Bryan to Host Forum With Aim of Boosting Confidence in Vaccines as Cases Climb to 254

  • Ernice Gilbert
  • August 01, 2021
comments
37 Comments

0 By. GETTY IMAGES

Prior to taking aim at vaccine doubters and conspiracy theorists Monday, Governor Albert Bryan said his administration would host an event aimed at instilling confidence in Virgin Islanders that the Covid-19 vaccines work and are safe. The governor spoke of the upcoming event in response to a Consortium question that led him to assail those who doubt the safety of the vaccines and spread conspiracies, among the most prevalent being that they were created for population control.

The announcement of the forum comes as new cases have grown rapidly in the past few weeks, led by the Delta variant of the virus. According to the V.I. Dept. of Health, as of Saturday there were 254 active Covid cases in the territory, 161 on St. Thomas, ninety on St. Croix, and three on St. John.

On the upcoming event, the governor stated, "So one of the things we're going to do is we're going to do an anti-vaxxer roundtable. We're going to do it on Facebook; we're hoping to get a live audience and bring people in and invite people to come online and ask questions — people who don't believe in getting the vaccines.

"We plan to have some people who've actually had Covid there to talk to people about what it is like to get Covid and their experience so we could have a forum to answer these questions in the most medical way," Mr. Bryan said.

The governor did not provide a date relative to when the event would occur.

After announcing the planned event, Mr. Bryan unloaded on anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists.

He said, "The number one killer in the Virgin Islands is hypertension, heart disease and diabetes, and people [eating] macaroni and cheese, stuffing, seasoned rice, every single day. Souse and all of these other stuff.

"They're putting on clothes washed in chemicals that will poison your body. They're spraying dyes and all kinds of things in their hair. They're going to nail shops where they're filing down and inhaling all kinds of toxins every single day, and painting themselves and their hair and their fingers with all kinds of things that contaminate your body.

"They're putting phones to their heads full of radiation and all kinds of other things that are messing with their system. And every day and night they're going to bars and places and drinking sodas and all kinds of alcohol and other kinds of toxins in their body that they never know where it come from.

"They're eating at fast food restaurants, they don't know how it's made, what it's made from, or what kinds of plastic are in it, and you're going to tell me about vaccines? Let's get real.

"If the government had wanted to poison you and kill you they could have done so a lot faster, because all they had to do is put it in an app.

"I mean all of the arguments that I've listened to, vaccines have a long history. In 2021 we don't need to be going through the Black Plague of the dark ages because people don't want to take the medicine. And so many places in the world people wish they could have this medicine in order to survive.

"Bottomline, if you get sick, you're going to be begging for the monoclonal antibodies which is the same technology that we use in the vaccine."

 

Get the latest news straight to your phone with the VI Consortium app.