 So, COVID-19 cases are sharply increasing around the country. But in Arkansas, it's an entirely different story because cases there are just exploding. And one of the reasons why they're one of the worst in the country is because they have an increased rate of vaccine hesitancy. Now, thankfully, as the situation gets worse, vaccinations have actually tripled in Arkansas in recent weeks. But having said that, though, not everyone is convinced yet. And even as they watch the Delta variant ravage their community and affect them personally, many people still refuse to even believe that the pandemic is a real thing. Now, we get a little bit of insight into what doctors and nurses deal with, thanks to a documentary that Vice News did, where they went into a hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas, and they interview doctors who work in the ICU with COVID-19 patients. And what they say is that even as people get COVID-19, they still won't take the vaccine. And many still believe, most still believe that the virus isn't actually real. So this is truly difficult to watch. But we'll take a look at this documentary, we'll discuss it, and then I'll tell you what I believe the solution is to this problem. We're here in a hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas, where the Delta variant has led to a surge in COVID cases. The ICU is full beyond capacity. There are people on ventilators who are in their 20s, and over 90% of the patients are unvaccinated. Arkansas has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country. Four months ago, the state legislature passed a ban on mask mandates. Now, with the spread of the Delta variant, hospitals here are being pushed to the brink. What are you hearing from unvaccinated patients who end up here in the ICU? Well, only a few of them would actually believe they have COVID. You have to tell them every day. Most people don't even believe they have COVID. There's a fair number of people who don't believe they have COVID, and then we're lying to them. How do you overcome that denial? It's very hard to do. I mean, you educate them, but if they get too agitated, then they get more short of breath, then they require more support, and then they get intubated, which then these two, along our hospitals, stay. My lungs were covered in COVID pneumonia. When you cannot breathe and you can't get air, it is very serious. Did you get the vaccine? No. Have you talked to the doctors and nurses here about the vaccine? I have, and yes, they're explaining, but you have to be open to hear, and I wasn't, and I'm more open to listen now. Why did you agree to be interviewed? I'm living something I didn't believe. I'm living it, and people need to know that it is real. It is real. People are dying. They are dying. 18 months into the pandemic, doctors here say they have more COVID cases than ever, and new groups are being hit harder. 20% of this hospital's recent COVID patients have been pregnant women. Lindsay Smith didn't get the vaccine and tested positive when she came to the hospital to give birth. She's asymptomatic, but had to be separated from her newborn son. This is our son. He's in the NICU right now. It looks like he's sleeping. How is it to not be able to go and see your baby in person? This morning was pretty difficult because he's supposed to be with me, you know. He's been with me the whole time, and now I can't even hold him, so that's definitely hard. I haven't got to meet my son yet. Because being here in this situation, not being able to see your baby in person make you start to reconsider at all, not wanting the vaccine? No. No, because even with getting the vaccine, you can still spread it. You can still get it. There simply aren't enough studies for it. Does it frustrate you to have patients who refuse the vaccine and then end up here in the ICU? We're disappointed in them, because the information that's been out there is just like what media they're using will color their perceptions and the family members and their perceptions. I didn't think I would live through a time when vaccines would be so ridiculed. Have you had success at convincing either patients or their family members to get vaccinated? I would say fifth of the time. A fifth of the time. And they may say yes to you here if they actually get vaccinated is a different story. Do you plan to get the vaccine after you get out of here? Not at this time, stuff red, all the bad stuff on it, I'm not ready to do it, because I didn't believe it. So I have to change my thinking and study. But don't you think that maybe being vaccinated could have prevented you from being here in the first place? Not at this time, I don't believe that. How are we going to get out of this if more people don't get vaccinated? I can't answer that. You even learn the saying goes, but what happens when you learn nothing from your lived experiences? That woman got COVID-19. She was previously a COVID-truther and getting the virus actually convinced her that it was real, but she still won't get the vaccine. I mean, at that point, what do you do? Is there a solution to convince these people to get vaccinated? I believe that there is a solution. But just from a human standpoint, it's really difficult to understand the thinking of folks like that. Now I'll link you to the full documentary in the description box. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can find this on the Vice News YouTube channel if you're seeing this on Means TV. But some things stood out to me and they were truly shocking, even if I've seen so much, like we've all kind of to an extent been desensitized by the widespread stupidity that we've seen as a result of the pandemic. But some things that are just truly, I don't even know, they left me speechless. So the doctor said that only a few patients who end up in the ICU with COVID-19 would actually believe that they have COVID-19 and they believe that the doctors are lying to them. And when you try to educate them and convince them that you're on their side, you're trying to save their life and you're not lying to them, they end up getting angry and worked up and they need more oxygen. They become short of breath. I mean, what do you even do if you're a doctor? Because, you know, you probably feel this sense of responsibility to educate people and explain to them why they need to do what's best for their health. And in this instance, getting the vaccine if they survive is the best thing that they can do, but then they get angry and more