Marvel Star Evangeline Lilly Protests Vax Mandates: “This Is Not Healthy”

Marvel and Lost actress Evangeline Lilly is slamming vaccine mandates.

The 43-year-old star posted on Instagram that she attended a rally in Washington, D.C., this weekend to support “bodily sovereignty” — i.e., protest against COVID-19 vaccine mandates. It was apparently the same Sunday rally where speaker and devout anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made headlines by comparing vaccine mandates to the Holocaust.

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“This is not the way,” Lilly wrote Thursday. “This is not safe. This is not healthy. This is not love. I understand the world is in fear, but I don’t believe that answering fear with force will fix our problems. I was pro choice before COVID and I am still pro choice today.”

Lilly added: “I believe nobody should ever be forced to inject their body with anything, against their will, under threat of:
-violent attack
-arrest or detention without trial
-loss of employment
-homelessness
-starvation
-loss of education
-alienation from loved ones
-excommunication from society
…under any threat whatsoever.”

Lilly, who plays Hope van Dyne in the Ant-Man films, isn’t the only Marvel star to come out against vaccine mandates. Black Panther star Letitia Wright posted an anti-vax conspiracy video in December.

Back at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, Lilly announced on Instagram she was refusing to social distance “all in the name of a respiratory flu,” which led to some backlash. She later posted an apology for her comments. “I want to offer my sincere and heartfelt apology for the insensitivity I showed in my previous post to the very real suffering and fear that has gripped the world through COVID19,” Lilly wrote at the time. “I thought I was infusing calm into the hysteria. I can see now that I was projecting my own fears into an already fearful and traumatic situation.”

A vaccine mandate for large companies was withdrawn by the Biden administration this week after a Supreme Court decision blocked it. Many states and cities have their own independent vaccine requirements for various workers, however. In late 2021, the CDC implemented rules requiring all non-immigrant, non-citizen travelers to the U.S. to be fully vaccinated.

The CDC recommends all eligible people receive the COVID-19 vaccine, noting that serious adverse effects related to the vaccine are exceedingly rare. “Millions of people in the United States have received COVID-19 vaccines under the most intense safety monitoring in US history,” wrote the CDC. It’s also worth noting that drugs typically clear FDA safety trials after being tested on 3,000 people or fewer, but nearly 5 billion people have received COVID vaccines worldwide. Also, even with the vaccines being less effective at stopping the spread of the omicron variant, recent studies have shown they still sharply reduce the likelihood of severe illness or death.

Lilly next appears in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which has wrapped production and is slated for a 2023 release.

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