UPDATED with more details: A group of SAG-AFTRA members opposed to the film and TV industry’s vaccination mandate say they will stage a protest Thursday outside the union’s headquarters in Los Angeles. Oscar-nominated actress Sally Kirkland, a former Screen Actors Guild national board member, will be one of the speakers. As Covid restrictions are being lifted nationwide, the protesters say it’s time for Hollywood to scrap the mandate.
The film and TV industry’s Covid-19 safety protocols, which include a narrowly defined “Mandatory Vaccination” provision, are set to expire Saturday but could be extended, as they have been several times since the protocols were first issued in September 2020, enabling jobs and productions to rebound during the darkest days of the pandemic.
After vaccines became widely available, the protocols were amended last July to give producers “the option to implement mandatory vaccination policies for casts and crew in Zone A on a production-by-production basis.” Zone A, where unmasked actors work, is the most restrictive of the protocol’s safe work zones on sets.
“I don’t think they should have a mandate requiring this vaccine,” Kirkland told Deadline. “I’m against the vaccination mandate because when I took the second shot last year, I became chronically ill for seven-and-a-half months. I ended up in the hospital and thought I was dying three times.”
Such reactions are rare, however, and the Center for Disease control says that the benefits of receiving the vaccine far outweigh the risks. According to the CDC, those who receive the vaccine are much less likely to be hospitalized or to die if they contract the virus, although vaccination doesn’t prevent people from acquiring the coronavirus. To date, nearly 1 million Americans have died from Covid-19 – the vast majority of whom have been unvaccinated – while more than 6 million people have succumbed to the virus worldwide.
Kirkland, an outspoken critic of the vaccination, says she’s received emails from “hundreds of people who have been vaccine injured.” Kirkland, who has appeared in 270 films and TV shows, says she’s “still working all the time.”
Carlos Guerrero, a Miami-based actor who will be speaking at the protest, has created a series of videos in which SAG-AFTRA members say they’ve been discriminated against because they refuse to be vaccinated. Guerrero said that “Facebook, YouTube and other social media outlets have routinely shadow banned, eliminated pages, and blocked the telling videos” he has compiled.
The protest, set to begin at 11 a.m. PT, will be live-streamed by Steel Truth, a far-right website that features interviews with conservatives and conspiracy theorists like My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, former general Mike Flynn and Fox’s Jeanine Pirro.
But Guerrero insists that “there’s nothing political about” the protest. “It’s about actors and members of the film industry who are not allowed to work because they aren’t vaccinated,” he said.
Last month, Guerrero sent an email to SAG-AFTRA national executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland expressing his opposition to the vaccination mandate. “What is the purpose of continuing to keep the return-to-work agreement with the vaccine mandates when the entire world knows that the vaccines are neither protecting the vaccinated from catching or spreading the virus?” he wrote. “Why is it that you and your constituents continue to have these policies in place when the rest of the country has been lifting the mandates?”
The protocols specify that, where permitted by law, producers may implement a policy providing that those working in Zone A, as well as studio teachers, “must be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 as a condition of employment and/or prior to entering the workplace, subject to reasonable accommodations as required by law for individuals who cannot be vaccinated due to disability or a…
Read More: SAG-AFTRA Members To Rally Against Industry’s Covid-19 Vaccination Mandates – Deadline