GOP Candidate for Governor Rails Against Vaccine Mandates While Hospitalized for COVID

From the beginning of the pandemic that's killed more than 700 thousand Americans, Republican officials at the state and federal levels have worked to undermine basic safety guidelines and peddle deadly disinformation regarding its spread.

This continues today, and especially targets lifesaving vaccinations, which have been proven safe and effective at containing the spread of the virus..

The Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, issued an executive order on Tuesday banning all vaccine mandates in the Lone Star State.

Right-wing media and elected officials have repeatedly spread conspiracy theories designed to sow distrust in vaccines, all the while comparing vaccine mandates or any federal effort to encourage vaccinations as a federal overstep amounting to the atrocities of Nazi Germany.

Even officials who are hospitalized with the virus can't disavow the vaccine hysteria within the GOP, if comments from far-right Texas gubernatorial candidate Allen West are any indication.

In a Twitter thread, the unvaccinated West notified his followers that he and his wife were receiving monoclonal antibody infusion therapy and that his oxygen levels were low.

But he only doubled down on his opposition to vaccine mandates.

West went on to call the shot "dangerous" and boasted that he now has natural immunity. Absurdly, he claimed that we should fight the virus with monoclonal antibody infusion therapy instead of "enriching the pockets of Big Pharma".

There's just one problem.

West's comments received an onslaught of backlash.

Yikes.