The owner of a private COVID testing clinic turned right-wing provocateur Candace Owens away for spreading COVID misinformation and discouraging mask use, according to a screenshot of an email posted online by Owens.
“We cannot support anyone who has pro-actively worked to make this pandemic worse by spreading misinformation, politicizing and DISCOURAGING the wearing of masks and actively dissuading people from receiving life-saving vaccinations,” the owner wrote.
“My team and myself have worked overtime, to exhaustion, unpaid and underpaid this past year, spending our own capital to ensure that our community remains protected. It would be unfair to them and to the sacrifices we have all made this year to serve you.”
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According to previous media reports, the owner, Suzanna Lee, runs a private lab in the ski resort town of Aspen, Colorado. She directed Owens to the only other testing site in the city, but said it had inconsistent wait times for results.
Owens then posted a screenshot of the response she sent to Lee, in which she called Lee’s email “emotionally unstable and hysterical.”
“Truly, I’ve never laughed harder,” she wrote. “Nothing screams ‘this virus isn’t political’ quite like googling the names of the people who book tests with you and determining on a case by case basis whether or not you will let them comply with your community covid measures.
“Nothing screams ‘I love my community’ quite like refusing to test people who are going to a local event and wish to ensure they are negative and therefore do not spread the virus.”
Owens has been one of the loudest purveyors of COVID conspiracies during the pandemic, from calling it no worse than the flu to downplaying the effectiveness of COVID vaccines and saying COVID death tallies are “extremely inflated.” (Most studies have found that COVID death tallies are likely vastly undercounted.)
She has called COVID “the greatest political scam in the history of the world,” claiming it is being used to “crash western economies and implement communist policies,” and said vaccinating children is akin to child abuse.
An event organizer in Texas said Owens pulled out of a speaking gig last week due to a “sudden illness,” sparking rumors she’d contracted COVID. Owens called the rumors a “conspiracy theory” and, while she didn’t outright deny she had COVID, she said she was on a family trip to Aspen and was “still proudly unvaccinated and unmasked.”
