How the Southwest Flight Cancellations Turned Into a Bogus Vaccine Conspiracy Theory

Many Republican politicians and right-wing pundits had been thrilled to report that large disruptions at Southwest Airlines over the previous week had been because of airline employees, fed up with a forthcoming employer vaccine mandate by Presidnet Joe Biden, staging an impromptu protest by strolling off the job.

The solely downside? No such spontaneous rebellion of the silent majority has truly occurred.

Southwest Airlines chief working officer Mike Van de Ven has since apologized for the delays, which started on early Friday, Oct. 8, after climate and air site visitors management points in Florida and shortly spiraled into a multitude of over 2,000 canceled flights. According to NPR, some 20% of Southwest flights on Saturday and 40% of flights on Sunday had been canceled, with numerous others experiencing prolonged delays.

Prominent Republican politicians, together with Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz, in addition to giant segments of the conservative blogosphere, shortly jumped on the chance to assert airline employees had been refusing to work because of their opposition to soon-to-be-implemented federal necessities that enormous employers and federal contractors guarantee their employees are vaccinated or examined for the novel coronavirus as soon as every week. While some pointed to a dispute between the airline and the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association union, which sought in courtroom to dam the corporate from implementing vaccines as a situation of employment whereas a separate labor lawsuit played out, others didn’t hassle to again up the speculation in any respect.

These claims had been fishy for numerous causes, foremost amongst them that there was nearly no credible sourcing for the declare, regardless of the very fact anti-vaxxers by no means shut the hell up about their beliefs. As the Washington Post explained, there was as a substitute plenty of evidence indicating the basis trigger was organizational points at Southwest. Those embrace obvious climate points in Florida that began a cascade of different messed-up flights and brought about the airline to lose observe of when and the place it was reassigning flight crews, in addition to understaffing courtesy of decreased hiring throughout the pandemic. Travel trade analyst and Atmosphere Research Group president Harvey Harteveldt advised Insider that Southwest’s “very complex spider web-like point-to-point route network” helps clarify why delays had been widespread even in areas with no climate points.

Southwest, the pilot’s union, and the Federal Aviation Administration all denied that any work stoppage was accountable, in keeping with the Post. Slate reported that whereas the FAA did acknowledge a staffing shortfall at an air site visitors management middle in Florida, it additionally pointed to navy workouts and the unhealthy climate and mentioned the unique disruption solely lasted just a few hours. (The overwhelming majority of air site visitors controllers are employed by the FAA, not airways.) The pilot’s union emphasised that Southwest had similar pilot sick rates final weekend because it did over the summer season, in addition to the airline’s unwillingness or incapacity to replace outdated technical methods that reassign pilots during disruptions. As Slate famous, different airways didn’t expertise such critical delays, regardless that the Biden mandate has resulted in backlash from staff at rivals like American Airlines.

Here’s a roundup of a few of the conservatives that attempted, and just about failed, to show this right into a referendum on coronavirus vaccines.