Rep. Taylor Greene calls exclusion of unvaccinated people 'segregation'

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said a private business’s decision to not admit unvaccinated patrons was tantamount to “segregation,” her latest use of inflammatory language while spreading anti-vaccine messages.

The Republican Georgia congresswoman tweeted Sunday night a screenshot of a recent Instagram post from an Atlanta restaurant that included a door sign that reads “NO VAX NO SERVICE.” In its message, the restaurant said “[a]fter a few positive covid cases last week” it decided the rule was necessary.

“This is called segregation,” Taylor Greene wrote on Twitter. “Will you be testing everyone at the door for the flu, strep throat, stomach bugs, colds, meningitis, aids, venereal diseases, Hep A, Hep C, staff [sic] infections, athletes foot, pink eye, croup, bronchitis, ringworm, scabies, or any other contagions?”

Businesses have wide latitude to refuse service to particular individuals, though there are a variety of characteristics such as age or race that cannot be grounds for discrimination.

The first-term Republican has repeatedly compared vaccination requirements and mask mandates to the Holocaust and other callbacks to Nazism. In June she apologized for making such comparisons following a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., after her comments drew outrage from fellow Republicans, though she has done little to tamp down her rhetoric since then.

More recently Taylor Green compared the Biden administrations door-to-door vaccine push to the Nazi paramilitary wing Sturmabteilung, colloquially referred to as “brownshirts.”

“People have a choice, they don’t need your medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations," Greene wrote in early July. “You can’t force people to be part of the human experiment."

Twitter also locked her out of her account for 12 hours earlier this month for posting messages the social media company said violated its policy against coronavirus-related misinformation. In turn, she accused Twitter of censoring her and other controversial conservatives.

The issue of vaccinations and how much to promote them has become a major fissure within the GOP, as many fret the danger posed by the insurgent Delta variant while people like Taylor Green have sowed distrust and fear around immunizations.

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, on Sunday blamed “false information” and “myths” for entrenching anti-vaccine sentiment in parts of his state and elsewhere and for making it harder to convince those on the fence of the benefits of getting vaccinated.

“What's holding us back is a low vaccination rate. We're doing all that we can," Hutchinson said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”