LOS ANGELES – An unemployed stand-up comic originally from New Jersey. A conservative actor and podcast presenter dressed in a white coat. A gadfly that ran several unsuccessful campaigns for Congress in Los Angeles. And at least some who were in Washington on the day of the Capitol rebellion.
They were among the heterogeneous group of so-called antivaxxers who recently converged on entering the mass vaccination site at Dodger Stadium to protest the distribution of a coronavirus vaccine.
The loosely formed coalition represents a new faction in the long-established anti-vaccine movement in California. And the protest was the latest sign that Californians have become the unlikely standard bearers of aggressive criticism of vaccines, even with the spread of virus cases in the state.
California, which had an average of 500 daily virus-related deaths last week, will soon become the state with the highest number of coronavirus deaths, surpassing New York.
For months, far-right activists across the country have been speaking out against masquerading rules, company blockades, curfews and local public health officials, considering the government’s response to the virus as an intrusion on individual freedoms. But as masks and roadblocks become an increasingly routine part of American life, some protesters have shifted the focus from their anger at the government to the Covid-19 vaccines.
Last week, at Dodger Stadium, the same small but vocal band of protesters who previously staged anti-mask and anti-lockdown protests in the Los Angeles area stopped a mass vaccination site that gives an average of 6,120 shots a day. About 50 protesters – some carrying signs saying “Don’t be a lab rat!” and “Covid = Scam” – marched to the entrance and caused the Los Angeles Fire Department to close the city-run site for about an hour.
The interruption illustrates the increasingly conflicting trend of some of the opponents of the state vaccine, who have long claimed that mandatory vaccine laws in schools represent an exaggeration by the government. Many were already skeptical about vaccine science, having read online misinformation websites that claimed that early childhood vaccines caused autism, a claim that has long been refuted.
In California, the anti-vaccine movement has been popular for decades among Hollywood celebrities and wealthy parents, gaining momentum as state legislators passed one of the country’s strictest mandatory vaccination laws for children in 2015. Previously, parents had chosen not to receive vaccination seeking exemptions on the grounds that vaccines conflict with their personal beliefs, but the law eliminated that option. The popularity of these exemptions has led to immunization rates that have dropped to 80% or less in public and private schools and preschools in Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and other wealthy communities in the Los Angeles area.
“Anti-vaccine attitudes are as old as vaccines themselves,” said Richard M. Carpiano, who is a professor of public policy and sociology at the University of California, Riverside, and studies the anti-vaccine movement. “Another thing that is linked to this is the well-being movement, this idea that the natural is better. There is a broader type of mistrust towards Big Pharma and health care and medical professions. There is this real market for discontent that these groups can really take advantage of. “
In the Covid-19 era in California, opponents of the vaccine found themselves increasingly in line with the pro-Trump, working-class people at times eager to adopt extreme tactics to express their beliefs.
Anti-vaccine activists in the state have sometimes been aggressive for a long time. But in the past two years, and in the months of the coronavirus pandemic, there has been an increase in confrontational and threat tactics.
They assaulted a legislator in Sacramento and threw menstrual blood at legislators in the Senate chambers at the State Capitol in 2019 and last spring helped pressure the head of health in Orange County to resign, publicly revealing the official’s home address. Last month, two weeks before the stadium’s vaccination protest, a group of women threatened lawmakers at a budget hearing on Capitol Hill, telling senators that they “were not shooting” and that “they did not buy weapons for free”.
“I think the most worrying thing is that they are increasing,” said state senator Richard Pan, a pediatrician and Democrat who drafted the vaccination legislation. Mr. Pan was hit in the back in 2019 by an anti-vaccine activist and was the likely target of the bloodshed incident in the Senate chambers that year.
“This movement not only discloses misinformation or misinformation about vaccines or lies about vaccines, which in themselves can be harmful, but it also aggressively intimidates, threatens and intimidates people who are trying to share accurate information about vaccines,” he said.
