KISS singer and bassist Gene Simmons launched into a polemic against people who are not vaccinated against COVID-19, calling them the “enemy”.
Speaking in an interview last Wednesday on TalkShopLive, the 72-year-old KISS cofounder and businessman denounced the unvaccinated, and said that people who believe they had the right to choose whether to get vaccinated are “delusional”.
“If you’re willing to walk among us unvaccinated, you are an enemy,” Simmons said.
“I don’t care about your political beliefs,” Simmons continued. “You are not allowed to infect anybody just because you think you’ve got rights that are delusional.”
Earlier this year, KISS cancelled a number of concerts after both Simmons and guitarist Paul Stanley became infected with COVID, despite being fully vaccinated.
“I don’t want to catch your disease. I don’t want to risk my life just because you want to go through a red light. This whole idea, this delusional, evil idea that you get to do whatever you want and the rest of the world be damned is really terrible.”
Born in Israel to Holocaust refugees, Simmons moved to the US at the age of eight, changing his name from Chaim Witz to Gene Klein, and later performing under the name Gene Simmons.
Simmons has frequently weighed in on political issues in the past, endorsing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and denouncing the war’s critics, publicly backing Barack Obama’s first presidential bid before slamming President Obama over his health care reform and Middle East policies, and denouncing the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
In his comments Wednesday, Simmons slammed both the Republican and Democratic parties as “evil” and called politics “the enemy”.
“I don’t like either one of them. Politics are the enemy. Humanism and humanity is what we should all be concerned about. Love thy neighbor as thyself.”