Caleb Wallace, a Texas man who organized rallies protesting mask wearing and other measures put in place to limit the spread of coronavirus has died after a month long battle with COVID-19.
“Caleb has peacefully passed on. He will forever live in our hearts and minds,” Jessica Wallace, Caleb’s wife, wrote on the family’s GoFundMe page.
According to the San Angelo Standard-Times, Wallace, a 30-year-old father of three, with a fourth baby on the way had been unconscious and heavily sedated in an intensive care unit at Shannon Hospital,” since Aug. 8.
A little over a year ago, Wallace helped organized a ‘Freedom Rally’– peaceful protest by people “sick of the government being in control of our lives.” He became known in his community of San Angelo, Texas for opposing COVID-19 restrictions.
Wallace also founded the “San Angelo Freedom Defenders,” a group “to educate and empower citizens to make informed choices concerning local, statewide, and national policy and to encourage them to actively participate in their duty to secure God-given and constitutionally protected rights,” the group’s Facebook page said, according to the San Angelo Standard-Times.
Wallace used the group’s page to criticize local leaders response to the pandemic and spread misinformation about COVID.
“Show me the science that masks work,” he wrote on the City of San Angelo’s official Facebook in December 2020. “Show me the evidence that school closures work. Show me the evidence that lock-downs work.”
The Facebook page belonging to the San Angelo Freedom Defenders appears to have been deleted since Wallace was hospitalized.
“My health has nothing to do with you. As harsh as that sounds, but our constitutional, fundamental rights protect that. Nothing else,” Wallace said while speaking to local officials at a COVID-19 Update held by the City of San Angelo on November 13, 2020. “I’m sorry if that comes off as blunt and that I don’t care. I do care. I care more about freedom than I do for your personal health.”
His wife said Caleb began experiencing symptoms consistent with a COVID infection on July 26. He refused to take a COVID test or go to the hospital. “He was so hard-headed,” Jessica told the San Angelo Standard-Times. “He didn’t want to see a doctor, because he didn’t want to be part of the statistics with COVID tests.” Instead he began taking unproven remedies to treat his symptoms including ivermectin, high doses of Vitamin C, zinc aspirin, and an inhaler.
His symptoms worsened and he was taken to the emergency room at Shannon Medical Center on July 30.
Unlike her husband, Jessica says she wears a mask even though he would tell her it is futile.
“I’m from the border town of Del Rio, and my views are less conservative,” she told the Standard-Times. “I’m not a liberal. I stand somewhere in the middle…Caleb would tell me, ‘You know masks aren’t going to save you,’ but he understood I wanted to wear them. It gives me comfort to know that maybe, just maybe, I’m either protecting someone or avoiding it myself.”
