Star Tribune
Antivaxxers test new round of losing election slogans
Blithely confident that Minnesota voters find chaos, cruelty and misinformation appealing, the antivaxxers assembled.
“It’s not a vaccine, it’s a death shot,” newly elected state Sen. Nathan Wesenberg,R-Little Falls, said of the COVID-19 vaccine. Dozens of people gathered with him in the Capitol Rotunda for the No Forced Vaccines rally nobody asked for this week.
Thursday’s rally leaned into the off-putting crackpottery that helped GOP candidates lose every statewide office and their majority in the Minnesota Senate in the last election.
“We should maybe start sending people to jail” for trying to save lives during a global pandemic that has already killed more than a million Americans, Wesenberg added. “Maybe we should start with [Minnesota Gov.] Tim Walz.”
Organized by an anti-vaccine group that isn’t getting any free ink from me, the Jan. 5 rally featured last year’s Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Jensen, who likened vaccine refusal to cancer patients making their own end-of-life treatment decisions.
The focus of their fury was legislation floated in the state Senate last session — by the party now in the majority. The bill would have made it harder for parents to opt their children out of routine immunizations for polio, measles, whooping cough and other childhood killers based on personal beliefs.
“Unfortunately, there are those who want to make vaccines a condition of us living,” said newly elected state Sen. Eric Lucero, R-St. Michael.
It is true that still being alive is one of the major side effects of most vaccines. Just ask Gen. George Washington, who had the entire Continental Army inoculated against smallpox — saving lives like a true patriot.
Back at the rally, speakers called the pandemic the “scamdemic.” They speculated that maybe it was a vaccine, not an unlucky tackle, that stopped Damar Hamlin’s heart during that terrifying Buffalo Bills game.
The false claim that the COVID vaccine is killing athletes has circulated for years, ignoring all proof to the contrary. You may have heard that one from your angry cousin who won’t stop talking about the imaginary microchips in vaccines that he learned about on YouTube.
Nobody wanted to sit next to the bitter, conspiracy-spouting cousin at Thanksgiving dinner. Fewer and fewer Americans want to vote for the angry, conspiracy-spouting candidate on the ballot. The kind of candidates who would rather block their own party from taking control of the U.S. House of Representatives than admit that government actually has a job to do.
This year’s rally was much smaller and much less heavily armed than the hundreds who turned out for Minnesota’s Storm the Capitol rally on Jan. 6, 2020. No one was wearing Trump hats in the crowd this year.
What hasn’t changed is that lies won’t become truths if you repeat them.
“That isn’t to say we can prove anything,” Jensen, a doctor, told the crowd, immediately after suggesting that thousands of people probably dropped dead within hours of receiving a COVID shot.
New year. New hats. Same message the voters rejected the last time around.
A 65-year-old pedestrian was struck and killed by a pickup truck near Christmas Lake Friday afternoon as she was walking through a crosswalk, the Minnesota State Patrol said.
The woman was crossing Highway 7 around 1 p.m. when she was hit by a 2019 Ford F-150 turning left from Christmas Lake Road onto the highway headed east, the State Patrol said in its report. The intersection is just east of Excelsior, between Saint Albans Bay and Christmas Lake west of Minneapolis.
The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office, Minnetonka police, and other agencies responded to the fatal collision. The State Patrol has not released the identity of the pedestrian.
The driver has not been arrested. Agencies are still investigating the collision, State Patrol Lt. Michael Lee said. Alcohol was not involved in the crash, the State Patrol said.
Former trooper Shane Roper, 32, had his last day Tuesday, State Patrol Lt. Michael Lee said. Roper’s attorney did not immediately return a request for comment Friday evening.
In July, Roper was charged with criminal vehicular homicide and manslaughter. He was also charged with criminal vehicle operation related to five other people who were seriously injured in the incident.
The criminal complaint states that Roper had been pursuing someone “suspected of committing a petty traffic offense” as he exited Hwy. 52 onto 12th Street SW. As he neared the intersection with Apache Drive, he reportedly turned his lights off and continued to accelerate with a fully engaged throttle.
Roper was traveling at 83 mph with his lights and siren off as he approached the intersection, a Rochester police investigation found. The trooper’s squad car slammed into the passenger side of a car occupied by Olivia Flores, which was heading west and turning into the mall.
Flores died from the blunt force injuries. She was an Owatonna High School cheerleader and set to graduate June 7. There were two other people in the car with Flores.
Olmsted County Attorney Mark Ostrem said in a statement following the charges that Roper violated his duty in “a gross fashion.”
Roper told investigators he was not paying attention to his speed at the time of the crash, and that he believed his lights were still activated when he exited the highway.
Steven Frane Bailey, 56, of St. Louis Park was arrested in connection with the incident and charged with two counts of criminal vehicular homicide and nine counts of criminal vehicular operation. His blood alcohol content measured at 0.325% after officers administered a preliminary breath test at HCMC, according to charges filed in Hennepin County District Court.
In his first court appearance Wednesday, Bailey told a judge his use of alcohol is not a problem. He has an extensive history of drunken driving convictions, starting in 1985 in Wisconsin. Additional convictions followed in Wabasha County in 1993 and Hennepin County in 1998, according to court records. Two more convictions followed in 2014 and 2015.
A Hennepin County judge set his bail at $500,000 with several conditions, including that Bailey take a substance use disorder assessment, that he abstain from drinking alcohol, avoid Park Tavern and stay away from the victims and his family.
His next court appearance is tentatively scheduled for Oct. 1.
Staff writers Paul Walsh and Jeff Day contributed to this report.
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