Marvel star Evangeline Lilly attended D.C. rally against COVID vaccines and mandates
Evangeline Lilly, who portrays Hope Van Dyne and The Wasp in Marvel's "Ant Man" films, said Thursday that she attended a rally in Washington, D.C., over the weekend against COVID-19 vaccine mandates. The Defeat the Mandates rally was the same one where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. compared vaccine policies to the Holocaust.
Lilly posted photos from the rally to her Instagram on Thursday. "I was in DC this weekend to support bodily sovereignty while Canadian truckers were rallying for their cross-country, peaceful convoy in support of the same thing," Lilly wrote. "I believe nobody should ever be forced to inject their body with anything against their will...under any threat whatsoever."
"This is not the way. This is not safe. This is not healthy. This is not love," she said. "I understand the world is in fear, but I don't believe that answering fear with force will fix our problems. I was pro choice before COVID and I am still pro choice today."
She concluded the carousel of images in the post with a quote suggesting that COVID mandates are the beginning of "tyranny."
With over 211 million Americans and 4 billion people worldwide fully vaccinated, there is a vast amount of medical evidence that COVID vaccines are safe and effective at reducing the risk of severe illness and saving lives. In December, when the U.S. surpassed 800,000 confirmed deaths from COVID-19, an analysis from the Peterson Center on Healthcare and the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated 163,000 of those deaths could have been prevented by vaccines.
The most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that adults who are unvaccinated are four times more likely to test positive for COVID and 15 times more likely to die of it than those who are fully vaccinated. Compared to those who received their booster doses, the unvaccinated are 13 times more likely to test positive and 68 times more likely to die.
It's not clear if Lilly is vaccinated against COVID-19.
The rally Lilly attended on Sunday was organized by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s anti-vaccine group Children's Health Defense, as well as the controversial group Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance. During the rally, Kennedy, a longtime activist against vaccines in general, compared the nation's COVID health measures to the Holocaust, during which time millions of people were killed for their religion and identity.
"Even in Hitler's Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland," Kennedy said. "You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did."
He apologized on Tuesday for his comments, tweeting that his "intention was to use examples of past barbarism to show the perils from new technologies of control."
His comparison to the Holocaust, and Anne Frank in particular, was widely condemned — including by Kennedy's own wife, actress Cheryl Hines, who said it was "reprehensible and insensitive."
In an interview with CBS News last week, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, called out politicians and others who persist in making such comparisons.
"To compare having to show that you've been vaccinated to walk into a restaurant to the Nuremberg Laws that regarded my grandfather and millions of other European Jews as subhuman, is, you know, it's historically inaccurate and it's horribly offensive," he said.