sick. So that kind of disincentivizes doctors and nurses from trying to educate patients. And what a horrible situation. Because if you talk to them about this, you could end up making them more sick inadvertently if they get angered by what you're saying, because they think you're a liar or maybe a Democrat hack or something. Wow. Wow. Now, he says out of all the people who have had COVID or no family members with COVID, he's only able to convince about a fifth of them to get the vaccine. That means that the majority of people in there with COVID or who have a loved one suffering from COVID, they still won't get vaccinated. I mean, if seeing it first hand doesn't convince you, literally nothing is going to convince you to willingly take the vaccine. Nothing will at that point. And one lady who was separated from her baby, she still wouldn't get the vaccine, even if she saw how it affected her first hand, the lady who was a COVID truther who we discussed, you know, she at least believes that the virus is real. So I mean, she made some progress, but she still doesn't want to get the vaccine at least at this time. These people are brainwashed and the doctor kind of alluded to this, that they choose media sources that spread misinformation. I don't know if they're watching the Fox News or Newsmax or even Joe Rogan, but they've been told that the vaccines are bad and they shouldn't get the vaccines and they believe that so much that they're willing to die just to be proven right or because they believe in the wrong things that they believe in that passionately. So here's where we're at. You know, a lot of people are going to choose to get vaccinated, who were reluctant at first, perhaps FDA approval will help, perhaps, you know, giving people more time off to get the vaccine and then recover for a couple of days if they experience side effects. All of these are policy measures that are really important, but they're still going to be a large portion of the population, large enough who refuse to get vaccinated under any circumstances and they're going to single-handedly keep all of us from reaching herd immunity. So this is the way that I look at it. We have two options. We can either a mandate vaccines and effectively wipe out this virus, at least in the United States, or B, we can choose to not mandate vaccines and let anti-vaxxers who are misinformed choose to keep all of us in a prolonged, if not permanent state of plague. Is that is that really fair? I don't think that we should let the most misinformed people in society dictate what happens with public health. I just think that that's incredibly cruel. To me, this is about freedom. Their refusal to make an objectively good decision for their own health and health of the public has inhibited our freedoms. So if you believe in freedoms, vaccine mandates are our only route to freedom from this virus. If we can't eradicate the virus, we can't resume safe indoor activities and get back to life as it was before the pandemic. So it's time to stop letting mostly right-wing anti-vaxxers impose their will on the rest of society. And it's time that we mandate vaccines through vaccine passports. And when you consider the fact that 62 percent of Americans actually support a vaccine mandate, this is just us advocating for the democratic will of the majority of the people who want to be free from this pandemic. And I wish that more people would say this and stop being afraid to say this. Like a lot of people don't want to say we should mandate vaccines, even if they believe it, because that might be unpopular. They might feel as if people are going to think they're authoritarians, but it's not authoritarian. This is the pro-freedom move. If you support vaccine mandates, you support freedom for all of us. If you don't support vaccine mandates effectively, you're OK with letting anti-vaxxers subject all of us to a permanent plague. That is antithetical to freedom. Now, Bronco Marsetic in Jacobin, he lays out a phenomenal case for mandatory vaccines, and he not just addresses the legal framework, but he explains how practically this can take effect. So this is relatively long and I'm not going to read all of it, but I am going to read a good portion of this article because I think it's really important. So please bear with me. This is what a lot of people need to hear. So he writes, however, you might feel about the idea of vaccine mandates. They're not some scary new creation of our quasi-authoritarian age. Most people are familiar with the most common form they already take in modern America, vaccination requirements for children before they can enter schools, some version of which every single state in the country has on books. Nearly half of all states imposed them by the start of the 20th century to deal with the scourge of smallpox with requirements expanding and spreading throughout the country after the 1960s, thanks in part to the development of a measles vaccine in 1963. But these mandates have also taken much broader forms with numerous examples of states and cities compelling all of their residents to get shots without exception. Massachusetts led the way, making smallpox vaccination compulsory to attend public school in 1855. The Brooklyn and New York health departments embarked on a policy of de facto compulsory vaccination to deal with outbreaks in 1893 to 94 and 1901 to two by the latter year, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia and Kentucky all had general compulsory vaccination statutes. Even the town of Muncie, Indiana, put in place citywide mandatory vaccinations in response to an 1893 outbreak. The fraud battles at the time between authorities and anti-vaccinationists which echo today's tussles to a remarkable extent, culminated in the Supreme Court's well known 1905 Jacobson v. Massachusetts decision, which upheld by a seven to two vote state government's right to enact mandatory vaccination. In his opinion for the majority, Justice John Marshall Harlan pointed to the social compact to argue that there are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good. Crucially, he created a health based exception for vaccine requirements that hadn't existed in Massachusetts law. And he also left enough leeway for individual liberty that the decision would be later used to establish a right to privacy for married couples and strike down the contraception bans. Civil liberties concerns about vaccine mandates aren't unreasonable. The right to not have a foreign object or substance inserted