BY ENRICO TRIGOSO | The Epoch Times | August 10, 2021
A crowd of New Yorkers from many different walks of life gathered in front of City Hall on Monday to protest against the vaccine pass mandate recently announced by Mayor Bill de Blasio.
The mandate is scheduled to be enforced on Sept. 13.
The Epoch Times talked to the organizers of the protest who voiced their reasons for attending.
Josephine Rose, one of the organizers of the protest, held a megaphone and led a march after the rally. She said that as a city worker, she feels that the vaccine mandate is “government overreach.”
“I was just told that by the 13th, I either get vaccinated, or I have to get weekly tested, but it is my body and my choice,” Rose told The Epoch Times. “I feel like it’s government overreach, we should all have a choice. I’m not an anti-vaxxer. But I believe in the choice of the people.”
She further voiced her concerns about the safety of the vaccine.
“I think on VAERS there have been 12,000 deaths reported,” Rose said. “I was vaccinated as a child but as an adult, I decide over my body, my parents no longer have any rights over me and it should be the same with the government.”
VAERS stands for Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, a publicly available database.
The Epoch Times wasn’t able to independently confirm the abovementioned numbers, but the National Vaccine Information Center, a non-profit dedicated to “preventing vaccine injuries and deaths through public education and advocating for informed consent protections in medical policies and public health laws,” complied a set of data from July 30 which states that so far, 12,366 cases of death following COVID-19 vaccination were reported to VAERS, as well as over 545,000 cases of adverse reactions.
However, according to a disclaimer on the VAERS website, “inclusion of events in VAERS data does not imply causality.”
Brendan Gutenschwager on Twitter: “”The Holocaust didn’t happen overnight, it happened in stages. Stages of humiliation, discrimination, demonization, and the final stage, extermination.” A Holocaust survivor speaks at today’s protest outside NYC City Hall pic.twitter.com/Gv8T4tfkwd / Twitter”
“The Holocaust didn’t happen overnight, it happened in stages. Stages of humiliation, discrimination, demonization, and the final stage, extermination.” A Holocaust survivor speaks at today’s protest outside NYC City Hall pic.twitter.com/Gv8T4tfkwd
Another one of the main organizers, Kevin, who preferred not to give his last name, told The Epoch Times that his concern with the “vaccine pass” is that the whole system has a technocratic side that would monitor the public and advance the digitalization of people’s lives.
“My concern is that the [vaccine] pass is opening the door to a completely tyrannical, new system of surveillance and control. I think more and more people are finally understanding this. This is not about so-called vaccines,” Kevin said…