The billionaire couple who took a private jet from a high infection area to pose as members of a small, indigenous community to skip the queue for a vaccine.
This is Rod and Ekaterina Baker, billionaire Vancouver-ites.
Earlier this month, the couple took a private jet from Vancouver to Whitehorse in the North of Canada. They then travelled by a smaller plane to the tiny village of Beaver Creek - population 125.
The Yukon region as a whole has a higher vaccination rate than the rest of Canada, and due to the relatively isolated communities, whole communities are being vaccinated rather than just the most vulnerable.
The couple knew that Beaver Creek would be getting vaccinated that day, and so they turned up and posed as motel workers. After receiving the jab, they immediately asked to be driven straight to the airport.
The couple were almost immediately discovered as frauds by the locals (obviously) and reportedly had to walk the whole way back to the airport when the entire town refused to give them a lift.
The police caught up with the couple at the airport and issued them with fines, however there are now calls for jail time, particularly once it was discovered that the couple did not self isolate as required by law at any stage of the trip, and at one point during the vaccination process were in the same room as the oldest member of the community (88).
A local community leader had this to say:
"It's clear to me that because we are a predominantly indigenous community, that they assumed we were naïve," she told the Washington Post, calling the fines of a few thousand dollars the couple are facing "essentially meaningless" given their wealth.
Janet Vander Meer, who is leading the White River First Nation's coronavirus response team, said in a statement that the couple's actions represent "another example of ongoing acts of oppression against indigenous communities by wealthy individuals that thought they would get away with it".
"Our oldest resident of Beaver Creek, who is 88-years-old, was in the same room as this couple," she told Canada's Global News on Monday.
"That's got to be jail time. I can't see anything less. For what our community has been through the last few days. The exhaustion. It's just mind-boggling."
It’s an incredible example of absolutely abhorrent behaviour by unfathomably rich and entitled people.
It’s crazy that they thought they would get away with this - like an isolated village of 125 people wouldn’t notice two complete strangers wearing Rolex watches and Gucci fur coats wandering into their medical centre. It’s doubly confusing as it’s unclear how they intended to go back and get a second dose. Presumably they were just going to try to dupe another small community.
Rod Baker has already lost his job as CEO of a Casino company over this; we’ll see if any further punishments materialise.
Edit - having read a bit more, it turns out this guy isn’t actually a billionaire, ‘just’ a multi, multi millionaire.