Arizona has removed a COVID-19 vaccine freeway message that a legislator compared with one that might be seen in communist China, but state officials say it wasn’t because of any specific complaint and that they’ll keep encouraging vaccinations.
“Our overarching point with these messages is clear and unchanged: Arizonans should get the COVID-19 vaccine,” CJ Karamargin, a spokesman for Gov. Doug Ducey, wrote in an email Tuesday.
Messages on the digital billboards routinely rotate, he said.
Sen. Kelly Townsend, a Republican from Mesa, on Thursday posted a photo of the message in question.
“Want to return to normal? Get vaccinated,” says the message the Arizona Department of Transportation’s digital billboard she photographed.
Accompanying the photo, Townsend added a caption: “Seen in Communist China today. Oops, I mean Arizona.”
On Tuesday morning, she tweeted that state’s message had been removed from the digital billboard after a complaint from “one senator” whom she did not identify.
Townsend, who did not immediately return a call from The Arizona Republic on Tuesday, suggested some people didn’t understand her original message about communism.
“For those who didn’t understand, this was posted after being contacted by many Arizonans who felt it was a veiled threat as in ‘If you want us to let you live normally, get vaccinated.’ One Senator contacted ADOT telling them to take it down b/c it was inappropriate, & they did,” Townsend wrote.
The reaction to her second tweet on the issue was mixed.
“Thank you! That sign wasn’t appropriate & not relevant to freeway traffic,” tweeted one user with the handle @CrunchyDoughnu1.
“Appropriate on a freeway to reassure tourists that the state is trying to make their visit safe. Of course, if you are OK with their dying as long as they spend some money, you don’t need signs like this,” tweeted another user named @curmudgeon_girl.
The digital message in the photo was one of several ADOT has on rotation, Karamargin said, and it was taken out of rotation on Thursday afternoon — the same day as Townsend’s tweet — but not in response to any “specific” complaint, he said.
Three messages encouraging Arizonans to get the COVID-19 vaccine are still in circulation on the digital billboards, Karamargin said. They are:
- “Join 3 million Arizonans Get Vaccinated”
- “5.3 Million Doses And Counting Get Vaccinated”
- “It’s Your Shot to End COVID-19 Get Vaccinated”
“Messages are constantly re-evaluated to make sure they convey the point we want … No one specific complaint was part of this process,” Karamargin wrote.
“We have seconds to connect with a motorist and doing so effectively is part art, part science. For this reason, the “Return to Normal” message was removed from the rotation.”
Townsend is one of at least two elected Arizona officials who recently have counteracted efforts to get more people immunized with the COVID-19 vaccine.
Another elected official, Republican Arizona Corporation Commissioner Jim O’Connor, has been sharing discredited conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 vaccine with leaders of power and utility companies.
Townsend has a history of drawing parallels between vaccine policy and communism. In 2019 she took to Facebook to decry mandatory vaccines as a “communist idea” amid nationwide worry about measles outbreaks and declining vaccination rates in school children.
About a month later, she went on Facebook and compared mandatory vaccines to government-imposed tattoos. Although Townsend denied it, some critics concluded she was talking about the Holocaust.
State and county public health departments, as well as non-government grassroots groups, have been encouraging people to get the COVID-19 vaccine because scientific evidence shows all three vaccines in use in the U.S. are effective at preventing COVID-19 infection, hospitalization and death.
To date, there have been 17,428 known deaths because of COVID-19 in Arizona.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the systems in place to monitor the safety of the vaccines have found two serious types of health problems after vaccination, both of which are rare.
Those health problems are anaphylaxis after vaccination, and thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome after vaccination with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 Vaccine.
“Millions of people in the United States have received COVID-19 vaccines, since they were authorized for emergency use by FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration),” the CDC website says.
“These vaccines have undergone and will continue to undergo the most intensive safety monitoring in U.S. history. This monitoring includes using both established and new safety monitoring systems to make sure that COVID-19 vaccines are safe.”
Reach the reporter at Stephanie.Innes@gannett.com or at 602-444-8369. Follow her on Twitter @stephanieinnes
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