Several thousand people chanted “no more mandates” while marching in Washington D.C. Sunday afternoon in protest of COVID-19 vaccine mandates and vaccine passports.
The group of largely maskless protesters made their feelings about leaders perceived as enemies clear—a parked bus was covered with photos of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates with signs reading, “Arrest or Exile,” the Washington Post reports.
The Children’s Health Defense, a group sponsoring the “Defeat the Mandates” event, said they expected 20,000 people to participate in the mile-long march, however, only a few thousand people showed up, according to WTOP.
Protesters began marching at 11:30 a.m. from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. The event website encouraged those marching to stop at the war memorials on the route to “remember those who have sacrificed lives and loved ones so that America might be free.”
The organizers had said the idea was to oppose mandates, not vaccines, per the Wall Street Journal. However, not all the speakers at the event went along with this idea. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a well-known anti-vaxxer, spoke at the event.
Dr. Pierre Cory, with the COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, endorsed early treatment instead of vaccinations. “They tell us to vaccinate ourselves endlessly and boost ourselves, even though that single strategy has failed, is failing, and will continue to fail,” he told the crowd.
The protest was announced by Dr. Robert Malone on Joe Rogan’s podcast at the end of December. Recently, Malone was banned from Twitter after sharing anti-vaccine falsehoods to his hundreds of thousands of followers, according to fact-checker PolitiFact.
