The Lieutenant Governor of Hawaii watched in horror as protesters gathered outside his condo yelled at him with megaphones and threw strobe lights at the building where he lives to harass him for mandatory vaccinations.
A father in Northern California broke into his daughter’s elementary school and hit a teacher in the face over mask-wearing regulations. At a school in Texas, a parent removed a teacher’s mask during a “Meet the Teacher” event.
A Missouri hospital official confronted an Alabama man in a parking lot this week who handed him documents accusing him of “crimes against humanity,” and it was not the only direct encounter related to vaccines and masks.
Members of school boards, county commissioners, doctors and local authorities regularly face angry taunts in public meetings in which they are compared to the Taliban, Nazis, Marxists and heads of Japanese internment camps.
Across the United States, anti-vaccine and anti-mask demonstrations are taking a terrifying and violent turn, and educators, doctors and public figures are appalled at the level with which they have been vilified for speaking out.
And they are terrified at the extent to which protesters have gone to confront personalities or superiors outside their homes and workplaces.
“The fire definitely increased in intensity this week,” said Shannon Portillo, a Kansas county commissioner who was reprimanded Wednesday during a meeting where the board mandated that unvaccinated children wear face masks indoors. “I faced much more hostility than I have ever seen.”
Anger over the pandemic has coincided with an increase in cases of COVID-19 and hospitalizations, the mandatory nature of vaccines and the forced use of masks is expanded, especially in schools where already tired families expected the worst days of the pandemic would have been left behind. Now the country registers an average of almost 1,000 deaths from COVID every day.
Parental anger over face masks has been boiling in Northern California’s Amador County and peaked this month when a teacher was assaulted for the first time.
A father was enraged when he saw his daughter leave school wearing a mask but the teachers in one room did not have one.
Vaccinated staff are authorized to remove masks if no students are present, said Amador County Unified School District Superintendent Torie Gibson. This situation was explained to the father and he left, but returned later to speak with the principal.
A concerned teacher made his way to the principal’s office. There was an argument and the father hit the teacher.
The professor was treated in a hospital and reported to work the next day. However, the incident shocked faculty and the community.
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Kelleher reported from Honolulu; Tang from Phoenix and Rodriguez from San Francisco. Associated Press reporter Heather Hollingsworth in Mission, Kansas contributed to this report.
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