Conservative radio talk show host Erick Erickson (Erick Erickson) called the anti-vaccine activist an “idiot” after one of his family members died of the COVID-19 virus.
During the broadcast on Wednesday Eric Erickson Show On WSB-AM, Eriksson said that one of his healthy, unvaccinated relatives recently died of the coronavirus. This relative does not have any comorbidities, such as obesity or old age, which increases their risk of hospitalization or death.
Erickson said his relatives’ decision not to vaccinate was influenced by anti-vaccine information. Eriksson later called “organized efforts to undermine trust in vaccines…it is a very evil thing” and “evil”.
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“Listen, you idiots,” he said, referring to those trying to undermine trust in vaccines. “But what I am very concerned about is that some of you are afraid to get [the vaccine] Because you have heard that someone is lying to you on the Internet, and you don’t know they are lying. “
“I don’t care if you don’t want a vaccine,” he continued, “but if you spread lies, misinformation and false information outside, and deliberately undermines people’s trust in vaccines, I am very concerned.”
In particular, Eriksson directed his opposition to two different types of anti-vaccination activists.First, he publicly opposed Anti-vaccination protesters closing vaccination clinics Last weekend in Georgia. The protesters harassed medical staff and people who wanted to be vaccinated.
He also opposes anti-vaccineists, who have been repeating a statistic recently shared that 60% of people hospitalized with severe COVID-19 in Israel have been fully vaccinated.
This statistic was recently highlighted in a report on August 31 Washington post Written by American mathematician Jordan Ellenberg. Anti-vaccineists point out that the statistics prove that the COVID-19 vaccine does not work. However, Ehrenberg pointed out that misleading statistics are an illustration of the so-called “Simpson Paradox.”
“Simpson’s Paradox is a warning that the entire data usually looks very different from the sum of its parts,” he wrote in his column. He explained that although 60% of hospitalized COVID-19 patients in Israel are indeed vaccinated, this high proportion is likely because 80% of the country’s eligible population are vaccinated.
“If everyone is vaccinated, then all those who are hospitalized will be vaccinated-this obviously does not mean that vaccinations are useless,” he added.
Eriksson is one of the most popular voices in conservative media. He also has a history of inflammatory remarks.
In the past, Erickson compared Linda Douglass, the head of the White House’s health care communications under the president’s leadership, to Linda Douglass Barack Obama, Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels (Joseph Goebbels). Anti-vaccination advocates also compared public health officials and COVID-19 restrictions with Nazi and anti-Semitic laws enacted during the Holocaust.
In September 2014, he said that minimum-wage workers over 30 had “failed their entire lives”. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 64 million Americans over the age of 25 work for the minimum wage.
In 2017, Erickson signed the Nashville Declaration, an anti-LGBTQ declaration declaring that homosexual and transgender identities are against God’s plan.period Donald TrumpIn the first presidential campaign, Eriksson called Trump a “racist” and “fascist” and said he would never vote for him. Erickson later supported Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.
Although Eriksson has made statements in the past, in 2015, he told Atlantic Organization He believes that the anger of conservatives has become “toxic and self-defeating.”
“Many conservatives are now liberals after 2004-hysterically angry at things they have no reason to be angry with,” he said.
Weekly newspaper Contact Erickson for comments.
