Antivaxxers invoke segregation and Jim Crow to attack COVID-19 vaccination requirements

Whenever I come back from vacation, particularly when it’s been more than a week, I always wonder how to get my blogging juices flowing again and what to write about. Often I’ll choose a relatively simple topic, just to get things moving again. So when I sat down to write this post I was a bit conflicted. Perusing antivax social media while on vacation, I had noticed a theme bubbling up more and more. As usual, the most overblown, ridiculously off-base version of this theme came from Mike Adams who likened vaccine requirements for jobs, school, and various public events in which lots of people are present to segregation and Jim Crow in a post he entitled YOUR KIND aren’t welcome here: Unvaccinated people now treated worse than Blacks in the Jim Crow era as vaccine pushers turn to bigotry and segregation.

I’ve pointed out a number of times before how antivaxxers love to falsely cloak themselves in the mantle of being some sort of “oppressed” minority. Years ago, they liked to compare themselves to Jews under Hitler, as if vaccine mandates were the equivalent of the Holocaust, or a “slippery slope” that will lead to a Holocaust of the unvaccinated in which they are sent off to camps and gas chambers, or…something. Indeed, as I recently wrote, I’ve been intermittently seeing this particular antivaccine trope comparing vaccine mandates to the Holocaust going back almost as long as I’ve been blogging, although never as frequently as I’ve seen it in the last year and a half.

Then, of course, another favorite antivaccine trope has been to compare vaccine mandates to “slavery,” never mind the tone deafness of privileged, mostly affluent white parents comparing themselves to what Black people forcibly kidnapped and sold into slavery endured for hundreds of years of our history. Although I’ve seen such rhetoric going back years, including a particularly vile form in which antivaxxers liken vaccine mandates to human trafficking and sex slavery, it’s become especially prevalent since the COVID-19 pandemic, with celebrities such as Eric Clapton and Van Morrison invoking the image of “slavery” with respect to “lockdowns” and vaccine mandates and Naomi Wolf explicitly co-opting Juneteenth, the holiday commemorating the end of chattel slavery in the US, for antivaccine, anti-“lockdown,” and antimask posturing. In any event, white antivaxxers have long been targeting Black and other minority populations with their conspiracy theories and misinformation, in effect trying to weaponize the understandable distrust that Blacks have of the medical profession given its history and abuses such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, in which Blacks with syphilis were left intentionally untreated in order to study the natural history of the disease, and convert that distrust into antivaccine beliefs.

One of the most risible examples of antivaxxers claiming to be “oppressed” occurred around six months before the first lockdowns were ordered in the US, in the wake of. the passage of SB 276 in California, a law designed to tighten up school vaccine mandates by closing off one method by which antivaxxers had been getting their children excused from being vaccinated, namely fake medical exemptions. At the time, antivaxxers started declaring themselves the “new civil rights movement,” which they most assuredly are not. So as a combination of vaccine hesitancy in many parts of the country preventing the achievement of anything close to herd immunity and the much more highly transmissible delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, have upended what appeared to be the easy reopening of the US for business as usual, now antivaxxers are taking aim at vaccine requirements for employment and entry into various businesses. and so-called “vaccine passports.” To do that, they’re likening such requirements to segregation and Jim Crow.

Which brings me to Mike Adams. Yes, Mike Adams is an easy target, but, on the other hand, he says the quiet part that antivaxxers don’t want you to hear so out loud that you need earplugs to muffle it:

It is morally wrong to dehumanize and disrespect people because of the color of their skin, or for being gay, or for being physically disabled, and so on. In America, we build access ramps so that people in wheelchairs can have access to restaurants and public buildings. But now, thanks to the bigoted, racist, anti-freedom vaccine zealots, Black people who refuse to take part in the government’s vaccine medical experiment will be told, “You people aren’t welcome here.”

The appropriate question is: What do you mean, YOU PEOPLE?

