Everyone is dunking on Kelly Ernby. The 46 year old deputy district attorney of Orange County, California, recently suffocated due to a widely circulating virus. Considering that more than 800,000 Americans have died this way over the past two years, Ernby’s death shouldn’t be remarkable. So, why are people laughing at her rather than showing a proper respect?
Well, it’s because she was an opponent of vaccine mandates. It’s a position she held prior to the American outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. She said as much in 2019 while campaigning for a State Assembly seat–she lost in the Republican Party primary.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Ernby took a firm stance against a new state law tightening immunization rules for California schoolchildren when appearing in an online town hall on the campaign trail in November 2019.
“I don’t think that the government should be involved in mandating what vaccines people are taking,” she said. “I think that’s a decision between doctors and their patients…. If the government is going to mandate vaccines, what else are they going to mandate?”
It’s reasonable and necessary to have political actors who challenge governmental power and reach, and this is true even if the reflex is sometimes misguided. Particularly before the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s easy to forgive someone for not having the direct experience or the imagination to understand why a viral pandemic requires a strong and coordinated public health response at the state and federal level.
The problem for Ernby is that she didn’t learn this lesson even after watching nearly a million of her compatriots die of the disease.
During the pandemic, Ernby remained an ardent and vocal opponent of COVID-19 vaccination mandates.
As recently as Dec. 4, she spoke against such mandates during a rally outside Irvine City Hall. Organized by the UC Irvine and Cal State Fullerton chapters of Turning Point USA, the rally drew dozens in attendance, according to the Daily Titan, a Fullerton student newspaper.
“There’s nothing that matters more than our freedoms right now,” Ernby said.
Despite her 2020 defeat in the Republican primary, Ernby was later elected to the Orange County GOP central committee and was planning another campaign for State Assembly.
According to [former executive director of the California Republican Party, Jon] Fleischman, Ernby was readying another state Assembly run in the newly drawn 72nd District when the two traded text messages last week. Ernby also confided that she had fallen ill with COVID-19, but Fleischman didn’t expect her to die, calling her passing “sudden,” especially as the two planned to talk this week.
“I found her to be funny and generous,” he said. “She quickly became part of the fabric of our party. We’re really going to miss her. It’s very sad.”
The assumption among many is that she was unvaccinated, but that isn’t confirmed. There are plenty of people pushing an anti-vax message who are not stupid enough to go without the protection for themselves. This isn’t technically inconsistent if the argument is that vaccination should be a personal choice rather than a governmental mandate. However, anti-vax messaging often goes further and advocates against inoculation. I haven’t seen reporting that Ernby engaged in the latter kind of rhetoric.
I don’t feel like dunking on Ernby. If it were up to me, it’d be sufficient to let her story be a warning to others. We’ve lost too much during this pandemic, and we don’t need to lose our common decency, too.
But we do need to regain our collective sanity. And that starts by understanding that Ernby’s position against strong governmental action against COVID-19 was misguided at best. She was part of a movement that creates large numbers of unnecessary deaths. It may turn out that she was a victim of her own movement, but either way she wasn’t helping.
I hope her family finds peace and that the ridicule doesn’t bring too much additional pain.
I won’t mock her. However, I’m glad she’s dead, just as I am glad serial killers like Ted Bundy and Richard Ramirez are dead. She pushed an anti-vaccine message that likely got other people killed, despite the overwhelming evidence that vaccines work. I’ll quote a recent rant from the Herman Cain Award Reddit:
That fellow speaks for me.
On a side note, my family didn’t get to see my kid for the second year in a row, his 18th birthday celebration has been postponed,and Quebec is in a total lockdown, which is taking a toll on his mental health. That is because of people like the dead lady here, who went around trying to prevent kids from being vaccinated against a deadly disease.
In my opinion, this is nothing more than Darwin at work, and good riddance to bad rubbish.
I’ll mock her. How many people did she spread the virus to through her deliberate ignorance? I’m done feeling sorry for sociopathic assholes. These people are disease carriers, and they are endangering other people just like a drunk driver.
So will I. Our pediatrician daughter, internal medicine specialist nephew (Kaiser-Permanente), his GI specialist brother and his pediatric neurologist wife are all exhausted from having to care for people that are willfully ignoring the science and pleas from every responsible official. I am glad she is dead. I will be glad when all of them are dead!
I’ll echo what others have said. Though I have no desire to “dunk” on her and I don’t even know what that means, I shed not a single tear for this dingbat who did her best to place others at risk and probably got some of them killed. She could have used her voice and her clout to persuade people to get vaccinated. If that was too heavy a lift, she could have kept her head down and her mouth shut. She was a big part of the lunacy that’s contributed to nearly a million dead. Not someone I will mourn or miss. I won’t say I’m glad she’s dead but I’m not grieving one little bit. This is, for me, simple cause and effect.
So very true. We have a few young people with young children in our family who refuse to be vaccinated and use it as a badge of honor. One of them got one shot and decided it was enough and has now come down with covd and she has two young children. Ugly shit.
In the words of an official from the last administration, “Womp Womp”.
You are a better person than me, Boo. She played a significant, if local, role in the noise machine that convinced people not to get vaccinated. Her actions played a role in the deaths of others.
She was not vaccinated.
How many people did she infect?
I won’t “dunk” on those who die. I won’t revel and mock someone unvaccinated who has died. It’s just not how I’m wired. But as someone I saw post the other day, “My test results are back, and I am negative for sympathy”. My dad, who swallowed the early right wing swill about it being a hoax, and took no precautions in the early days of the pandemic, is now a Covid long hauler who, 13 months post-covid, often still can’t walk to the mailbox and back. He’s now vaccinated, after I pre-emptively made an appointment for him last spring and brow-beat him until he went. Now I’m trying to convince him to get boosted, while I have right wing family members telling him not to get “another jab” because it’s nothing more than a government experiment that is being foisted on him, and he’s their guinea pig.
I’m sorry for those who loved her. But I can’t find it in myself to grieve for an individual who helped create the environment and spread the misinformation that helped destroy my dad’s health. I guess I will just internalize my anger toward people like her, and try in some way to channel that in whatever constructive way I can to try and minimize the unnecessary death, especially among those I love the most. That is a way in which I am completely different than people such as her.
Regarding Ernby’s vaccination status: https://www.ocregister.com/2022/01/04/husband-kelly-ernby-wasnt-vaccinated-when-she-died-of-covid-19-complications/
She led others to avoid a sensible public health measure, and used misinformation while doing so. What she did was hateful. I do not wish to mock her, but I do want us to pause to recognize the fact that she was a particularly malicious actor on this issue.
Sadly, her Herman Cain Award is richly deserved. I live in a part of the US that is just nuts about basic public safety. She was no role model to us. Neither were the vast majority of my own state legislators and activists. I lost the ability to feel even sympathy for them a long time ago. I can empathize with those who did all the right things – even if we might disagree on a lot – who caught this plague. There’s no empathy for the rest. I’m honestly fed up.
Schadenfreude can be a toxic emotion, although in certain circumstances it seems justified.
There’s a website called “sorryantivaxxer” which is “a repository of stories of anti-vaxxers who died or came close to dying of COVID.” Many of the comments left on that site are vicious and yet, the sheer number of anti-vaxxers who have succumbed to covid is striking.