Evangeline Lilly reveals she was at anti-vaxxer protest

Evangeline Lilly, famous for her roles in Lost, The Hobbit trilogy and the MCU, has revealed she attended a notorious anti-vaxxer event.

Marvel actress Evangeline Lilly has revealed she attended an anti-vaxxer rally in Washington D.C. where wild statements compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust.

Lilly plays Hope van Dyne, otherwise known as the Wasp, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. You might also recognise her from TV series Lost and The Hobbit trilogy.

In an Instagram post today, she said she had travelled to Washington to “support bodily sovereignty”, and shared a handful of photos from the protest.

“I believe nobody should ever be forced to inject their body with anything, against their will, under threat of: violent attack, arrest or detention without trial, loss of employment, homelessness, starvation, loss of education, alienation from loved ones, excommunication from society ... under any threat whatsoever,” she wrote.

“This is not the way. This is not safe. This is not healthy. This is not love.

“I understand the world is in fear, but I don’t believe that answering fear with force will fix our problems.

“I was pro-choice before Covid and I am still pro-choice today.”

Lilly also shared a quote from entrepreneur Naval Ravikant: “All tyranny begins with the desire to coerce others for the greater good.”

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One of the photos Lilly posted from her trip to Washington. Picture: Instagram

Protesters on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Picture: Instagram

The actress’s own vaccination status is unknown. Her post did not include any vaccine misinformation; she merely expressed opposition to mandates.

The United States currently has Covid vaccine mandates in place for workers at government-funded medical facilities, as well as some other federal employees.

The country’s Supreme Court recently struck down the Biden administration’s attempt to impose similar mandates on large private businesses.

Like Australia, the US requires most incoming travellers to be fully vaccinated.

Lilly previously expressed scepticism about the severity of Covid, and in the early months of the pandemic announced she was refusing to practise social distancing “all in the name of a respiratory flu”.

She said early Covid restrictions felt “a lot too close to martial law for my comfort” and were “unnerving”, urging her followers to “keep a close eye on our leaders, making sure they don’t abuse this moment to steal away more freedoms and grab more power”.

She subsequently apologised for that stance after a public backlash.

“I want to offer my sincere and heartfelt apology for the insensitivity I showed in my previous post to the very real suffering and fear that has gripped the world through Covid,” Lilly said.

“I thought I was infusing calm into the hysteria. I can see now that I was projecting my own fears into an already fearful and traumatic situation.”

Lilly alongside Paul Rudd in Ant-Man and the Wasp. Picture: Marvel Studios

Lilly previously expressed scepticism about the severity of Covid, in the early months of the pandemic. Picture: Instagram

The protest Lilly attended in Washington featured some outlandish rhetoric, including from the notorious anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who is the son of Bobby Kennedy and nephew of former US president John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy compared people defying vaccine mandates to Jewish people who hid from the Nazis during the Holocaust.

“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” he argued.

“I visited, in 1962, East Germany with my father, and met people who had climbed the wall and escaped. So it was possible. Many died doing it, but it was possible.”

An estimated six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.

“It has been the ambition of every totalitarian state from the beginning of mankind to control every aspect of behaviour, of conduct, of thought, and to obliterate dissent. None of them have been able to do it. They didn’t have the technological capacity,” Kennedy said.

He said now “none of us can run and none of us can hide”, citing conspiracy theories involving Bill Gates, satellites and 5G.

His remarks were subsequently slammed by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Place and Museum, which didn’t think much of his Holocaust comparison.

“Exploiting of the tragedy of people who suffered, were humiliated, tortured and murdered by the totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany – including children like Anne Frank – in a debate about vaccines and limitations during a global pandemic is a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decay,” it said.