, pointing to the fact that he’d been so critical of the Jan. 6 protesters for also illegally breaching the same building but was making excuses for his staffers.
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