Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested that if vaccinators go door to door in Alabama offering the COVID-19 vaccine, Alabamians are entitled to use their “Second Amendment rights,” a reference to the constitutional provision that protects the right of citizens, as part of a “well regulated Militia,” to keep and bear arms. In making those comments, Greene appears to be misrepresenting door-knocking community members who encourage people to get the vaccine as someone standing on your steps, needle in hand, coercing vaccinations. Alabama’s hospitals are currently overrun with COVID-19 patients, partly due to the low vaccination rate in the state.
The video, which was taken surreptitiously by someone in the crowd at a private event in Alabama on July 23, was provided exclusively to “The David Pakman Show,” a nationally broadcasted progressive TV and radio talk show. In it, the representative from Georgia tells the crowd that President Joe Biden might send “one of his police state friends” to Alabamians' front door, and that Southerners love the Second Amendment rights and don’t like “strangers showing up at our front door.”
“You lucky people in Alabama might get a knock on your door because I hear Alabama might be the most unvaccinated state in the nation,” Green told the assembled crowd to cheers. “Well, Joe Biden wants to come talk to you guys. He’s going to be sending one of his police state friends to your front door, [they’re going to] knock on the door, write down your name, your address, your family members’ names, your phone numbers, your cell phone numbers, probably ask for your Social Security number, and whether you've taken the vaccine or not.”
“Yeah, well, what they don’t know is in the South we all love our Second Amendment rights. And we’re not really big on strangers showing up at our front door, are we?” Greene added. “They might not like the welcome they get.”
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Greene went on to spread a conspiracy theory that Dr. Anthony Fauci was to blame for the spread of COVID-19.
“Dr. Tony Fauci funded, with your tax dollars, he funded it in the Wuhan lab, didn’t he? He funded COVID-19, the gain of function research, that is his baby, that is his experiment, and he’s getting to watch it in the real world like a live television show where he has a front row seat, he gets to watch what happens. So this man sent your tax dollars, my tax dollars, through a third party to the Wuhan lab, where a gain of function was used to take a virus that was spread between animals and it was changed into a virus that spread between humans all over the world. And they’re dying, and they’re still dying.”
Greene’s comments about deploying one’s Second Amendment rights seem to be in reaction to comments Biden made on July 6 about getting more people vaccinated to prevent further spread of COVID-19. “Now, we need to go to community-by-community, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, and oftentimes, door-to-door—literally knocking on doors—to get help to the remaining people protected from the virus,” he said at a press conference.
After an uproar among anti-vaxxers, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki clarified that door-to-door workers would not force anyone to get vaccinated.
COVID-19, and its Delta variant, is spreading across the country, particularly among unvaccinated communities. The Associated Press reports that nearly all COVID-19 deaths are among unvaccinated people.
