New York Daily News

Anti-vaxxers knock down bug test site

- BY KERRY BURKE AND JOHN ANNESE

A group of anti-vaccine protesters were caught on video busting up an outdoor COVID-19 testing site as they walked through Union Square on Monday.

The protesters — marching against the city’s vaccine mandates for public school teachers along with demonstrat­ors holding a sign demanding “health freedom now” — appeared to abruptly target the testing site as they walked by.

The protesters flipped a table and knocked down a tent outside a mobile testing van on E. 14th St. and Union Square East, where Linda Lopez was testing patients.

“I first realized it when they started pounding on the side of the van,” said Lopez, who conducts tests for Infinity, a New Jersey-based lab that runs the testing site. “They just ran up and turned over our table. They also overturned our tent. They were saying everything we were doing was bulls---, that COVID was bulls--and vaccinatio­ns are bad.”

Journalist Brendan Gutenschwa­ger caught the scene on video and posted it to Twitter, showing two protesters flipping a table and chair, while a third — wearing an American-flag bandanna and backpack and apparently accompanie­d by two children — punches the side of the van. They then pull down a tent covering the site while someone repeatedly screams, “Shame on you!”

A pair of NYPD officers directs the protesters away from the tent, as two more cops join them to set it upright, but the video doesn’t show that any of the protesters were detained or arrested.

An NYPD spokesman said no arrests were made, and had no additional details on the incident.

Lopez said the testing site has been hassled before. “But this time they actually attacked us,” she said. “We were right in the middle of testing people.”

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