Piers Morgan's mission: Bring the partisan 'tribes' together

Piers Morgan sat down with Will Cain to discuss his new Fox Nation show "Piers Morgan Uncensored," partisan tribal warfare, the evolution of his thoughts on the COVID pandemic and more on "The Will Cain Podcast" on Fox News Audio.

WILL CAIN: I'm going to bring in a couple of first responders, nurses, fire department, police – because I know you're pro-vaccine mandate – who've lost their jobs today and I want you to be able to have this debate with me in front of the people that suffer from your policies. 

PIERS MORGAN: I'm not actually pro-vaccine mandates. With one exception, I did believe that it was relevant for people who worked in health care. That was my only – I thought that was the only part of it which I thought was justified because I thought if you're working in hospital conditions, you're already taking a number of other things as part of your employment, other vaccines and so on. So I didn't feel that was unreasonable. I did feel that wider vaccine mandates were unreasonable.

And I think that throughout the pandemic, the one thing I've tried to avoid is being dogmatic and sticking to a position when facts obviously change, whether that's about masks, whether it's about the vaccine efficacy and how that works in terms of transmission and so on. And I think one of the problems with society today is that everybody gets boxed into their partisan tribe and then they don't care about new facts emerging. And that, to me, is going to be a central part of my new show, which is to try to bring the tribes together to understand that the most important thing is actually a fact. And as Ben Shapiro rightly said, facts don't care about your feelings and they shouldn't care about your tribalism, either. Because that's where you end up, where we are today, with the most fractured, polarizing society imaginable. 

CAIN: So, if I may, whether or not you have been dogmatic in the past, you've certainly been emphatic when it comes to masks, when it becomes a conversation about vaccines. As you pointed out, I think you said something like 25,000 or 125,000 UK health workers shouldn't be in health care if they won't get the vaccine. Are you telling me that your position on those issues has changed as the facts have changed?

MORGAN: Yes, because I think what the most important fact to me about the vaccines – and when I said I felt there should be a mandate against health workers, for example, that was at a time when we didn't really understand the full reality of the transmission, the impact of having the vaccine or not. 

What is clear is that the vaccines have been very effective. They prevented a lot of serious illness and death, but the ability to transmit the virus has not been stopped by vaccines. And although you have a higher ability to transmit if you're unvaccinated, you don't have no ability if you are vaccinated. So my position about that did evolve because I saw the facts change.

You know, like so much of the pandemic, everyone was blind to start with and everyone took blind positions. And I've tried actually, as I've got older and perhaps a little bit wiser and more experienced, to understand that being too entrenched into a position too early when things are uncertain is always a mistake. And I think that that's what I'm going to try and certainly do going forward. I think the pandemic brought the best out of many people. It also brought out the very worst in people.

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