At DC rally, anti-vaccine activists protest covid mandates - The Washington Post

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Protesters from across the country — including some of the biggest names in the anti-vaccination movement — were preparing to gather 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 Mall promised to be a jarring spectacle: A crowd of demonstrators decrying vaccine mandates in the middle of a city that recently adopted such a mandate 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 Jan. 21, during the annual March for Life, through today for the anti-vaccine mandate rally, spokesman Dustin Sternbeck said.

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 F. 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 Anthony S. 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.

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’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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At DC rally, anti-vaccine activists protest covid mandates - The Washington Post
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