We know it’s cold in Alaska, but has it frozen the brain of Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson? It must be mighty embarrassing and extremely sad to hold the mantle of being the state with the highest COVID-19 cases in the country. But you’ve got to be an utter moron to place the blame on vaccine mandates as the culprit when they haven’t gone into effect yet. 

On Sunday, Bronson took to Facebook to discuss his burgeoning coronavirus numbers, quadruple the national average. Still, instead of talking about masking up and getting the vaccine, he chose to indict “some employers forcing employees who chose not to be vaccinated to lose their jobs” as the reason behind hospital “staffing shortage.”

Like all of his Republican counterparts, Bronson opposes mask and vaccine mandates as they mess with personal freedom, public health be damned. 

“The personal choice to vaccinate or not is up to the individual person,” Bronson told the Anchorage Daily News. He added: 

According to reporting from Alaska Public Radio, physicians from Alaska’s largest hospitals met on September 14 to discuss new mask mandates. Bronson and an assembly member from Eagle River, Alaska, held their own meeting on Sept. 18 to hear from health care workers who claim they’d rather lose their jobs than get a vaccine—a threat that’s widely reported, but according to a survey conducted by The Conversation, rarely carried out. In fact, 63% of workers surveyed said that “a vaccine mandate would make them feel safer.”

Meanwhile, Alaska’s health care system is tumbling into a freefall. Last week, the state was forced to adopt crisis care, a method in which hospitals must ration care to relieve staff and resources. 

Jared Kosin, head of the Alaska State Hospital and Nursing Home Association, told Alaska Public Radio that hospital staffing shortages were happening long before vaccine mandates, and he calls the mayor’s comments dangerous. “From all hospitals and nursing homes that are dealing with this, I have not heard a single concern that there’s going to be a mass exodus of staff over these requirements,” he said.

Bronson has a dark history of saying dangerous and unfounded things. In a 2013 article written for joemiller.us, Bronson notoriously claimed that “Adolph Hitler was not always a tyrant.” Adding that “[Hitler] gave his countrymen hope for better future while he returned to them their pride in their homeland, the pride they so passionately desired.”

Another winning member of the GOP.