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Rob Schneider was someone who did not agree with the vaccine. He influenced people online through Twitter by saying "just say no" to the shots. He also called them "experimental gene therapy". This spread a lot of misinformation, especially because there were scientific facts proving that these vaccines were not experimental gene therapy. Another key figure during the COVID-19 pandemic was Donald Trump. He spread a lot of misinformation online, including a Twitter post comparing the severity of COVID to the flu.

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https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/covid-19-mask-mandates-wisconsin-elsewhere-spark-my-body-my-ncna1235535

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/pandemic

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/05/health/young-people-covid-vaccine/index.html

https://www.thecut.com/2022/02/anti-vaxx-celebrities-are-coming-out-of-the-woodwork.html

https://simplylocalbillings.com/rob-schneider-to-bring-his-i-have-issues-tour-to-abt

https://doggett.house.gov/media/blog-post/timeline-trumps-coronavirus-responses

https://www.optilingo.com/blog/the-polyglots-paradox/part-2-the-golden-age-of-globalization/

https://www.ajmc.com/view/a-timeline-of-covid19-developments-in-2020

https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/history-disease-outbreaks-vaccine-timeline/covid-19

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/02/trump-covid-19-risks-national-security-russia-iran/

https://onebigphoto.com/abandoned-cinema-ohio/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/health/Covid-patients-mental-state.html

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It was only a matter of time before the effective pro-choice refrain "My body, my choice!" was hijacked in an attempt to reframe the language of the Great American Mask Debate.

On the surface - where this kind of political rhetoric works best - the appropriation would appear to be legitimate: The government should not tell people what to do with their bodies.

On the surface the appropriation would appear to be legitimate: The government should not tell people what to do with their bodies.

Because the messaging is simple and familiar, the appropriation has been well, viral. "Say NO to masks! My Body My Choice!" read the sign of one protester in upstate New York. "What about 'my body, my choice'?" read another in a protest at the Indiana Statehouse. "We're not anti-mask. We're not for masks. We're for choice," one protester in Wisconsin said over the weekend.

In July, approximately 100 people chanted the refrain while marching in protest of Seminole County's mask mandate in Florida - a state where the coronavirus infection rate skyrocketed by 168 percent in June and the total number of cases continued to climb throughout July.

In Pennsylvania, Republican state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe argued the government cannot "force citizens to wear face masks. Wearing a mask in this committee meeting remains the choice of the individual. Your body, your choice."

Metcalfe - who, no doubt, believes himself to be a very clever man playing a game of "Gotcha, liberals!" - prefaced this statement by asserting the hypocrisy of people who support mask mandates, because, he claimed in loaded religious speak, they are "from the 'my body, my choice' crowd, who support abortion on demand. They support terminating the lives of the unborn as a choice, even though the life they are destroying is created by God with the unique and distinct genetic body that is different from the individual choosing life or death."

But, are mask-mandate supporters the hypocrites?

The appropriation of "my body, my choice" maliciously equalizes two distinct issues, collapsing the fundamental difference between the two: The coronavirus pandemic is a public health crisis; abortion is a personal, medical issue.

To create this equation, Metcalfe uses the language of "abortion of demand" to imply that abortion spreads virally, like the coronavirus. That abortion is contagious. That everyone wants one. That women have abortion parties like people in Alabama allegedly had coronavirus parties. (The parties have since been mostly debunked.)

But, it is a fact - a real, medical fact - that a deeply considered decision to have a medical procedure is not a virus. Simply put, I cannot "catch" an abortion because a friend of mine has one. And, guess what? Neither can you.

Simply put, I cannot "catch" an abortion because a friend of mine has one. And, guess what? Neither can you.

Also a medical fact: Masks are proven to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. And new research offers hopeful data about how masks not only slow the spread, but also help protect the wearer.

Mask mandates are intended to free people from the significant risk of being exposed to the coronavirus. But this viewpoint - that masks are freeing us from exposure rather than imprisoning us - depends upon a willingness to believe the lives of other people matter, that we are not individual island nations but live in a society, in a symbiotic relationship with others, in which their health and well-being directly influence and correlate with our own.

Conservatives' appropriation of social justice messaging is a long-standing practice, as documented by NARAL President Ilyse Houge in a commentary for Rewire. Even the framing of the abortion debate - between "pro-choice" and "pro-life" - has been set in terms dictated by conservatives that egregiously erase the value of the women's lives. Because people who are pro-choice are, in fact, pro-life: "pro" the life of the living person making the choice to have an abortion.

