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Tag: republican death cult
Kelly ernby dies of covid

Anti-Vax Republican Who Campaigned Against Vaccines Dies From Covid

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

In Orange County, California south of Los Angeles, Kelly Ernby — a GOP activist known for her opposition to vaccine mandates — has died of COVID-19 at the age of 46, according to the Daily Pilot.

Ernby, who spent a decade as a deputy district attorney in Orange County, ran for a seat in the California State Assembly in 2020 and competed with Newport Beach Mayor Diane Dixon for the Republican nomination. Dixon narrowly defeated Ernby in that primary before losing to the incumbent Democrat, Cottie Petrie-Norris, in the general election.

Ernby’s opposition to vaccine mandates preceded the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2019, Ernby opposed a California law that created stricter immunization rules for schoolchildren, saying, “I don’t think that the government should be involved in mandating what vaccines people are taking. I think that’s a decision between doctors and their patients…. If the government is going to mandate vaccines, what else are they going to mandate?”


After losing in the California Assembly race in 2020, Ernby — who continued to speak out against vaccine mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic — was elected to the Orange County GOP’s central committee.

Back when California was still a red state, Orange County was known for being a hotbed of conservative Republican politics. Democrats in Los Angeles County, during the 1970s and 1980s, jokingly referred to Orange County as “behind the Orange Curtain.” But Orange County, like many other areas of California, has become increasingly Democratic in recent decades — and the last Republican candidate to carry California in a presidential election was George H.W. Bush in 1988.

Ernby reiterated her opposition to vaccine mandates during a December 4, 2021 rally outside of Irvine City Hall. According to the Daily Pilot, she planned to run for the California Assembly again.

Article reprinted with permission from Alternet

Senator Ron Johnson is anti-vaxx

Senator Johnson Still Clueless On How Vaccines Work, Gets Owned By ER Doctor

Republican Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) continues to prove he has the intellectual understanding of a weevil when it comes to the science of vaccines. There exist a great many conservative-leaning quacks that couldn't understand the science of vaccines if they asked Alexa, but Senator Johnson appears committed to publicly broadcasting his ignorance on television whenever he can.

On a recent appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight with guest host Sean Duffy, Johson called the nation's Covid response a "miserable failure" and castigated Dr. Anthony Fauci for misleading the public about masks and vaccines when, in fact, Dr. Fauci modifies his views in light of new scientific developments.

JOHNSON: Listen, we all hoped and prayed the vaccines would be 100 percent effective, 100 percent safe, but they’re not. We now know that fully vaccinated individuals can catch COVID, they can transmit COVID. So what’s the point?

For Christ's sake! Even a grade school child understands that vaccines are not fool-proof. Neither Dr. Fauci nor anyone at the CDC ever said that vaccines were 100 percent effective. Conversely, what they have said, repeatedly and accurately, is that vaccines are safer than hospitalizations or death. Johnson is either pretending to be a complete dummy and just wants to spread misinformation to make President Biden look bad, or he's really as clueless on vaccines as he is on other important matters. One thing is completely clear when it comes to the science of vaccines: If you’re fully vaccinated, COVID-19 is far less likely to send you to the hospital or cemetery.

The rate of serious or fatal illness among unvaccinated people is exponentially greater than among people who received the vaccines.


Johnson, however, appeared to up the ante on stupidity by insisting that we’re not recognizing the benefits of natural immunity or the danger from “vaccine injuries.” Indeed, a sore arm, muscle aches, and head tension are all common side effects from the vaccine. Moreover, anyone feeling those effects should be pleased to know that their immune system is strong. Serious adverse events from the Pfizer vaccine, for instance, are less than one percent. More important, studies have shown that the Omicron is so transmissible that it can ravage natural immunity. Duffy said he knows “scores of people who’ve been vaccinated and boosted and they’ve all got Omicron!” Again, failing to understand the difference in outcomes or choosing to promote misinformation to boost ratings. One NYC ER doctor, however, was not having any of it.


