SAN JUAN (LifeSiteNews) – Facebook and the media are teaming up to silence growing resistance among Puerto Ricans to some of the most radical COVID-19 vaccine rules introduced so far in the United States.
Last Friday, hundreds marched at the Puerto Rico Capitol building and the governor’s mansion in San Juan to protest a series of vaccine mandates recently imposed on the island.
The Puerto Rico Department of Health last month ordered schools to require students, teachers, and staff members to provide proof of vaccination for all in-person classes for next semester. A subsequent order by left-wing Gov. Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia demanded that most government employees get vaccinated and empowered private businesses and other institutions to follow suit.
The island’s top trauma hospital did just that earlier this week, with a new rule declaring that all outpatients and visitors will need vaccination cards or negative test results for entry.
Puerto Ricans protesting the extreme dictates Friday chanted “we are not lab rats” and “the vaccine is not a vaccine,” while some carried signs reading “I will not vaccinate myself” and “I am not an experiment.” Coalición Pro Consentimiento Informado y Salud (Coalition for Informed Consent and Health) organized another protest for Tuesday, and further events are planned for this weekend.
The rising demonstrations in Puerto Rico come amid a wave of global protests that have drawn millions of people into streets across the world in recent weeks in opposition to vaccine mandates and coronavirus restrictions. As is standard for such events, mainstream news outlets downplayed the Friday protest, and Big Tech suppressed information about it.
“The mainstream media completely ignored this event,” Fieles a la Verdad, a top pro-life, pro-family Catholic organization in Puerto Rico said in a press release Tuesday. The group also reported that Facebook arbitrarily deleted a video of the event, citing alleged risk of “physical harm.”
“We don’t allow false information that could cause physical harm,” a message Facebook sent to Fieles a la Verdad warned, claiming that the group’s post violated “community standards on misinformation.” Facebook told Fieles a la Verdad to find “reliable information about COVID from the World Health Organization,” which notably helped China to cover up the threat posed by the virus and which has repeatedly backtracked on COVID-19 recommendations.
“In demagogic fashion, Facebook has taken upon itself the role of deciding who belongs to the ‘community,’ what the ‘community’ standards are, and what the ‘community’ is allowed to see,” said Fieles a la Verdad.
“On the basis of politicized ‘fact-checkers’, they abrogate medical information and censor voices that deviate from the official narrative. They prefer, instead, to refer people to the World Health Organization, whose director, a member of the (Maoist) Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, is not a medical doctor and is infamous for initially downplaying the virus and halting research into alternative drug treatments.”
The day before the protest on Friday in San Juan, 340 Puerto Ricans launched a legal challenge against vaccine mandate orders by the Department of Health and Gov. Pierluisi Urrutia, Noticel reported. The lawsuit, led by Coalición Pro Consentimiento Informado y Salud, seeks to invalidate the orders as unconstitutional, and includes dozens of minors and Willy Rodríguez, singer of Grammy award-winning reggae band Cultura Profética, as plaintiffs.
“We demand that we continue to enjoy our rights as citizens, to freely participate in the services and spaces intrinsically related to our civil life, especially our jobs and the schools of our children, taking the least possible onerous health measures, without being coerced by the State, without option or consent, forcing us to inject a vaccine that is currently in an experimental state (E.U.A.), and that is evidently yielding many adverse and fatal results,” the lawsuit stated in part.
“Puerto Rico has been left in a perennial state of emergency, depriving the Legislative Branch and its citizens of being able to democratically attend to the matters they affect, and leaving everything in the hands of an agency official, not elected by the citizenship,” it continued.
The lawsuit slammed the “abusive, repressive” vaccine mandates, which are “inconsiderate toward the remaining non-vaccinated population, many of them disabled [and] unfit to assume the severe adverse risks of vaccines.”
Puerto Ricans “are being forced to consent to being vaccinated when the three coronavirus vaccines are being administered under emergency authorizations from the federal government that, by definition, cannot be made mandatory because they are not medicines with final approval,” it added, arguing that all coronavirus-related executive orders that have been issued in Puerto Rico are “an illegal use of power by the Chief Executive.”
The plaintiffs are seeking $70,000 each in damages, citing civil rights violations. Superior Court Judge Alfonso S. Martínez Piovanetti held a hearing for the case on Tuesday, and a ruling is expected as early as today.
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