I’ll take False Analogies for $1000, Alex. (Oh, wait. Alex Trebek is still dead, and Jeopardy! is on the verge of replacing him with a bland and misogynistic producer. But I digress.) It is, of course, wrong to disrespect, dehumanize, and discriminate against people based on their race, but guess what? Refusing to be vaccinated is a choice, unlike one’s race. Of course, Adams probably realizes that his analogy is a false one, hence his appeal to the “experimental vaccine” (it’s not, not anymore) and his not-so-subtle invocation of the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment.

Adams is not one for even “sort-of” subtlety for long. In particular, he aims his ire at Bill de Blasio, the Mayor of New York:

In New York City, Mayor de Blasio has just announced that restaurants, gymnasiums and soon grocery stores and public buildings will discriminate against the unvaccinated like a scene ripped right out of the Jim Crow era of racism and bigotry. The pharma-funded media is openly calling for unvaccinated people to be “shamed” and “shunned,” actually encouraging vaccinated people to dehumanize others who refuse to take the deadly jabs that are now linked to at least 20,595 deaths and 1.9 million injuries across the USA and the EU.

Um, no. The vaccine has not been shown to have caused anywhere that many deaths, if any, Adams’ implication otherwise notwithstanding. I’ve discussed this many times before, most recently here. Still, Adams is on a roll and decides to quote de Blasio, only changing the word “vaccinated” to “White” and the word “unvaccinated” to “Black,” resulting in:

Bill de Blasio: If you’re White, you’ll have the key, you can open the door. But if you’re Black, unfortunately, you won’t be able to participate in most things. That’s the point we’re trying to get across, it’s time people see Whiteness as literally necessary to living a good, and full, and healthy life. It will require Whiteness for workers and customers in indoor dining, in indoor fitness facilities, and indoor entertainment facilities. The ONLY way to patronize these establishments indoors will be if they’re White. The same in terms of work.

Again, how false can your false analogy be? But let’s see where Adams goes with this. It’s pretty much where you would expect:

Can you imagine the outcry if de Blasio declared that Blacks could not have jobs, or visit restaurants, or go to the gym because of who they were? It would be immediately decried as a policy rooted in hate and racism, and those attempting to carry out such policies would be criminally investigated by the DOJ.

But announce the same discrimination against unvaccinated people, and suddenly all the hate and bigotry is celebrated by the media, the government and Big Tech. Because hatred is endorsed by all those groups when it helps compel people to take Big Pharma’s depopulation shots. Never make the mistake of believing that this vaccine push is rooted in love or even a desire for public health. It’s all rooted in hatred, racism and raw bigotry.

Notice how Adams conflates allowing different privileges based on one’s COVID-19 vaccination status to segregation, discrimination, bigotry, and hate. Then he pivots to saying that the “war on the unvaccinated” is actually a “war on Blacks” because, well, I’ll let him explain it in his usual unhinged fashion:

In a nation where it would be abhorrent to deny someone access to a restaurant because they’re gay, trans, Black, female or physically disabled, we now see mayors literally encouraging discrimination based on vaccine status. This makes those government leaders bigots and racist, since Black Americans have the least percentage of vaccinated people (about 26%) versus other races. So the war against the unvaccinated is, not surprisingly, actually a war on Blacks, now being waged by the very same lunatics (like Dr. Leana Wen) who have been running the Planned Parenthood genocidal attack on Black babies for generations.

Unsurprisingly, it never occurs to Adams to ask why it might be that Blacks have the lowest vaccination rate. I also note that he doesn’t link to his source. According to KFF, for instance, it is true that less than 50% of Blacks and Hispanics have received a dose of COVID-19 vaccine:

The vaccination rate for Black people is less than 50% in 38 of 42 reporting states, including 7 states where less than a third of Black people have received one or more doses. Similarly, less than half of Hispanic people have received a COVID-19 vaccine dose in 32 of 40 reporting states, including 9 states where less than a third have received at least one dose. At least half of White people have received a COVID-19 vaccine dose in 17 of 42 states. The rate remains below 50% in the remaining 25 states but falls below a third in only one state, Idaho. At least half of Asian people have received one or more doses in most reporting states (33 of 39).

