Conservative analyst and author Candace Owens said in a tweet Wednesday that a COVID-19 testing lab refused her request for a test, citing her “spreading misinformation” about the pandemic.
“I just received an e-mail from a Covid testing facility that they are REFUSING to administer a test to me because they don’t like my politics. INSANE,” Owens wrote on Twitter.
The talk show host later posted a follow-up tweet with screenshots of Aspen Laboratories co-founder Suzanna Lee’s email denying the request for a COVID-19 test. Owens described Lee as a “rabid activist” who “isn’t stable enough to work in health and is a danger to the Aspen community.”
In the screenshot of Lee’s email that Owens posted, the co-founder of the lab wrote that her establishment “cannot support anyone who has pro-actively worked to make this pandemic worse by spreading misinformation, politicizing and DISCOURAGING the wearing of masks and actively dissuading people from receiving life-saving vaccinations.”
“My team and myself have worked overtime, to exhaustion, unpaid and underpaid this past year, spending our own capital to ensure that our community remains protected,” Lee’s email continued. “It would be unfair to them and to the sacrifices we have all made this year to serve you.”
The Hill has reached out to Lee for comment.
In Owens’s response to Lee that she posted in the same tweet, the commentator criticized her for choosing whether to administer tests on a “case by case basis.”
“Nothing screams ‘this virus isn’t political’ quite like googling the names of the people who book tests with you and determining on a case by case basis whether or not you will let them comply with your community covid measures,” Owens wrote. “Nothing screams ‘I love my local community’ quite like refusing to test people who are going to a local event and wish to ensure they are negative and therefore do not spread the virus.”
When some users on Twitter defended Lee, arguing that conservatives often champion private businesses having the right to make their own choices in regards to their establishments, Owens responded that she believes in the “freedom to choose,” but that when health professionals “begin choosing who is allowed to determine if they have covid — we are no longer in a public health crisis.”
Owens, who has said she isn’t vaccinated against COVID-19, faced backlash last year for some of her comments about the pandemic, including alleging on Twitter that “the virus was never as fatal” as experts said.