Taxi company in Missouri refuses to give rides to customers who wear masks or are vaccinated

A taxi company in Missouri is refusing to take passengers who wear masks or are vaccinated.

Yo Transportation owner Charlie Bullington said he required customers to verify they had not been vaccinated or put on a mask before accepting their fare.

Customers at the St Louis taxi company have reported being turned away for being vaccinated.

Bullington told the KMOV4 news site he had decided that masks carried germs and vaccines were unsafe after doing his own research on the internet.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has concluded that Covid vaccines are safe and effective in curbing the risk of serious illness or death from the virus.

In June, Missouri was among the first states to experience a major outbreak of the Delta variant, as it tore through rural areas with low vaccaintions rates.

Dr Farrin Manian, an infectious disease expert with Mercy Hospital in St Louis, told KMOV4 that vaccines and masks were crucial to minimising the spread and threat of Covid-19.

“There’s no way you can actually have live vaccine strains of the virus transmitted through the vaccine and there’s no way you can actually shed any viral particles in the mask or nose,” Dr Manian said.

Mr Bullington claimed he was proud of the fact Missouri had one of the lowest vaccination rates in the United States.

According to The New York Times vaccine tracker, Missouri ranks 39th out of the 50 US states.

Some 60.6 per cent of Missouran adults have received at least one dose, and 51.7 per cent are fully vaccinated.

The Delta variant is spreading rampantly through the unvaccinated across the US, causing an explosion in new cases and hospitalisations to rise to levels not seen since the height of the pandemic in winter.

The US first crossed the 100,000 daily cases average number in November and peaked at about 250,000 in early January before bottoming out in late June.