in your body is a fundamental element of privacy and bodily autonomy. The same principles on which we might base opposition to drug testing of workers or welfare recipients, as well as a variety of other shocking oversteps. Socialists should be deeply concerned with the safeguarding of civil liberties from authoritarian institutions, whether in the private sector or those embedded in our existing nominally democratic forms of government. But it's possible to have a broad expansive commitment to civil liberties while stopping short of absolutism. You can, for example, be vehemently against the threats that tech, state censorship and authoritarian state institutions pose to freedom of speech and assembly to the point of defending those rights for people whose politics you find repugnant. But still call for strict limits on money and politics, which is a type of speech restriction. Similarly, it's possible to oppose mandatory drug testing and non-consensual medical experiments while seeing vaccine mandates as a pragmatic solution to an exceptional and life-threatening crisis. Even so, critics are right that if not carefully guarded against, it's possible for vaccine requirements to end up in some ugly places. The Jacobson decision was horrifyingly stretched in 1927 to justify various state eugenics laws of forced sterilization on the basis that it is better for the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them star for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. While the US federalist system means the federal government is probably limited in what it can do here, one obvious course of action is for Biden to make vaccines a requirement for mass transport, including airports, as he's already done for masks. This would have the additional benefit of compelling more affluent vaccine skeptics, who would effectively be barred from traveling in anything other than a car or private jet to get their shots. But needless to say, measures like these will only be fair and workable as long as the vaccine remains free and easily accessible to everyone. In an ideal world, we would never have to turn to mandating vaccines. But given the continuing and horrifying skill of the pandemic's threat to life, it's dangerous to children who won't be vaccinated for some time. The ongoing economic disruption, the virus is spread among the unvaccinated will cause and the fact that US society has already decided it's willing to make a far worse and far more dangerous trade off of privacy for security. New York style vaccine mandates are an appropriate and measured response. They should be understood as a unique exception, but we're living through exceptional times and he's exactly right here. This is an exception to the rule. It's something that is necessary because we are living in truly horrific times where this virus has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. Now, contrary to popular belief, vaccine mandates don't mean that we knock down people's doors, hold them down and forcibly stick a needle in their arms. In fact, Bronco Marsetic explicitly is against that. He says that in this article, we don't do that. But when we say vaccine mandates, we're simply saying vaccine passports. Now, that word has become a boogeyman and vaccine mandates will inevitably become a boogeyman word. So I think that any public health official who's going to promote mandatory vaccinations should find some way to reframe it so it doesn't sound so ominous. But in actuality, all this means is that we replicate effective strategies at the state and local level that have worked. And also we replicate France's law. So already a lot of states have made it mandatory for state workers and health care workers to get vaccinated. But on top of that, New York took it a step further. And what they did was they mandated proof of vaccination or proof of a negative COVID-19 test in order to resume indoor activities. So if you want to, you know, I don't know, go to a movie or if you want to go to a club, then you need to get vaccinated and show proof that you've been vaccinated. And in France, if you want to dine indoors or travel long distances by plane, you have to show proof that you've been vaccinated or show proof that you tested negative for COVID-19 within 48 hours. Now, guess what? The day that the French president merely hinted at a vaccine mandate, one million people signed up for an appointment. So vaccine mandates work. And like it or not, even if people don't want to admit this, it may be our only way out of this pandemic. Now, was it unpopular in France and New York? Yes. But extraordinary times calls for extraordinary measures. People are dying. And they're being misinformed and they don't want to do what's necessary and objectively good to protect their health as well as the health of their community. So this is something that is necessary. The government has a responsibility to save people's lives. And I think that it is absolutely legitimate for the government to intervene here to stop suffering, to not allow anti-vaxxers to keep all of us in a perpetual state of plague. So it's time to mandate vaccinations. Don't call them vaccine passports. Don't call them mandatory vaccines. Call them safety protocols. I don't know. But regardless, if you choose to try to sell it or not, it's necessary. And it's the one thing that we can do to at least get rid of the virus until a new variant emerges. Now, we have to make sure that the global population is vaccinated. We have to make sure that everyone has access to vaccines. They're still free and they're widely available. But if we don't mandate them, there's going to be a large portion of people who just refuse to do it. It's not like I'm advocating people do something that I didn't do myself. I got the vaccine, right? I wouldn't advocate for people to be harmed. But what I am advocating for is for people to not die. I want to stop people from dying. I want to stop people from suffering and I want Americans and the rest of the world to have our freedom back to resume life as it was before the pandemic. And we don't get our freedom back unless we mandate vaccines. I'm not afraid to say that because it's necessary and it's true. And I hope that others will join me in calling for mandatory vaccines because that's where we're at in this state of the pandemic. You know, we tried the carrot approach and now it's time to use the stick approach. People just are refusing to do what's in their best interest. So we're left with no choice.