Last month, UCLA's Dr. Christopher Lake, an unvaccinated anesthesiologist, spoke at an anti-vax rally, telling the Kool-Aid-drunk crowd, "They want to force a vaccination or medication or treatment into my body that I don't want. So they're telling me, 'Take the jab or we take your job.' And I'm here to say no." The anti-vaxxers ate it up, hooting with excitement. (See @andrewkimmel's tweet below.)
For dramatic effect, as an aircraft flew over the rally, he held his hand up to the sky and shouts, "Wave for freedom! FREEDOM!"
Cut to yesterday's tweet by @InMinivanHell (below) showing a deflated Dr. Lake play-acting the martyr as he is being escorted out of UCLA "for standing up for freedom." He valiantly says, "This is what happens when you stand up for freedom, when you show up to work, willing to work, despite being unvaccinated [as a doctor!] … I'm willing to lose everything."
The comic relief comes when he tries to speak to one of his masked escorts, asking for the man's title, and the escort says, "Don't come near me."
From UCLA's Daily Bruin, which doesn't mention Lake's chaperoned walk today, so I assume it was written beforehand:
A UCLA physician's anti-vaccination activities prompted criticism from some UCLA faculty and staff, who said health care workers spreading COVID-19 vaccine misinformation threaten public safety.
A social media user recorded Dr. Christopher Rake, an anesthesiologist at UCLA Health, at an anti-vaccination rally. In the video, Rake said he was opposed to mandatory vaccination in the workplace and that he founded Citizens United for Freedom – an organization against mandatory vaccines – in response to an Aug. 5 California order that all health care workers must be vaccinated against COVID-19 by Sept. 30. …
"I think it's mind boggling that a physician at a world-class institution would go to such a rally and use their name as a physician to directly contradict public health," said Dr. Anna Yap, a resident physician in emergency medicine at UCLA.
Dr. Nina Shapiro, a professor of head and neck surgery at the School of Medicine and the director of pediatric otolaryngology at Mattel Children's Hospital, said vaccine misinformation from doctors could be extremely dangerous.
"We as a health care community … were some of the earliest in the country to have access to it," Shapiro said. "To twist that into a negative – especially when you know one of the main reasons why we are in this disastrous delta (variant-driven surge) is due to slow vaccine acceptance in the community – and spewing this misinformation is frankly deadly."
