Mandatory Vaccination Debate Gets Personal at Santa Barbara County Board
Critics Liken It to Nazi Germany, Supervisor Compares Critics to Cult
It’s not every day an elected county official accuses members of the public who testified against the county’s COVID vaccination effort of behaving like members of a cult. But that’s exactly what County Supervisor Steve Lavagnino did this Tuesday morning, after listening to more than 90 minutes of public comment from 20 militant anti-vaxxers who frequently compared the county’s proposed vaccination plans to something straight out of Nazi Germany.
Lavagnino, it turns out, knows something about cults. He grew up in one, he declared from the supervisors’ dais. His parents divorced when he was a kid over religious differences; his mother moved into a religious cult in Northern Idaho, and Lavagnino went with her. The theology was all about “conspiracy, catastrophe, and persecution,” he recalled. At age 10, Lavagnino said he first encountered a barcode scanner while shopping at a supermarket. Church elders, he said, wasted no time denouncing this new technology as a “mark of the Beast.” Lavagnino said the same type of thinking was evident in the speakers at this meeting.
When one speaker described his recent time in Florida, a state with no mask or vaccine mandates, as a “breath of fresh air,” Lavagnino said that dishonored the grief experienced by families of the 43,000 people recently killed by COVID in Florida.
