Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate, used the same week that the US passed 800,000 Covid-19 deaths to tell a rightwing gathering she would add to that toll herself before she would agree to be given a vaccine.
“It’ll be over my dead body that I’ll have to get a shot,” Palin told a cheering crowd. “I will not do that. I won’t do it, and they better not touch my kids either.”
Palin, who tested positive for Covid in March, was speaking at AmericaFest 2021 in Phoenix, Arizona, an event hosted by the conservative student organization Turning Point USA which attracted other staunch vaccine opponents including Tucker Carlson of Fox News and extremist Republicans Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Experts say vaccinations against Covid-19 almost entirely eliminate the threat of death or serious infection. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said unvaccinated people are 14 times more likely to die than those who get the shot.
Palin also falsely claimed that those who would refuse a vaccine outnumbered those taking them.
“I think if enough of us rise up and say, ‘No, enough is enough,’ there are more of us than there are of them,” Palin said in response to a question about vaccine mandates, Mediate reported. “There is an empowerment in a group like this where we can kind of feed off each other and really be strong.”
According to the CDC, 72.9% of the eligible US population has taken at least one shot and 61.5% are considered “fully vaccinated” with two. One in three of those has also taken a booster shot – including former president Donald Trump, who was booed at a rally in Dallas when he revealed he had done so.
Writing for the Washington Post, the columnist Dana Milbank said: “Palin’s talk of dead bodies is on point. By discouraging vaccination, she and Tucker Carlson and the rest of the anti-science right are quite literally getting people killed.”
He also pointed to studies that have shown a widening Covid death toll between counties that voted for or against Trump.
Other analysts have likened a Republican party dedicated to an anti-vaccine and anti-mask stance to a “death cult”.
“Though free Covid vaccines are readily available to every American, untold numbers of people have needlessly died in 2021, heavily clustered in Republican-dominated states, often because they refused the vaccine,” Sidney Blumenthal, a former Clinton adviser and now a biographer and Guardian contributor, wrote in Prospect magazine.
Republican governors, Blumenthal said, had “wantonly” undermined public health measures by banning mask and vaccine mandates.
“Never before has a US political party sought to gain partisan advantage through tactics that would result in the widespread deaths of its followers,” he wrote.