NEW YORK CITY (LifeSiteNews) – Conservative media outlet Newsmax further intensified tensions between itself and many in its own target audience by hosting a holiday reception in New York City that complied with local COVID-19 vaccine mandates for attendance.
The Daily Beast reported that on the evening of December 8, Newsmax hosted the gathering in the Oak Room in New York City’s Plaza Hotel. According to an internal Newsmax memo, guests would “need to show a vaccination card, or photo image of one” on their phones in order to attend.
“Newsmax has had several holiday parties at different locations and the company has no requirement for vaccination to attend any of these,” the outlet confirmed in a statement. “New York City, however, mandated a vaccination card for entry to restaurants and public venues. Newsmax has no company mandate for vaccinations, though we encourage our staff to get vaccinated.”
The policy resulted in unvaccinated Newsmax anchor Grant Stinchfield being unable to attend, opting instead to film himself walking the streets of the mandate-dominated city/a>, although he latter insisted that the blame rested with Democrat Mayor Bill de Blasio, not his employers:
NYC is a total shithole. pic.twitter.com/CQDtejZuFm
— Grant Stinchfield (@stinchfield1776) December 9, 2021
This is a total Fake News headline. @RedState you need to retract. NYC and Bill Deblasio kept me out of our Party NOT @newsmax. And and I claimed 1/3rd of NYC uses fake vax cards NOT NewsMax employees. It figures NEVER TRUMP Red State would attack a PRO Trump guy like me!!! #maga https://t.co/8ADqnD0CkY
— Grant Stinchfield (@stinchfield1776) December 10, 2021
This is not the first time Newsmax’s mixed messaging on the COVID vaccines has generated headaches for the outlet. Last month, Newsmax sent its employees a memo announcing that by January 4 of next year it would “require that all vaccinated employees submit a copy of their vaccination card” in order to “ensure that we are in compliance” with President Joe Biden’s workplace COVID vaccine mandate, which is currently held up in lawsuits.
Newsmax later claimed that it “has no vaccine mandate nor do we require it for employment,” and merely “informed our staff of the upcoming federal rule” while guaranteeing “an easy opt-out for any employee who does not want to be vaccinated” by offering free weekly, on-site testing as an alternative.
Still, the company’s policies have caused tensions with some of its former personalities. Newsmax fired reporter Emerald Robinson for claiming the COVID vaccines contain “a bioluminescent marker called LUCIFERASE so that you can be tracked,” and anchor Steve Cortes recently departed, declaring he “will not comply w/ any organization’s attempt to enforce Biden’s capricious & unscientific Medical Apartheid mandate,” though Newsmax denies its vaccine policy was the reason.
Vaccine hesitancy persists thanks to unaddressed concerns about the vaccines’ safety, stemming largely from the fact that they were developed and released far faster than any previous vaccine.
Vaccine defenders note that this one-year development period was not starting from scratch, but rather relied on years of prior research into mRNA technology; and that one of the innovations of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed was conducting various aspects of the development process concurrently rather than sequentially, eliminating delays unrelated to safety. However, those factors do not fully account for the condensing of clinical trial phases — each of which can take anywhere from 1-3 years on their own — to just three months apiece.
While cases of severe harm reported to the federal Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) after taking COVID shots represent less than one percent of total doses administered in the United States, a 2010 report submitted to the US Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) warned that VAERS caught “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events.” May reporting from NBC News quotes several mainstream experts acknowledging “gaps” in federal vaccine monitoring.
More generally, data indicates that widespread dissemination of the vaccines has failed to end the COVID pandemic. The federal government considers more than 202 million Americans (almost 61% of the eligible) to be “fully vaccinated” (a moving target given the vaccines’ temporary nature), yet data from Johns Hopkins University reported in October shows that more Americans died of COVID-19 by that point in 2021 (353,000) than in all of 2020 (352,000).
LifeSiteNews has produced an extensive COVID-19 vaccines resources page. View it here.