Sarah Palin Got COVID and ‘Of Course’ She’s Unvaccinated

Sarah Palin’s libel trial against the New York Times has been delayed because the former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate tested positive for COVID-19, and the judge in the case could not contain his frustration. 

U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff told the court Monday that he found out the night before that Palin had tested positive. “She is of course unvaccinated,” Rakoff said. "Since she has apparently tested positive three times, I'm going to assume that she's positive."

The trial was set to begin Monday but will now start 10 days later, on Feb. 3. Palin is suing the New York Times over a 2017 editorial in the wake of the Congressional baseball game practice shooting. That editorial linked Palin’s rhetoric to the 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, which killed six people and nearly ended the life of then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

The Times later corrected the editorial and apologized for the mistake, but Palin filed her lawsuit against the Times less than two weeks later, seeking “compensatory, special, and punitive damages” because the Times allegedly “defam[ed] her by publishing a statement about her that it knew to be false.”

Rakoff asked Palin to take a PCR test today, but her lawyer Kenneth Turkel told the court that Palin got “confused” by the testing queues and later obtained a third rapid test today, which was positive, according to the New York Law Journal. 

Turkel also told the court that Palin “wants to be here for jury selection, she wants to testify live,” according to the Times.

Palin tested positive for COVID in March 2021, at which point she briefly encouraged wearing masks and encouraged “everyone to use common sense to avoid spreading this and every other virus out there.” But for the most part, Palin has long railed against COVID mitigation efforts and, more recently, against the COVID vaccine. 

Last month, she told a cheering crowd at a conference run by the right-wing group Turning Point USA that “it’ll be over my dead body that I’ll have to get a shot. I will not do that. I won’t do it, and they better not touch my kids either.”

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