The anti-vaccination, anti-mask, anti-science crowd is hooking up with the sovereign citizen loons. There are amazing business opportunities for those who are willing to bilk the militantly credulous.
'This Sketchy New Company Wants to Help Anti-Vaxxers Travel'
James Corbett, the self-styled “independent, listener-supported alternative” journalist behind The Corbett Report, a hub for content on topics like “9/11 Truth and false flag terror” that has been a mainstay of the digital conspiracy world for over a decade and receives over 750,000 views per day, is unsurprisingly not a fan of what he calls “COVID-1984” control measures. But because he is “not going to get masked up and tested and vaccinated and whatever else is coming along as requirements for international travel,” he worries that, as a Canadian living in Japan, he might not be able to see most of his family in person for quite some time. “I know I am not the only person in this boat,” he told his viewers in a video released on his site and its YouTube channel in mid-January.
That, he explained, is part of why he wanted to do a feature on the Freedom Airway & Freedom Travel Alliance (FAFTA), a company founded in late 2020 to help its (paying) members travel around the world without observing any masking, quarantining, vaccination, or other pandemic control measures—or any other public health regulations they don’t want to follow. They frame this as an effort to protect people from “injurious regulation and discriminatory policy” that infringes on their “natural health rights.” Their tagline: “Are you ready to travel freely again?”
If this sounds like an impractical mission in light of the stringent COVID-19 control restrictions the vast majority of nations and airlines have enacted in recent months, that’s because it is. When interested parties on FAFTA’s Facebook page have asked how they will get around these laws and rules, the company usually responds with some variation on the vague assurance “there are always loopholes,” if it responds at all. But as Lawrence Gostin, an expert on global health laws at Georgetown University, told The Daily Beast, “No company can guarantee that there will be no testing or contact tracing or any other requirements” for its travel customers.
“There are so many things about this company that jump out as red flags,” added John Breyault of the National Consumer League’s Fraud.org project, ranging from its mixture of improbable claims and vague offerings to its founders’ lack of apparent relevant industry experience. “It screams fishy at best, scammy at worst… Regardless of how you feel about mask mandates or vaccines, I would say steering clear of this company is the smartest course to take.”
