Vaccine protest at legislator’s town hall
Activists storm the door at meeting in San Rafael
WASHINGTON — A disruption at a town hall held by North Bay Rep. Jared Huffman is raising questions about safety and security as the country reopens after the coronavirus pandemic, especially in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
The San Rafael Democrat held the constituent event Tuesday afternoon in Marin County, one of the first inperson town halls held by a politician since COVID19 closed down much of daily life a year ago. The event was intended to be capped at 100 attendees, socially distanced in an auditorium, with masks required. It was advertised as requiring proof of vaccination, but Huffman said that admission was later based on an honor system.
Shortly after the town hall began, according to the livestreamed video of the gathering, antivaccination activists stormed the door, disrupting the event. For several minutes, Huffman pleaded with the group to respect the other attendees as the protesters displayed crude signs decrying vaccinations and public health mandates and chanted “medical freedom now.” Jeers
went back and forth between the masked, orderly crowd and the doorcrashers, including a counterchant of “go away.” At one point, a female protester attempted to pull the mask off one of the attendees. Another woman holding a sign about dead ferrets jumped onstage and sat in front of Huffman for some time.
Huffman addressed the group directly, saying he took issue with their language.
“My view is that in the middle of a deadly pandemic that has taken over about 600,000 lives that it is not unreasonable to ask people before they gather into crowds to have a vaccination or to go to school or to go to a workplace,” he said. “We have always had capacity rules for gatherings, we’ve always had commonsense limits on gatherings. And I’m sorry that some of it rubs you the wrong way, but it is not a civil right, it is not apartheid, it is not the Holocaust or any other kind of ridiculous hyperbole that you want to attach to it.”
He then carried on with the scheduled event, taking questions from the audience and speaking
for roughly an hour as the protesters lingered. He referenced a dangerous undercurrent in political rhetoric that harks back to the insurrection on Jan. 6, during which a violent, proTrump mob forced its way into the U.S. Capitol seeking to override the results of the presidential election to install Donald Trump over President Biden, who was duly elected.
“The violent vitriol that animates a lot of this that led up to Jan. 6 is still with us, you sort of feel shades of it here with us today,” Huffman told the room.
The event is not the first stunt by antivaccination demonstrators. In 2019, a woman poured apparent blood onto
California lawmakers. The Sonoma County Republican Party’s Facebook page posted a message in advance of Huffman’s event encouraging a demonstration, but advising anyone going to appear as “concerned citizens, not affiliated with any group.”
In an interview Wednesday, Huffman said he was not overly concerned for his safety, though the San Rafael Community Center told him his town halls would not be able to take place there in the future without private security. Lawmakers are seeking to pass additional money to secure the Capitol and members of Congress personally as many feel greater threats to their safety since Jan. 6.
“I don’t want my town halls and public events to turn into police state experiences,” Huffman said. “We’ll take the security precautions that we need to and we’ll do it more than we would have before yesterday, but we don’t want to alter the accessibility or the basic character of our town halls. You really lose a lot when that happens.”
Still, he said, he has heard from colleagues who are thinking about resuming their own inperson town halls, asking about what happened.
“My advice to them is, let’s get past these COVID restrictions and just make sure that town halls are attended by as many goodfaith citizens that will behave themselves as possible,” Huffman said. “I think that alone kind of takes away the opportunity for these bullies to take over an event.”