As the more infectious and dangerous Delta variant of the COVID-19 virus is driving up new infections and returning some states to crisis levels of hospitalizations—with almost all of the serious illnesses and deaths taking place among unvaccinated people—Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver is waging a relentless public relations and legal campaign against the COVID-19 vaccines and against any moves by private or government employers to require employees to be vaccinated.
It is hard to keep up with Staver’s anti-vaccination activity, which Right Wing Watch has reported on numerous times before, and his recent activities continue to cause alarm.
In a July 30 blog post, Staver compared vaccine requirements with the inhumane medical experiments carried out by Nazi doctors on concentration camp prisoners. A Staver email the next day claimed, “The shots are maiming, paralyzing and killing people, but Biden continues his mad quest to inject every American.” Staver returned to the Nazi comparison a few days later in an appearance on David Brody’s “The Water Cooler” television show on the right-wing Real America’s Voice network, where he warned, “We’re repeating the dark history of Nazi Germany.”
Staver portrays the federal vaccine strategy as a conspiracy to impose tyranny. In a July 29 appearance on right-wing broadcaster Steve Deace’s radio show—promoted with the title, “What can you do to push back against Covidstan?”—Staver claimed that “they” were using the pandemic to “take our freedom away,” claiming that “they crushed information on hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin because they wanted to create this emergency to create a shot to create control by the vaccine passport.”
Staver wrote to Liberty Counsel supporters on Monday asking for money to support litigation to challenge the Biden administration’s announcement that Veterans Affairs and federal government employees would be required to get a vaccine. Claiming that his phone is ringing off the hook with “desperate pleas for help” from people whose employers or schools are requiring them to get vaccinated, Staver is asking supporters to send Liberty Counsel $75 so it can send a fax in their name to every congressional urging members of Congress to oppose “mandatory COVID injections, vaccine passports, and tracing apps.”
Staver fills his emails and media appearances with anecdotes about people he claims were seriously injured by one of the COVID-19 vaccines. Previously he claimed that the vaccines are killing more people every day than the 9/11 attacks did. On a July 28 episode of his Faith and Freedom podcast, cardiologist Peter McCullough claimed that the vaccines are causing a “staggering” number of deaths, more than the illness itself. Eager to get in on the anti-vaccine action, Staver’s colleague and co-host Holly Meade called the push to vaccinate Americans “a crime against humanity.”
That podcast was part of a six-podcast series Staver produced with McCullough, who has called the COVID-19 vaccination program “propagandized bioterrorism by injection.” McCullough’s claims about COVID-19 and vaccines have been repeatedly labeled false and misleading by medical and media fact-checkers. He is currently being sued by Baylor University’s medical center for continuing to claim an affiliation with Baylor Health after agreeing in a February separation agreement that he would not.
Viewers unfamiliar with Staver and wondering how much credence to give his commentary on COVID-19 vaccines may want to consider Staver’s wildly false claims about the Equality Act, which would protect Americans against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, but which Staver claims would force religious schools to hire pedophiles and “goat lovers.”
