Anti-Mask ‘Freedom Rally’ Organizer Who Took Ivermectin Dies From Covid-19 After Weeks-Long Battle
Photo by LUIS ROBAYO/AFP via Getty Images)
A Texas man who helped organize a “Freedom Rally” protesting against pandemic restrictions last summer died from Covid-19 on Saturday.
Caleb Wallace, a 30-year-old father of three (and soon to be four), battled the virus for weeks in the ICU, the San Angelo Standard-Times reported. He had been “unconscious, ventilated and heavily sedated” since Aug. 8. His wife, Jessica Wallace, said that he initially began experiencing symptoms on July 26. and wrote on a GoFundMe page that he had been in the hospital since July 30.
“Caleb has peacefully passed on,” she wrote on the fundraiser page Saturday. “He will forever live in our hearts and minds.”
The fundraiser was organized due to Caleb Wallace being out from work and Jessica Wallace being unable to work nor find a job in the near future since she is expecting on Sept. 27.
Jessica Wallace told the Standard-Times that her husband initially refused to be tested for Covid and took unproven home remedies for the virus including high doses of Vitamin C, zinc, aspirin, and ivermectin — a parasitic worm treatment.
The FDA has urged people not to use ivermectin for Covid-19, writing that it is not FDA approved, is not an anti-viral medicine and that taking large doses “is dangerous and can cause serious harm.” The FDA also noted that people should “never use medications intended for animals,” as “ivermectin preparations for animals are very different from those approved for humans.”
“He was so hard-headed,” Jessica Wallace told the Standard-Times. “He didn’t want to see a doctor, because he didn’t want to be part of the statistics with COVID tests.”
Caleb Wallace had been a vocal opponent to Covid restrictions and mandates, appearing in interviews criticizing school closures and mask policies as well as organizing a July 4 “Freedom Rally” last year to protest government restrictions. He also organized “The San Angelo Freedom Defenders,” a group that hosted a separate rally last year to “end COVID tyranny.”
“We are not real happy with the current state of America at the moment,” he said last year, according to the Standard-Times.
“Show me the science that masks work,” Caleb Wallace wrote on the City of San Angelo’s official Facebook in December 2020. “Show me the evidence that school closures work. Show me the evidence that lock-downs work.”
His fight underscored how science and politics have intersected, and it has helped his wife realize that virus “does not discriminate.”
Unlike her husband, Jessica Wallace would wear a face covering.
“I’m from the border town of Del Rio, and my views are less conservative,” she told the Standard-Times. “I’m not a liberal. I stand somewhere in the middle…Caleb would tell me, ‘You know masks aren’t going to save you,’ but he understood I wanted to wear them. It gives me comfort to know that maybe, just maybe, I’m either protecting someone or avoiding it myself.”
She also noted that “whether he was a hardcore conservative or not, he was an amazing man.”
