Dunbar: Alaskans will die because of Dave Bronson's policy decisions

East Anchorage Assemblymember Forrest Dunbar took to Twitter this afternoon to state plainly that "Alaskans will die that would not have died but for the policy decisions of Dave Bronson and the disinformation spread by Jamie Allard and Suzanne Downing."

Anchorage Mayor David Bronson has steadfastly refused to enact any kind of COVID-19 mitigation strategies to slow down the volume of patients streaming into Anchorage's hospitals and has twice ignored resolutions passed by the Anchorage Assembly asking the mayor to mandate that masks be worn in Municipal Buildings.

A Saturday event organized by East Anchorage Assembly Person Jamie Allard and which was attended by Mayor Bronson and members of his administration was billed as a "listening session" for healthcare workers who claim they’re being discriminated against by employers who have enacted vaccine requirements.

Legitimate healthcare workers were thin on the ground at Saturday's event, however, and the event was mostly political theater where members of the public shared COVID-19-related misinformation. Video clips of the event began trickling out on right-wing social media and one of those clips was flagged as "partly false information," by Facebook fact-checkers.

According to the warning label in the social media post, the clip posted by Must Read Alaska to its Facebook page contained partly false information related to causality in adverse events after vaccination and directs readers to this link. Must Read Alaska's post has been shared more than 1.7k times, which is perhaps a textbook example of how misinformation spreads quickly online.

In February, Must Read Alaska wrote that its YouTube channel had earned a strike for “misinformation” after it clipped out public testimony given at an Anchorage Assembly meeting that had members of the Save Anchorage group in attendance.

The East Anchorage Assembly member concluded his afternoon tweet by writing that there was money and power in the lies Mayor Bronson, Suzanne Downing, and Jamie Allard told last year about COVID-19, claiming that those lies continue to be told by them, their friends, and donors.

"For the average Alaskan," Dunbar wrote, "those lies only bring suffering and death."