27 July 21
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Somewhere, her middle school history teacher weeps.
s COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths surge in the U.S., a small but growing number of Republicans have begun telling their constituents to get vaccinated. “It’s safe and effective,” Representative Steve Scalise said last week after getting his jab, noting that the available vaccines had been tested on thousands of people in clinical trials before being approved by the FDA for emergency use. “The new cases of COVID are because of unvaccinated folks,” Alabama governor Kay Ivey told a reporter on Thursday, before forcefully adding: “These folks are choosing a horrible lifestyle of self-inflicted pain. We’ve got to get folks to take the shot.” Would these pronouncements have been a lot more helpful months ago? Yes. Would it be equally nice if, for example, people like Ivey simultaneously took other measures to protect the public, like mandating masks in schools when classes resume, which she has signaled she will not do? Indeed! Still, the call for people to get inoculated as the much more contagious delta variant spreads is a good thing, which is more than one can say for the GOP holdouts who continue to suggest that encouraging people to get vaccinated is akin to human rights abuse.
Obviously one of the worst offenders in this case is resident Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene who, absent any committee assignments, has nothing better to do than lie about the virus and say the craziest things that come into her head about vaccines—which, given the other stuff rattling around in there, are extra crazy.
Fresh off of claiming that Nancy Pelosi requiring masks on the House floor is like “a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and...treated like second-class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany,” Greene has now decided that a business’s decision not to admit unvaccinated customers is equivalent to Jim Crow–era segregation laws. Per Politico:
The Republican Georgia congresswoman tweeted Sunday night a screenshot of a recent Instagram post from an Atlanta restaurant that included a door sign that reads “NO VAX NO SERVICE.” In its message, the restaurant said “[a]fter a few positive covid cases last week” it decided the rule was necessary. “This is called segregation,” Taylor Greene wrote on Twitter. “Will you be testing everyone at the door for the flu, strep throat, stomach bugs, colds, meningitis, aids, venereal diseases, Hep A, Hep C, staff [sic] infections, athletes foot, pink eye, croup, bronchitis, ringworm, scabies, or any other contagions?”
Does this U.S. congresswoman believe that “venereal diseases” are airborne? Given the evidence, we honestly have no choice but to say the odds are high that she does.
The first-term Republican has repeatedly compared vaccination requirements and mask mandates to the Holocaust and other callbacks to Nazism. In June she apologized for making such comparisons following a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., after her comments drew outrage from fellow Republicans, though she has done little to tamp down her rhetoric since then. More recently Taylor Green compared the Biden administration’s door-to-door vaccine push to the Nazi paramilitary wing Sturmabteilung, colloquially referred to as “brownshirts.”
Twitter also locked her out of her account for 12 hours earlier this month for posting messages the social media company said violated its policy against coronavirus-related misinformation. In turn, she accused Twitter of censoring her and other controversial conservatives.
Last week, Greene was in the news for claiming that an interviewer asking if she’d been vaccinated was a HIPAA violation, which may say more about the American education system than it does about her, though to be fair it says a lot about her too.
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