An airline pilot warned Monday night that President Biden’s COVID vaccine mandate for federal workers and contractors, which includes airlines, will lead to “massive disruptions” due to flight cancellations as more of them opt out and refuse to comply, leading to their firing.
In an interview on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Joshua Yoder, a commercial airline pilot and the co-founder of a group called U.S. Freedom Flyers, warned that events such as this past weekend’s Southwest Airlines flight cancellations could soon be unavoidable, cancellations that reportedly, according to Carlson, due to mass work stoppage.
The reason: Yoder said the people who do skilled jobs, such as flying planes and driving trucks, will stand against President Biden and their own employers over the mandate.
“My motive for resisting [the COVID vaccine] is primarily religious for myself,” Yoder told Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
“Among my friends I saw a need. Many of us don’t want to take this. People were being coerced. I believe in freedom, and I’m here to support the freedom of my fellow employees and all people across this country.”
“I’m not going to take a mandate. I’m not going to be forced to do something that I don’t believe in,” he added.
“If you have flights reduced by 30 percent because 30 percent of pilots are fired because they won’t take the vaccine, this is going to affect how your goods get here from overseas, how they are distributed to the store,” he explained after being asked
“I’m not going to take a mandate. I’m not going to be forced to do something that I don’t believe in,” he added.
“If you have flights reduced by 30 percent because 30 percent of pilots are fired because they won’t take the vaccine, this is going to affect how your goods get here from overseas, how they are distributed to the store,” he said when he was asked to describe the effect on the national transportation infrastructure.
“The same thing is happening with the truckers; it’s happening in the shipping industry. Those Amazon boxes that typically show up in two days, you might be looking at three weeks,” he added, going on to note of a shortage of truckers and dock workers as major ports on both coasts experience weeks-long backlogs.
Earlier, that the massive amounts of cancellations by Southwest Airlines over the weekend were the result of walkouts, not weather or other issues, as the airline claimed:
Southwest Airlines, you may have read this, one of our biggest carriers all but shut down on Saturday and Sunday, the airline canceled thousands of flights. It threw the nation’s famously efficient system of air travel into total chaos. It’s stranded countless travelers in airports. Again, you saw it on the news.
The question is how did this happen? Well the official explanation came right away. It was bad weather on the eastern seaboard. There were thunderstorms. There were also unspecified issues with air traffic control and all of that together forced Southwest Airlines, alone among airlines, to cancel its flights.
That’s what the company Southwest Airlines claimed. They claim that in a statement to us today, a long statement. It’s what many media outlets have repeated uncritically for the past two days.
And yet we can tell you it is untrue. All of that is a lie. It’s not what happened. We’ve spoken to several people with direct knowledge of what actually did happen. We can tell you that the shutdown of Southwest Airlines over the weekend was a direct consequence – it was a reaction to – Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates.