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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, on a tour of Kentucky during a Senate recess, continued to promote vaccination against the coronavirus.

“I was a polio victim when I was a kid,” McConnell said Monday. “It took 70 years to develop a polio vaccine, two of them, that worked. Our country, as a result of the CARES Act and the $50 billion we put into Operation Warp Speed, developed not one, not two, but three highly effective vaccines in less than a year.”

Those efforts that produced a “modern medical miracle” will be useless if people don’t get vaccinated, McConnell said at a press conference in Louisville.

Asked what he would say to vaccine skeptics, a majority of whom are Republican white men like him, McConnell replied simply, “Take it.”

The state is offering three $1 million prizes to vaccinated adults and 15 postsecondary-education scholarships to vaccinated youth 12-17 to encourage shots. The deadline for the first drawings, which will be held Friday, is 11:59 p.m. Wednesday. For details, go to vaccine.ky.gov.

Daily numbers of coronavirus vaccinations in Kentucky have increased the last four days, after a decline that took the seven-day average below 10,000. Monday, it stood provisionally at 10,540, subject to adjustment, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data processed by The Washington Post.