Your Take: Whitmer answers viewers about personal risk, COVID-19 vaccine distribution

FOX 2 - Governor Gretchen Whitmer joined FOX 2 for Your Take, answering audience questions about COVID-19, the vaccine release and the state's pandemic orders on Monday. 

FOX 2: What is the latest with vaccine doses arriving in Michigan?"

"We were supposed to get 300,000 vaccines the first week, we got around 80,000," Whitmer said. "That is why I asked what is happening and I said at my press conference I can't get the (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) to respond and tell me what is happening, why we didn't get our doses and when are they coming. General (Gustave) Perna apologized the next day on the national news. We still don't have a cadence on numbers of what is coming and when. They have acknowledged their fault in this and hopefully they are resurrecting their plan and that they update it and it is something we can work from."

Jeffrey from Port Huron asked, "Why is it that individuals can't access risk themselves and why is it that the government seems willing to make assumptive medical decisions for individuals and businesses?"

"I appreciate the nature of the question," Whitmer said. "We are a nation of fiercely independent people, that is a value of ours and it is important. However, in this public health crisis, our individual decisions can impact our community and can contribute to the death of others. That is why it is so important that we take these steps to keep people safe. I am doing it for your sake, as well as the sake of people you come into contact with. 

"This virus we can be carrying and not have a clue. It can be deadly to someone with whom we come into contact. And the nature of this virus is, it spreads through respiration and so being indoors without a mask on, with someone you don't live with, is an inherently dangerous thing when there is so much Covid."

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer joins us for Your Take.

FOX 2: "Aren't people's civil liberties being violated right now?"

"I think that COVID-19 threatens everyone's civil liberties," Whitmer said. "It threatens our ability to live and to live in a healthy way. I am mourning a very dear friend of mine to COVID-19 and he died last week. He wore masks and took it very seriously and he still got it and it killed him. That is why this moment is so different than usual. That is why we, as a nation, need to come together against our mutual enemy, this virus."

For more information and more of our Q & A, watch the video at top. If your question wasn't asked, ask Gov. Whitmer yourself at this link HERE.