It is, dare I say, hypocritical - or, at the very least, ironic - for anti-maskers to claim their personal freedom is jeopardized by being "forced" to wear a mask while at the same time advocating that women be forced to carry out an unwanted, and potentially life-threatening, pregnancy.

This hypocrisy rests upon a conservative logic that has weaponized "equality" to establish a false equivalency. The National Right to Life's mission statement declares such by anchoring its argument in one of the nation's foundational documents, the Declaration of Independence: "Our Founding Fathers emphasized the preeminence of the right to 'Life' by citing it first among the unalienable rights this nation was established to secure."

Through a religious mindset, all life - born, unborn, dead - is equal. The advocates of this cause smartly point to the Biblically inflected language of the declaration as proof that this state-sanctioned "unalienable right" to life extends to fetuses, using the oxymoron "unborn human beings."

However, another foundational document they so effortlessly overlook secured a separation between church and state; that the law is predicated upon constitutional rights rather than religious doctrine - and that a fetus is not a legal human being.

A simple feminist response to this would be to note how quickly conservatives espouse equality when it ensures that women are denied the right to control their bodies.

But another response would attack the logic - and fallacy - of equality head on. The reality is that all human lives are not treated equally in society or under the law - because, if they were, Black and brown and Indigenous communities would not be suffering disproportionately from the pandemic of the coronavirus or endemic police violence.

So, let us reframe the language of this debate: Being anti-mask isn't some kind of righteous clarion call to protect the individual rights of Americans. Being anti-mask, rather, represents an acceptance of social inequality. It represents a stunning indifference to the lives of other Americans and a willful ignorance about public health - that my well-being is fundamentally related to that of my neighbor. It represents the unpatriotic rejection of the government and its job to ensure the health, safety and well-being of all its citizens - shockingly, a view espoused by some of the people elected to do this very job.

What if we began with these truths?

What kind of hypocrisies would then be revealed?
Related:

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Opinion | COVID-19 mask mandates inspire a special kind of GOP hypocrisy

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It was only a matter of time before the effective pro-choice refrain "My body, my choice!" was hijacked in an attempt to reframe the language of the Great American Mask Debate. On the surface - where this kind of political rhetoric works best - the appropriation would appear to be legitimate: The government should not tell people what to do with their bodies.

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There were many controversial elements during the COVID-19 pandemic, and these still linger inside of us all today. COVID-19 turned political when Donald Trump began disregarding the pandemic as a small bump, when in fact America had the most deaths of COVID throughout the whole world. There was also the storming of the Capital in January of 2020, which created a lot of fear. The Pandemic also inspired a lot of fear, and many people lost loved ones.

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Many motions have been put into place, and the economy has gotten a lot better than it was back in 2020. Many people are now vaccinated, and life has almost gotten back to normal. However, our world was forever changed by the pandemic, and no one can go back in time.

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Some Federal laws that helped with COVID relief was the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act. These provided worker protections regarding wages, hours worked, and job-protected leave. This meant that people could know that they would not lose their job if they did not come to work because they were sick.

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One incredibly important even in the history of the COVID-19 pandemic was when Trump officially declared COVID-19 a National Emergency. This opened up the government to substantial funding to help fight the spread of the disease. Another important event that happened during the COVID-19 pandemic was when the Capital was stormed by Right-Wing Trump supporters. This spread fear throughout the nation, because it showed how divided the country had become. Many of the people that attended the Capital were mask less, and the disease spread like wildfire.

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The pandemic affected everyone in every part of the world. COVID sent a lot of activities that were normally done in person to online, and there was a large push to set everything out online. Movie theatres are diminishing, and many movies now are published right to streaming platforms. Many people, no matter what they believe, were very scared during the pandemic. This spread a lot of trauma. Loved ones, coworkers, and friends all perished during the pandemic. Many people also still live with long term health conditions caused by COVID.

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Everyone in the world was affected by COVID-19. Whether affected economically, by the loss of a loved one, or even work and shopping related, COVID affected every essence of life.

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Before 2019, since the 80s, researchers had been testing how mRNA could vaccinate people against different illnesses. In 2019, an acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 was found in China. This illness spread quickly, which followed into the pandemic that we all know today.