Anti-’Covid tyranny’ campaigner in hospital with virus
Caleb Wallace from Texas organised rallies against “Covid-tyranny” and criticised the use of masks to stem the spread of Covid-19 but is now in hospital himself fighting to cling on to his life.
On Wednesday, Mr Wallace’s wife Jessica Wallace provided what she wrote was a “heartbreaking update” on Facebook.
“He’s not doing good. It’s not looking in our favour,” she said. “His lungs are stiff due to the fibrosis. They called and said they’ve run out of options for him and asked if I would consent to a do not resuscitate. And it would be up to us when to stop treatments.
“My heart just can’t. I can’t imagine my life without him,” she added. The 30-year-old father of three has been unconscious, on a ventilator, and sedated since 8 August in the ICU at Shannon Medical Centre in San Angelo in central Texas, according to the San Angelo Standard-Times.
On a GoFundMe page, his wife wrote on 22 August that Mr Wallace has been intubated on several occasions, was suffering from high fevers, and “bleeding into his chest and having to stop blood thinners and a feeling of gloom again”.
According to reports, Mr Wallace helped organise “The Freedom Rally” in July – an event campaigning against the “government being in control of our lives”. He founded “The San Angelo Freedom Defenders” – a group that last year hosted an event to “end COVID tyranny”.
In April, he wrote a letter to the San Angelo Independent School District, which was published by San Angelo Live, in which he demanded that the “San Angelo ISD rescind ALL COVID-related policies immediately! Nothing less would be acceptable”.
“With so few kids getting sick from this virus, and so little evidence that masks worked for anyone, why isn’t your administration taking [into] ... account the harmful effects of masking on children?” he wrote.
The claim that children wearing masks would cause a lack of oxygen “has been convincingly debunked,” Babak Javid, professor of medicine at the University of California-San Francisco, told PolitiFact.
Benjamin Neuman, a professor of biology at Texas A&M University added that a mask “will add some resistance to the breathing process, meaning it may feel like it takes a bit more work to take a breath, but it won’t materially change the makeup of air that comes through the mask”.
John Lednicky, a University of Florida virologist, told Fox 35 that masks are “not 100% protective, but they’ll do a good job of reducing the spread”.
In an update on 7 May, the CDC said: “A study of an outbreak aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an environment notable for congregate living quarters and close working environments, found that use of face coverings on-board was associated with a 70 per cent reduced risk.”
Jessica Wallace told the Standard-Times that when her husband first experienced symptoms on 26 July, he declined to get tested or see a doctor. He started to use Vitamin C, zinc, aspirin, and ivermectin – an anti-parasitic drug falsely described in some conservative media outlets as a good treatment for Covid-19.
Ms Wallace told the paper that she was “less conservative” than Caleb Wallace and that she wears a mask.
“Caleb would tell me, ‘You know masks aren’t going to save you,’ but he understood I wanted to wear them,” she said. “It gives me comfort to know that maybe, just maybe, I’m either protecting someone or avoiding it myself.”
On Wednesday, Texas’ Republican Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order banning any state or local vaccine mandates, despite the state having the most people with Covid-19 in hospitals since the start of the pandemic. He has previously banned mask mandates.
As of 26 August, 46.8 per cent of Texans had been fully vaccinated, compared to 52.5 per cent of all Americans.
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