Typhoid Mary was a real person.
Her name was Mary Mallon, and she worked as a domestic cook for a series of wealthy NYC families just over a century ago. She was an asymptomatic carrier for typhoid fever, and as she moved from household to household she left behind a trail of sickness and death.
At one point fully one percent of typhoid deaths in New York were traced back to Typhoid Mary — with every one of these victims unsuspecting and unknowing. When she was first interviewed by an investigator looking for the source of the outbreaks in the households where she worked, she reacted very much like a modern-day Trumper:
[Investigator George] Soper first met Mallon in the kitchen of the Bowen family and accused her of spreading the disease. Though Soper himself recollected his behaviour "as diplomatic as possible", he infuriated Mallon and she threatened him with a carving fork [and] refused to give [medical] samples [for the lab],
In 2021 Tucker Carlson would have Mary on national TV as a “resistance hero,” and she’d be earning six-figure fees as a warmup speaker for lumpy pillow guy Mike Lindell and Florida retireee Donald Trump.
Today’s anti-vaxers bury themselves in the language of “freedom and liberty,” and convince many people that vaccine mandates and “anti-American”— notwithstanding that founding father Washington insisted his Revolutionary Army troops were vaccinated against smallpox, and didn’t object to government-enforced yellow fever lockdowns during his presidency).
Let’s fight their meme with our meme. Let’s use the iconography of Typhoid Mary to pull the high ground out from under anti-vaxxers waving “freedom” flags, by converting their “brand,” from freedom into freedom for Typhoid Mary.
Every time an anti-Vaxer opens their mouth we should label their nonsense as propaganda from the pro-death Typhoid Mary Liberation Movement rather than a cry for freedom.
Lets start calling them what they are — a vast movement dedicated to unleashing Typhoid Mary on unsuspecting and unknowing Americans