Gara Calls on Dunleavy to Apologize Over Concerning Vaccination Comparison

It's a new low for Trump sycophant Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy, who bristled over a line of questioning put to him by a reporter yesterday about why he wasn't more assertive in encouraging Alaskans to get the COVID-19 vaccine. Dunleavy argued in his COVID-19 press briefing that he was not doing so because the United States wasn't “someplace in Europe in 1939.”

Interesting to note is Dunleavy's assertion that people weren't "stupid" and able to make informed decisions about whether they should receive the COVID-19 vaccine, even as reports circulate that Alaskans are gobbling up livestock dewormer at alarming rates.

Related: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously y’all. Stop it.”

Dunleavy's comments, which appear to have compared encouraging and incentivizing vaccinations to medical experiments conducted by German doctors during World War II, are eerily reminiscent of social media posts made by Alaska Representative Ron Gillham this year, who shared on social media a post that likened members of the media and medical professionals who provide information about COVID-19 vaccines to Nazis who were executed for war crimes.

The Auschwitz Memorial has been publicly calling out these incredibly 'bad takes,' recently writing on Twitter that "exploiting the tragedy of people who became victims of criminal pseudo-medical experiments in Auschwitz in a debate about vaccines that save human lives is disrespectful to victims & a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline."

When reached for comment about the statements made by the governor at yesterday's COVID-19 press briefing, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Les Gara responded by email:

"As a husband of a health care worker who has treated patients suffering from COVID, I want him to apologize to her peers for talking about the non-existent prospect that they'd ever "force a needle” into people’s arms. Hospital workers are being put into the middle of this debate when patients get riled up by rhetoric like this.  

I’d ask him to apologize for saying anything this nation has ever done on COVID or would do, is the equivalent of a brutal dictatorship or bloody war and horrific genocide that killed tens of millions of people. Leaders should stop trying to get votes out of the pandemic. Instead, we should act as a team to battle a virus that harms people, jobs, and the economy.”

Democratic candidate for Governor Les Gara

Dunleavy has come under increasing pressure in recent weeks to do more to curtail the spread of the highly contagious COVID-19 Delta variant. But, thus far, Dunleavy has only encouraged others to get a vaccine "if they want to" — verbiage healthcare professionals and some Alaskans feel is evasive and a code phrase for "personal choice."

Dunleavy exercised his personal choice last year when he chastised Alaskans in a press briefing over mask-wearing and was caught the very same day maskless at an Anchorage fundraising event.

Jared Kosin, CEO of the Alaska State Hospital and Nursing Homes Association, has said that the vast majority of COVID patients in Alaska hospitals are unvaccinated and that the situation was "completely avoidable," saying that the way Alaska keeps its healthcare system intact is by getting vaccinated.

Today, Alaska DHSS announced a new 536 total cases of COVID-19. The number of those hospitalized with COVID increased to 142 patients today, up from yesterday's reported total of 127 according to data taken from the Alaska COVID-19 Data Dashboard.

Video: Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy, "This isn't someplace in Europe in 1939."