Namakula, a multimedia artist and producer, discusses her experiences as an actor who was disenfranchised from her profession during the COVID-19 pandemic due to her refusal to comply with vaccine mandates. Noting pervasive violations of medical privacy within theatre, film and television—from casting lists to auditions which often revealed private health information or for which vaccine status was required—Namakula notes how personal choices about medical health and bodily autonomy were entirely abandoned. Despite Big Pharma having noted that the “vaccines” would not stop transmission or infection, Namakula recalls how legacy media was effective propaganda machine in advertising just the opposite while amassing public support for a lie about experimental “vaccines” while also attempting to foment racial and class division. Noting the hypnotic effect of the television, a medium where the public is more apt to believe anyone propped up before the camera wearing a white lab coat over the anecdotal stories of friends and family, Namakula postulates that the lockdown was designed to keep people from hearing the stories of others as they were not only locked up in their homes and kept far away from human connections, but where they were also locked into the televisionscape of daily misinformation about the pandemic branded as “news.” As a SAG (Screen Actors Guild) member, Namakula took issue with her union not having protected the rights of its members to informed consent among a long list of problems that have been plaguing SAG for years, among which embezzlement of union funds. As a result of her experience during lockdown noting how SAG did not protect her rights or respond to SAG members’ request for peer-reviewed studies to explain the union’s support for vaccine mandates, Namakula felt compelled to run for the seat of New York Local President of SAG-AFTRA 2023 candidate running for the office of New York Local President.

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