By Alex P. Vidal
“On the pro-vaccine side – and not everyone does this, but I saw it enough for it to make me really uncomfortable – is a tendency to accuse people who are wary of vaccination of being stupid and not understanding science.”—Eula Biss
IMMEDIATELY after reaching their apartment at past seven o’clock in the evening sometime in November 2020, Carmonita and her lover Bruno, both gasping for breath, embraced each other in the kitchen like Bonnie and Clyde, criminal couple who just missed the police dragnet by the skin of the teeth.
But, unlike Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and Clyde Chestnut Barrow, who traveled the Central United States with their gang during the Great Depression, to rob banks, stores, and rural funeral homes, Carmonita and Bruno were small fries and weren’t involved in bank robberies.
Carmonita, 71, a Filipino-American from Ipil, Zamboanga in Mindanao, and Bruno, 38, a Latino from Quito, Ecuador, gained notoriety for their fierce anti-vaccine stand and being the rabid fanatics of former US President Donald Trump in a predominant Latino community in Queens, New York City.
“Next time, babe, don’t hold my arms when I shout at them,” appealed Carmonita. “If they attack us, we can’t move freely and we’ll be both cornered.”
“But I only tried to protect you just in case that crazy woman on your left side moves closer and hit you,” Bruno retorted while resting both his arms around Carmonita’s short frame.
“At least we made it home now, babe. We are safe,” Carmonita assured.
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The couple had been chased by a group of irate civilians they engaged in a near-violent verbal spat inside the Manhattan-bound subway train.
Coming from Forest Hills in Queens, the duo boarded the 7 train from 74th Jackson Heights Station without wearing a mask.
Mask had been strictly mandated to all passengers in public transportation by the city hall as part of the health protocol when COVID-19 cases were still up in New York at that time.
When accosted by fellow passengers, the couple, especially the combative Carmonita, resisted aggressively and yelled at their unwanted lecturers. “Mind your own business,” barked Carmonita, who narrated the incident to a friend in a phone conversation. “This is America, a free country and you have no right to impose upon us something (wearing of mask in public) that is against our health. Covid is fake.”
The verbal joust escalated when the couple refused to capitulate as they alighted from the train two stations away.
Outside the train, both camps continued to trade insults and expletives that resulted in the chasing incident.
Carmonita, who doesn’t have a college degree, never believed that COVID-19 existed.
Everything she said about the “false” pandemic his lover Bruno, who also never went to college in Quito, swallowed it hook, line and sinker. For Bruno, her live-in partner was more credible and believable than the “fake news.”
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The couple has shunned the mainstream media and spends a great deal of time nibbling on YouTube “news” channels that promote conspiracy theories about the pandemic as untrue and “created only by the oligarchs to depopulate the world.”
Carmonita didn’t stop from forcefully embracing the unproven theories. She also seriously took it upon herself to regularly phone friends and relatives and convince them that “President Trump will be back soon… (President Joseph) Jose Biden is dead and what we are seeing on TV is a fake Joe Biden; the US government is now being controlled by the ‘military tribunal’ and the vaccines contained microchips meant to monitor our movements and siphon all our money in the bank..there will be food shortage, etcetera.”
Well-meaning friends and some worried relatives parried Carmonita and goaded her to “stop your non-sense” but her mind was close. “You can avoid me if you want to, but don’t blame me that I didn’t warn you,” she chided them.
In December 2021, or more than a year after Carmonita and Bruno were nearly lynched in the subway train for their recalcitrance, Carmonita attended a Christmas party for the networkers of a botanical vitamin product in Jamaica, Queens.
The party occurred as the United States, as well as other countries in the world, faced the grim upsurge of Omicron variant, which had spread rapidly before the New Year 2022.
As usual, she was the only person who didn’t wear a mask. To compound the matter, she probably was the only attendee who neither have a COVID-19 vaccine nor a booster shot.
Days after the party, Carmonita became ill, downed by a strange fever and was coughing hard. Bed-ridden for a week, Bruno finally rushed her to the hospital the first week of January 2022.
Bruno, who is also unvaccinated, wasn’t allowed to stay beside his partner, who was “fighting for her life” after reportedly being tested positive for COVID-19 from Omicron.
(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of dailies in Iloilo.—Ed)
