For two months now, Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne has been holding an “open air mass healing and miracle crusade” at The River church in Tampa, Florida. (Last week, we posted about how the noise was so loud, it was causing problems for people living in the community.)
Now here’s another disturbing aspect of it: Howard-Browne is still spreading conspiracy theories about the virus to an audience that’s already heard plenty of them from him since the pandemic began. His latest? A potential vaccine will kill you.
“There is nothing that is happening today that is by accident,” Howard-Browne said. “From the rioting, from the looting, from the pillaging, from stirring up a racial war to try to disband our police department so that they can bring in a United Nations police force of 500,000 people that are not loyal to the American people and they’re not loyal to the Constitution, so they can force exactly what they want to take place in America, which let me tell you will be gun confiscation, ultimately. That’s why they’re trying to push this thing with COVID-19. They’re trying to drag it out so they can put masks on every single person because that is the forced compliance that will come, and then everybody will have to get a vaccine.”
“If you go and get the vaccine, you’ll be dead within a couple of years,” he continued. “This is tyranny that has been forced upon the American people by medicine. … The last stand is the church. … Let me tell you, here is one pastor that is not gonna play dead and I’m not rolling over. I don’t care if I have to get arrested again. And I actually don’t care if I have to get killed. We will not compromise.”
Nothing like a pastor pretending to be brave by pretending to sacrifice his own life to an enemy that’s entirely fictional.
In any case, he’s lying about the vaccine. Obviously, different options are still in development and we need to know their side effects before they can be mass produced and given to people, but Howard-Browne is already promoting the kind of anti-vax lies that make the whole scientific process futile. If the people taking the biggest COVID risks are the same people refusing to get a COVID vaccine, there’s virtually no hope that this pandemic will end anytime soon.
(via Right Wing Watch)