Grammy award-winning choral director Ragnar Bohlin would rather quit than comply with the SF Symphony’s vaccine mandate, and his Facebook posts are striking a pretty strange note.
We have come to expect resignation threats over workplace vaccine mandates from employment sectors like police and sheriffs, because they tend to skew a lot more MAGA than the general Bay Area populace. We did not expect to hear this from tuxedo-wearing graduates of the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm, who have two Grammy awards for Best Classical Album and Best Choral Performance, and cushy tenured director positions at Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall.
BREAKING: San Francisco Symphony Choral Director Ragnar Bohlin resigns over vaccine mandate https://t.co/tkRD9T6FAW
— Lily Janiak (@LilyJaniak) August 20, 2021
Yet that is now the case, as the Chronicle reports that San Francisco Symphony Choral Director Ragnar Bohlin has resigned rather than comply with the symphony’s mandatory vaccination policy. San Francisco Symphony employees are not city employees, so they are not affected by the mandatory vaccination for city employees rule. But the symphony announced its own mandate for both employees and audience members on August 3, and after some apparently contentious discussions, Bohlin will take his baton back to Sweden.
And the man has been on a crazy Facebook-posting binge, with about a dozen posts daily over the last few days, with timestamps indicating he has already left the country in a huff. SFist is embedding several of his posts here, not out of respect for his opinions, but to detail his descent into not only anti-vaxx hysteria and extremely unusual personal and public attacks against his industry colleagues.
The above post goes after soprano Heidi Moss Erickson, who is not with the San Francisco Symphony, but has performed with the SF Opera, Opera San Jose, and Oakland Symphony. But his stemwinder ravings devolving into a Stanford professor of epidemiology being “bought off by Jet-Blue” perhaps gives you a sense of what his colleagues have been dealing with lately.
And here we see his farewell post, officially calling it quits with the symphony over “a growing sense of alarm observed the tide turn in the direction of medical passports.” Again, the time stamp indicates he is in another country, which means he has a passport, which means he’s already received 14 other vaccinations for other types of viruses.
Related: San Francisco Makes Vaccination Mandatory for Entering All Restaurants, Bars, and Gyms [SFist]
Image: San Francisco Symphony
