Leah Cole Allen, a former state representative from Peabody, launched a bid for lieutenant governor Monday, saying firsthand frustration with COVID-19 mandates pushed her to reenter public life and team up with her former colleague Geoff Diehl in the Republican primary.
“I am faced with losing my job over not complying with the COVID-vaccine mandates,” Allen, 33, said at a morning press conference with Diehl outside the State House. “It makes me want to get involved again.”
Allen, who left the Legislature in in 2015 to focus on her nursing career and now lives in Danvers, said she requested a religious exemption and was denied. She declined to identify her employer.
“I was pregnant during the pandemic [and] not comfortable taking the shot,” Allen said. “There was no evidence that was proving to me that we understood the long-term safety data, or the side effects that it could have on anyone, regardless of pregnant or breastfeeding.”
While Republican primary voters will ultimately choose their nominees for governor and lieutenant governor separately later this year, Allen said Diehl’s opposition to vaccine mandates and a personal bond forged with they were legislative colleagues make him an ideal political partner.
“After serving with him in the Legislature, getting to know him, I felt that he was an honest person that I could trust,” Allen said.
Allen and Diehl are also aligned when it comes to fiscal policy. Both believe that Massachusetts spends too freely and imposes an undue tax burden on its residents.
"Massachusetts [took] in something like $5 billion over expected tax revenue [in 2021],” Allen said Monday. “And I think when we have that kind of a surplus, we need to look at ways of returning the money to families ... to help better their lives.”
A second pair of GOP hopefuls, gubernatorial hopeful Chris Doughty and LG candidate Kate Campanale, are also running as a ticket.
Claims of COVID overreach are prominently featured in the “policy” section of Allen’s new website, which asserts at one point that “kids shouldn’t be in masks.” Asked Monday to elaborate on that statement, Allen said that kids were forced to wear masks far longer than necessary.
“Perhaps in the beginning it was an appropriate response,” Allen said. “But fairly quickly it was starting to become evident ... that masks were not effective as we thought they were, and most of all that children were not at high risk of morbidity from COVID, as well as they were not the primary vectors of spreading COVID.”
According to an October 2021 study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, “Symptomatic and asymptomatic children can carry high quantities of live, replicating SARS-CoV-2, creating a potential reservoir for transmission and evolution of genetic variants.”
There is also a significant body of evidence that mask use, while not completely effective, substantially reduces the spread of COVID-19.
At one point in the press conference, Allen was asked about former President Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was illegitimate. Diehl, Allen’s running mate, was an early supporter of former President Donald Trump, but has offered conflicting assessments of Trump’s claim.
“I think that there was enough states that felt that it was that they were investigating it, and I would like to see the outcome of those investigations,” Allen replied. “I think that there was enough evidence that there could have been an issue.”
In a recent interview on GBH News’ Talking Politics, Doughty and Campanale, the two Republicans on the competing ticket, both said the 2020 election was legitimate.
