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WASHINGTON - Thousands of protesters from across the country - including some of the biggest names in the anti-vaccination movement - gathered Sunday for a rally against vaccine mandates in the nation’s capital.
Almost two years into a pandemic that has killed more than 860,000 Americans, the gathering on the National Mall was a jarring spectacle: A crowd of demonstrators, many unmasked, decrying vaccine mandates in the middle of a city that has adopted mask and vaccine mandates to reduce sickness and death from the surge of the virus’s omicron variant, which has battered D.C. for weeks.
Organizers estimate that 20,000 people will attend the rally, marching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, according to a permit issued by the National Park Service. D.C. police were fully activated from Friday, during the annual March for Life, through today for the anti-vaccine mandate rally, spokesman Dustin Sternbeck said.
A few thousand had arrived on the Mall late Sunday morning. Some were white-haired; others were being pushed in strollers. Most were White and many wore gear with slogans supporting former president Donald Trump. A group of men in front of a cart with a “Don’t Tread On Me” flag started a chant of “Let’s go Brandon” and “F--- Joe Biden” at around 10:30 a.m. to cheers. The few who wore masks risked the tirades of a man screaming “Take those masks off!” and “It’s all a lie!”
The marchers carried posters and flags that included false statements such as “Vaccines are mass kill bio weapons” and “Trump won.” A bus was parked beside the Washington Monument, wrapped in signs with “ARREST OR EXILE” and displaying pictures of Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates and Jacob Rothschild - the last an echo of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories involving the Rothschild family. A speaker blared Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger (What doesn’t kill you).”
Justin Perrault, 38, was demonstrating in D.C. for the first time. The 38-year-old from Fairhaven, Mass., said he had watched business to his body therapy and spiritual counseling business dry up as clients - afraid of catching the virus from an unvaccinated practitioner - stopped coming. He said he started using food stamps for the first time in his life, but was ashamed and worried what his 8- and 4-year-old children would think of him. He said he came to D.C. with his wife and her best friend not only to protest vaccination mandates, but also to take a stand against the scientific consensus that the vaccines are safe.
Jaedyn Wetzel,12, stood nearby holding a sign that read “I have natural immunity.” She said she was sickened with the coronavirus over Thanksgiving. She stood with her sister, Jessie, 14, and parents, who didn’t want to be named for fear of discrimination based on the family’s unvaccinated status. They drove to the District of Columbia for the day from Warfordsburg, Pa., for their first protest in the nation’s capital.
They said they haven’t faced covid vaccine mandates in their schools or workplaces, but wanted to protest because they are fearful mandates may be imminent. Their mother heard about the protest through Telegram channels, including one she said calls for auditing the Pennsylvania presidential election results, and doesn’t like using Facebook or Twitter because she says those companies employ “censorship.”
The march is billed as a protest of mandates, rather than the medicines themselves. But similar rhetoric - emphasizing individual autonomy rather than untenable scientific ideas - has long characterized the broader anti-vaccine movement, and the march’s speakers include movement veterans such as Robert Kennedy Jr. and Del Bigtree, founder of the anti-vaccine group Informed Consent Action Network.
Other speakers include physician Robert Malone, a prominent critic of the coronavirus mRNA vaccines, and former CBS News correspondent Lara Logan, who in a November appearance on Fox News compared White House chief medical adviser Fauci to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Public employee associations that have formed to protest their employers’ vaccine mandates, such as Feds for Medical Freedom and D.C. Firefighters Bodily Autonomy Affirmation Group, are also participating.
“The goal is to show a unified front of bringing people together - vaccinated, unvaccinated, Democrats, Republicans, all together in solidarity,” said organizer Matt Tune, an unvaccinated 48-year-old from Chicago. He said he wants the event “to help change the current narrative ... which is basically saying that we’re a bunch of weirdos and freaks who don’t care about humanity. And that’s not true at all.”
An overwhelming body of evidence demonstrates that the coronavirus vaccines are safe and effective for most who receive them. As of October, according to the most recent estimates from the CDC, those who received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines and a booster were 40 times less likely to die of the virus than the unvaccinated.
The CDC on Friday released studies showing that the vaccines continue to provide robust protection against hospitalization from the omicron variant, even if they no longer ward off infection as effectively.
Nevertheless, national surveys show about 1 in 5 U.S. adults remain unvaccinated. Among children ages 5 to 11, who became eligible for the shots in November, fewer than 20 percent are vaccinated.
The rally has benefited extensively from publicity in recent weeks on prominent social-media and podcasting platforms. Tune said the march’s website saw a “huge spike” in traffic after Malone mentioned it on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast. Malone’s appearance provoked a condemnatory letter to Spotify, which hosts the podcast, from hundreds of doctors and public health experts. Tucker Carlson also plugged the event during an interview with Malone.
More than 15,000 people have joined a Facebook group for the rally, with many saying they will stay overnight and eat in Northern Virginia to avoid the District of Columbia’s vaccine mandate. Some commenters on the group’s page have compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust and urged people not to get tested for the virus.
Aaron Simpson, a spokesman for Meta, the new corporate name for Facebook, said that because the page is ostensibly opposed to vaccine mandates rather than vaccines it does not violate the platform’s policies on covid-19 and vaccine misinformation, which prohibit “content calling to action, advocating, or promoting that others not get the COVID-19 vaccine.”
However, some individual posts and comments that contain misinformation have been removed, he said.
“Voicing opposition to government mandates is not against Meta’s policies,” Simpson said. “What we don’t allow is content that promotes harmful false claims about the vaccines themselves and we remove those posts - including in this group.”
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The Washington Post’s Justin Wm. Moyer, Katie Mettler, Lizzie Johnson and Peter Hermann also contributed to this report.
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