Protesters who attended and helped organize the demonstration at Dodger Stadium said they did not attempt to enter the venue and did not block the entrance. They blamed the firefighters for overreacting to his presence and closing the gates, and said their aim was to educate those waiting for vaccination, but not to stop them driving in to get the vaccines.
One of the protesters, a 48-year-old actor whose first name is Nick and who asked for his surname not to be published because of the death threats the group had received, said he did not believe that any of the protesters had previously been part of anti- vaccines established in the state. “All of this resulted from the whole Covid-19 crisis,” he said. “It all started with the use of the mask and evolved to concern about the vaccine. It is all about civil liberties. “
Lead organizer Jason Lefkowitz, 42, a comedian and bartender at a restaurant in Beverly Hills, said the catalyst for the stadium protest was the death of Hank Aaron, the baseball legend who died at age 86 on January 22. .
Aaron was vaccinated against the coronavirus in Atlanta on January 5, and anti-vaccine activists, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., took advantage of his death to establish a connection. The Fulton County coroner said there was no evidence that he had an allergic or anaphylactic reaction to the vaccine.
“I am not a violent person,” said Lefkowitz. “Nobody in my group is violent or physical or anything, but there are a lot of people who don’t want to get this vaccine or be forced into it.”
No one was arrested, but city officials, including the chief of police, were disturbed by the symbolism and global headlines – that a small group of opponents of the vaccine had temporarily closed one of the country’s largest vaccination sites and were walking and shouting without masks among older residents who wait in their cars for their vaccination appointments.
“The point of this is that it appeared that the protesters were able to symbolically interfere along that line, and I think we have a greater public responsibility to ensure that this symbolism does not repeat itself,” Chief Michel R. Moore told the Los Angeles Police Commission in virtual meeting.
Protesters planned to return to Dodger Stadium and were more encouraged by the attention than discouraged by criticism on social media. Lefkowitz said that after the fire department closed the gates, he immediately took this as a positive sign for his group.
“They are helping us indirectly, because now I say, ‘Oh, this is going to be news,'” said Lefkowitz.
The ease with which many of the protesters moved from anti-mask to anti-vaccine ideology was shown in a live stream from Facebook.
A protester on the website, Omar Navarro, a frequent Republican candidate for Congresswoman Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, told his Facebook viewers that he was “100 percent sure” that electoral fraud led to President Biden’s victory, praised the effort to recall the Democratic governor of California, Gavin Newsom, and called Democrats “the real virus”.
“They want to trick us,” said Navarro in the video. “They want to control us. They want to put that snout on our face, this mask that I don’t wear ”.
One of the most prominent anti-vaccine activists in Southern California, Leigh Dundas, a lawyer, spoke at a rally in Washington the day before the Capitol riot and posted videos on social media when she was outside the building on January 6, screaming : “It’s 1776 again!”
In May, Ms. Dundas led an effort to force the departure of the Orange County chief of health, Dr. Nichole Quick, over the request for masks, which was unpopular in the historically conservative county. Dr. Quick received death threats and security details. During a meeting of the Board of Supervisors, Ms. Dundas ridiculed Dr. Quick’s credentials, announced his home address and said that she would make people “do gymnastics with masks on their front door, and when people start to fall like flies , and they will, I will ask each rescuer within a 30 mile radius to place lights and sirens on your door. ”
Dr. Quick resigned almost two weeks later.
Kenneth Austin Bennett, the activist who attacked Pan, the state senator, has been charged with misdemeanor assault and is due to be reported again in a few weeks. Rebecca Dalelio, who was arrested after throwing blood at the Senate gallery, was charged with assaulting a public official and vandalism and has a preliminary hearing this month. A spokeswoman for state senator Toni G. Atkins, the Senate’s pro tempore president, said a report was presented to the police after women made threatening comments about firearms in January.
Dr. Pan said the lack of arrests at the Dodger Stadium protest suggests that anti-vaccine extremists would be encouraged.
“There is a history of people who are intimidating and intimidating, and there are very few consequences in doing so, so they increase, increase and increase,” he said.
Jan Hoffman contributed reports.