My guess is that Adams picked a figure of fully vaccinated people (both doses) in order to make it as low as possible. In any event, it is true that there is a vaccination gap between Whites and Blacks (and Hispanics), and that’s why states are working to reach the unvaccinated and close that gap. The answer to lagging vaccination rates among Blacks and Hispanics is not to paint efforts to protect people with vaccination requirements as somehow a racist war against them, but rather to work harder to get their vaccination rates up to that of Whites.

Of course, appeals to segregation and Jim Crow aren’t enough to Adams, which is why he quickly pivots to trying to portray the unvaccinated as having a “medical disability,” thus making “discrimination” against them the equivalent to discriminating against someone with a medical disability:

What’s even more disturbing in all this is the fact that many people have made a conscious choice to avoid vaccines because of previous vaccine injuries or allergic reactions. This means they have a medical disability that prohibits them from taking additional vaccines without risking serious adverse reactions or death. Yet in a society where it’s illegal to discriminate against people with physical disabilities, it’s now being openly encouraged to discriminate against those with medical disabilities.

It’s the equivalent of a restaurant owner in New York City tearing down the wheelchair ramps and posting a sign, “Handicapped not welcome here” … which would be abhorrent (and illegal).

Or imagine if a fitness gym set up shop in New York City and posted a sign, “No lesbians allowed.” They would be burned down by angry lesbians wielding Molotov cocktails, pitchforks and torches.

Notice the conflation of something that is a choice (not to be vaccinated) with personal characteristics that are not choices (to have a medical disability or to be gay—and, previously, to be Black). Then, of course, Adams is playing a very old antivaccine game, namely claiming that people who refuse vaccination because of dubious “medical reasons” that are not really science-based medical contraindications to being vaccinated are being “discriminated” against for a “medical condition.” (As an aside, I can’t help but note one condition that Adams conspicuously did not mention as an abhorrent reason to discriminate, being transgender. Perhaps it’s because he’s a raging transphobe.)

This trope goes way back, but most recently was a prominent feature of the antivax propaganda campaign against the aforementioned SB 276. The reason that SB 276 was even passed was because of a cottage industry that had developed in California in which quacks and antivax doctors (but I repeat myself) were selling letters claiming bogus “medical” exemptions to school vaccine mandates based on medical issues that are not science-based contraindications to vaccination. Indeed, five doctors wrote one third of the medical exemption letters in eight Bay Area school districts before the passage of SB 276.

Finally, to Adams, it’s all about the usual conspiracy theory of “control”:

Vaccine passports used in New York assign expiration dates to vaccine injections. Your “freedom” expires in one year, based on current vaccines, and with Moderna and Pfizer now pushing “booster” shots, those will likely expire in just a few months. Big Pharma is pushing for monthly spike protein injections, which means vaccine passport apps will have people on a short leash: Keep complying with the monthly bioweapons injections, or you’ll lose your freedom and plunge into the “unvaccinated” status, even if you’ve taken all the vaccines so far.

This means, incredibly, that even those who have taken all the hyped vaccines can very quickly find themselves categorized as “unvaccinated” and watch their “key to the city” privileges vanish.

The lesson in all this? Complying with medical tyranny will never bring you freedom. The only freedom comes from saying NO to the tyranny in the first place.

Yes, because keeping people protected from a deadly disease is exactly the same as tyranny. Adams schtick reminds me of this meme from a few years ago:

Again, I realize that Mike Adams and his likening vaccine requirements to “segregation” or “Jim Crow” are easy targets. However, remember this. There are a lot of antivaxxers out there who aren’t as—shall we say?—over-the-top with their analogies and invoke the very same sorts of appeals to vaccine requirements as “discrimination” or “segregation.” Whenever you see them, I think it’s helpful to see what Adams says, because all such antivaxxers are doing is taking Adams’ rhetoric and dialing it down to the point where it seems reasonable, at least superficially. However, when you strip away the camouflage, Mike Adams is what you’re left with.