Police Are Dying of COVID While Police Unions Fight Vaccines
Nationwide, police officers are dying of COVID contracted in the line of duty more than any other single cause, while many simultaneously resist life-saving vaccination mandates. Police unions across the country are threatening to launch legal challenges to vaccine mandates and threatening to quit over them.
A recent report from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund found that 71 officers died of “COVID-related causes” contracted while performing official duties — more than gun and traffic incidents combined — between January 1 and June 30. And since the release of that report, the number has risen: As of September 16, the death toll included 133 officers.
In 2020, COVID-19 was the highest cause of death for police officers on the job, also according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. In South Florida alone, at least five officers died of COVID over the course of one week; it's not clear if all contracted the disease in the line of duty.
The resistance to vaccine mandates is being led, in part, by organized officers and police unions. As Teen Vogue labor columnist Kim Kelly wrote in 2020, police unions historically and presently often serve as a protective shield against accountability for officers committing wrongs and violating the law; union heads, as in Chicago, have come out as “100% against” vaccine mandates, comparing them to the Holocaust.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/police-anti-vaccine-covid-deaths
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