Sixteen months into the coronavirus pandemic, it would be fair to say that Republicans and their friends in conservative media would rather Americans get COVID-19 and die than give into “science“ or Joe Biden’s liberal agenda to “have people live.” Donald Trump is out there telling his followers not to vaccinate their kids. Fox News is hosting doctors who insist it’s a “giant mistake” for anyone under 30 to get the jab. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk is calling the administration’s vaccination push an “apartheid-style, open-air hostage situation.” Tennessee Republicans got a vaccination chief fired for promoting…vaccines. And then there‘s congressional menace Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Previously best known for endorsing the QAnon conspiracy theory that Democrats belong to a satanic cult that eats children, indicating support for Nancy Pelosi to be executed, and blaming California wildfires on Jewish laser beams, Greene has of late devoted her time to spreading misinformation about the virus and making extremely historically inaccurate statements re the Holocaust. In May, she claimed that Pelosi’s decision to maintain the mask mandate on the House floor was “exactly the type of abuse” that Nazis inflicted on Jews, an analogy, she insisted, that “any rational Jewish person” would agree with. Later, she likened the White House’s campaign to encourage all Americans to get vaccinated against a highly contagious disease to “brownshirts,” i.e. the the paramilitary organization that helped Hitler rise to power. And, of course, she‘s been using her Twitter account to feed her followers lies about the virus, which has killed more than 609,000 people in the U.S. to date.
Per The Washington Post:
Greene’s suspension came days after Biden said social media companies like Facebook are “killing people” by allowing misinformation about COVID-19 and the vaccines to spread, a comment he later amended to note he meant some Facebook users are killing people. The suspension also comes as coronavirus cases surge thanks to the significantly more contagious delta variant, which has almost exclusively hospitalized and killed unvaccinated people.
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