Don't expect Senator Johnson to grasp any of this anytime soon.

Former President Trump outside of Walter Reed Medical Center after contracting Covid-19.

How The Republican Party Became A Death Cult

The childish narcissism and prideful ignorance of the American right — as personified in its idol, former President Donald Trump — have transformed "conservatism" into a public health menace. Republicans in office and their media echoes are the principal obstacles to vaccinating enough Americans to achieve herd immunity from COVID-19, which would be awful even if their gullible audiences were the only potential victims.

But the rapid spread of the highly contagious and harmful delta variant is a warning that large pools of unvaccinated human hosts create the perfect environment for further mutations that may overcome vaccines and kill more efficiently. This means, in short, that the Republicans resisting vaccination and encouraging others to resist are a danger to all. After whining bitterly for the past year about masks and shutdowns, these same complainers may now make a safe reopening impossible.

The campaign to thwart vaccination grows more intense on the right as the Biden administration seeks desperately to prevent a viral catastrophe. It is a campaign of fear and lies, seemingly designed to ensure that the maximum number of Americans will succumb to the disease. According to the Centers for Disease Control, at least 99 percent of those Americans now dying from coronavirus infection are unvaccinated. The Republicans urging their constituents to reject the vaccine appear determined to massacre them in a terrible parody of the Darwinian theory of natural selection.

What's so strange about this strategy is that its only possible result will be to cull the gullible who make such easy marks for every "conservative" crusade, con and scam. Perhaps the point is to block President Joe Biden's vaccination campaign from ultimate success, even if such partisan recalcitrance mostly kills their own.

Equally sinister is the fact that many of the loudest voices hindering universal inoculation belong to hucksters who are already vaccinated themselves. Consider the Fox News Network, where hysterical anti-vaccine messages are broadcast every day and night, most prominently by Tucker Carlson — who refuses to disclose whether he (and his family) have been vaccinated.

Sean Hannity at first refused to say whether he got the shot, but then admitted that he had. With his usual intellectual consistency, Hannity continued to discourage vaccination anyway. Jesse Watters, Brit Hume, Harris Faulkner, the hosts of "The Five" and "Fox & Friends," and nearly every other on-air personality are all inoculated. We can be confident that the studio personnel, camera crews and all the office staff who work for the network are vaccinated too.

We know for certain, too, that Rupert Murdoch is not only vaccinated but went to London last December so he could jump the line for a jab. The marauding billionaire Fox News boss clearly knows how to keep himself safe but doesn't care if hundreds of thousands of his network's viewers are imperiled. The profits from stoking stupidity have always been irresistible to him.

Why Republicans have decided to pursue this destructive obsession to the point where it specifically threatens their voters and donors is difficult to comprehend. After all, they spent months insisting that the Trump administration deserved all the credit for the development of the COVID-19 vaccines, a gross exaggeration of a scientific process that occurred over many years and outside the framework of Operation Warp Speed. Trump got the shot and has declared vaccines to be "safe and effective" and "a miracle."

Yet almost every day, Trump's lackeys ratchet up the anti-vaccine melodrama to new and highly fictionalized extremes. Crazed members of Congress declare that the nation faces a "Marxist" conspiracy to force everyone to get a shot. Their foam-flecked rhetoric threatens the safety of health care workers who will soon be visiting households to inform the unvaccinated about the shot and where to get one. For trying to save lives, those workers will encounter scorn and perhaps violence.

The Republican loudmouths must be unaware that mandatory vaccinations have been a reality in this country for decades — and of course have saved millions of lives. Today, according to the CDC, every single state, red or blue, mandates various vaccinations for staff and students in public schools. Thousands of businesses, large and small — and probably not operated by Marxists — are requiring employee vaccination now.

Does freedom require us to allow stupid people to endanger everyone else and the future of society? Or should we be seeking to free ourselves from the ravages of a disease that has killed 600,000 of our people and millions around the world?

It isn't a hard question. Get vaccinated.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.