Missouri taxi company refuses to drive customers who wear masks or are vaccinated

A Missouri taxi company refuses to pick up passengers wearing masks or vaccinated.

Yo Transportation owner Charlie Bullington said he asks customers to check they haven’t been vaccinated or put on a mask before accepting their fare.

Customers of the St. Louis taxi company said they had been turned away for being vaccinated.

Bullington told news site KMOV4 that he decided that the masks carried germs and that the vaccines were dangerous after doing his own research on the Internet.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has concluded that Covid vaccines are safe and effective in reducing the risk of serious illness or death from the virus.

In June, Missouri was among the first states to experience a major Delta variant outbreak, as it traversed rural areas with low vaccination rates.

Dr Farrin Manian, infectious disease expert at Mercy Hospital in St Louis, said KMOV4 that vaccines and masks were essential to minimize the spread and threat of Covid-19.

“There is no way to pass live vaccine strains of the virus through the vaccine and there is no way to shed virus particles in the mask or nose,” said Dr Manian.

Mr Bullington said he was proud of the fact that Missouri had one of the lowest vaccination rates in the United States.

According to The New York Times A vaccine tracker, Missouri ranks 39th out of 50 US states.

Some 60.6% of adults in Missouran have received at least one dose and 51.7% are fully immunized.

The Delta variant is spreading rampantly among the unvaccinated across the United States, sparking new cases and hospitalizations to levels not seen since the peak of the pandemic in winter.

The United States first crossed the average number of 100,000 daily cases in November and peaked at around 250,000 in early January before bottoming out in late June.