Jefferson City, Missouri– State legislators in Missouri have erected a statue paying tribute to the many Missourians who bravely refused the COVID-19 vaccine and subsequently contracted the disease and perished in order to help Republicans with their short term political goal of thwarting President Biden’s efforts to vaccinate 70 percent of the country by July 4th.

“These people gave their lives so that the Biden administration could not impose live-saving vaccines on them and thus strip them of their freedom to die horrible deaths and infect other Americans freely in accordance with our recently enacted laws,” state legislator Rodney Bruegler said as the monument was unveiled in front of the state capital Friday.

“They are the real heroes,” Bruegler, who declined to say whether he had received the vaccine, continued. “Some of us did our part by spreading disinformation and cleverly casting doubt on decades of settled medical science, but these folks made the ultimate sacrifice just to sow death and chaos in the country that would undermine the success of the Biden administration.”

Bruegler and the Republicans’ disinformation campaign has paid off handsomely as Missouri boasts the fourth highest rate of new cases in the country, has a vaccination rate almost twenty percent lower than the nation as a whole, and has hospitals being overwhelmed with new cases, almost entirely by unvaccinated patients. Nationwide, the seven day average for new cases has jumped nearly 70 percent in just one week, according to the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Rochelle Walensky, with more than 97 percent of hospitalizations being unvaccinated patients and almost all of the deaths among those who bravely rejected the nanny state’s needle.

A minor controversy erupted as the statue was unveiled as the Republican funders of the statue realized there had been a miscommunication with the sculptress. Rather than the triumphal monument the Republicans had commissioned, the sculptress, Lisa Andretti, had thought the statue was intended to be somber memorial to the entirely preventable deaths of the unvaccinated. She therefore portrayed the victim covering his face with his hand in a regretful manner. Bruegler vowed to withhold payment to the sculptress until she modified the statue to giving the Josh Hawley fist salute the junior Senator gave to Trump supporters on January 6th.