 Georgia anti-vaxxers shut down mobile vaccine event. That is a headline that in and of itself makes me feel so hopeless, so depressed, they shut down a mobile vaccine event. These mobile vaccine pop-ups are usually really effective at getting members of the community to come out and get vaccinated, but they shut it down. So anti-vaccine protesters in Georgia have disrupted several mobile COVID-19 vaccination drives and caused one to shut down completely, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported. The Office of Georgia Public Health Commissioner Kathleen Toomey told the newspaper Monday that public health staff at vaccination drives have been harassed, yelled at, threatened, and demeaned by some of the very members of the public they were trying to help. At a press conference Monday, Toomey said they had also received hostile and embarrassing emails. Like, we're two paragraphs in and I already want to bang my fucking head against the wall. This is wrong. This is absolutely wrong, Toomey said, according to the Make and Telegraph. These people are giving their lives to help others. We should be thanking them for trying to get life-saving vaccines to our state. The mobile vaccination event that was shut down was set to take place in North Georgia, where a group of protesters showed up to harass public health officials according to the Journal Constitution. So you have people who are anti-vax. They show up to anti-vaccine mandate rallies. They show up to anti-mask rallies. And then you have people who are even scumier than that and they do things like this, where they actually try to obstruct the effort to vaccinate more people. They're trying to stop people from getting this life-saving vaccine that is highly effective and safe. These people are the lowest of the low. They are scum. And there should be criminal charges filed against them. This is just disgusting. And in the state of Georgia, you know, Brian Kemp issued an order last week deploying more than 100 National Guardsmen to hospitals around the state to support staff amid the rising cases. This is not the first state who had to deploy National Guard. My state of Oregon had to deploy National Guard as well. And you have people around the country trying to do their best to bring vaccines to people, go to communities that don't necessarily have access to, you know, some store that's offering vaccines, perhaps more rural areas. And, you know, these mobile vaccine pop-ups are getting shut down. Just truly disgusting. And, you know, as people continue to get COVID, as the Delta variant continues to ravage the country, things like this are going to continue to happen. Unvaccinated 19-year-old died of COVID calling for her mom through a mask. Her mother says they did not get vaccinated due to pressure from friends and family and it's a decision she regrets. 19 years old. So what you often hear, I mean, Joe Rogan was pushing this nonsense that if you're younger and you work out and you eat healthy, you know, you don't have to get the vaccine. This is a 19-year-old that died. 19-year-olds dying from a virus. That is not acceptable. That is not okay. And it's not just like 19-year-olds like we're seeing pediatric hospitals reach full capacity in some states. To not take this seriously is truly callous and just cold-hearted. So a healthy but unvaccinated 19-year-old died after spending two weeks in the hospital with COVID-19, leaving her family devastated that they'd chosen not to get vaccinated despite the threat of the Delta variant. It's sad, right? When you're 19, you're so young. You're so naive. So really, I blame the family here. I blame the family. You're an adult and you're old enough to, you know, take your own health into your own hands, but still, like, this is such a young age. And unfortunately, a lot of people, they're not going to understand the seriousness of this virus. They're not going to understand the importance of vaccines until it's too late, like in this story, where now they wish that they did get vaccinated because one of their family members at 19 died. That is tragic. That is so sad. This is a child died from COVID-19 because her family shamed her. Every single member of her family that shamed her and pressured her to not get the vaccine, they have to live with this for the rest of their lives, knowing that her blood is on their hands. They should feel disgusted. They should feel absolutely embarrassed at what they did. They should hide their faces from the rest of their family, never show their faces in public again. Like, they killed her. Whoever shamed her, they led to her demise. Breonna Gray, who was set to be a freshman at Navarro College this fall, had no underlying health conditions when she contracted COVID-19 and entered the hospital on July 31, according to Fox 4. The Texas teen stayed there for more than two weeks before dying after being on supplemental oxygen. Nobody in her family was vaccinated. Breonna's mother, Tabatha Gray, told Fox 4, and it's a decision they all regret. Yeah, I bet. I bet they regret that decision. The last words Tabatha ever spoke to her daughter were ones trying to calm her down over the phone as the 19-year-old's condition worsened on August 19th and she died hours later. This is so heartbreaking. You just hear her screaming through the mask for me. And that was the last time Tabatha Gray said, and the last voice I heard is her yelling for me in her mask. The entire household was unvaccinated and that led to all of them contracting the virus. However, only the teen felt seriously ill and ended up in the hospital. It's just, what do you even say to this? And you know, you would think that stories like this, stories of prominent right-wingers like Phil Valentine, Dick Ferrell dying, that would like wake some of these dumb fucks up, but it's not. Nothing is going to resonate with them unless they experience it firsthand. They're not going to be moved. They're not going to be moved. And what's disgusting about all of this is that like the people who are peddling anti-vax nonsense, they're acting as if they're the victims. Now in some instance, if you're an anti-vax and you get COVID and you die, yeah, you are a victim of this virus. But like, look at what we're seeing here. Anyone noticing a personality change in their jabbed friends? What, like maybe your friends are getting irritated that you aren't getting a vaccine that could save your life? Maybe the personality change is them fucking caring about you. You, ugh. I can't with these people. I can't with these people. Yes, OMG. I thought I was the only one who noticed this. Yeah, I can't believe that people around me would dare to encourage me to get a vaccine that could potentially save my life. How dare they? These jabbed people, they're the bad guys. What a bunch of fucking idiots. Big changes in some of them. Not had anyone close-ish to me get it until last night. My 20-year-old daughter's friend got Pfizer two weeks later is in the hospital with some heart issues she told me. Yeah, correlation doesn't equal causation. For some of these people, if they know someone who got vaccinated, if they have any medical issue, if they have a tummy ache, they're going to attribute that to the vaccine. That's what they're going to do. And that will just further, you know, solidify this belief in them that the vaccines are bad. They'll do this. Oh, I know this one person who got vaccinated and then, you know, they had a headache for like a week. It's definitely from the vaccine. I mean, how many millions of Americans have gotten the vaccine? Well over more than 160 million at this point. I mean, why would you be more afraid of this vaccine that's killed zero people compared to a virus that's killed 600 and what, 20,000 people? Yeah, captivating chameleon. Pfizer vaccine with no issues. I got the Moderna vaccine, was sick for a day after my second dose, felt better on day three. I mean, I just, I don't get their thinking. It's conspiratorial. It's a little bit of that, a little bit of stupidity. This person is memeing about oh, so you were zombies. I think some people think that the movie I am Legend with Bull Smith where they found like a vaccine for cancer and turned the world into like the zombie apocalypse. Like, I think people believe that that was actually nonfiction, that it was some sort of a prophecy because the beliefs that people express is so embarrassingly delusional. So far not mind. They still realize the choice one has. That is so true. So I mean, basically, this is a gigantic circle jerk jab derangement syndrome. This is a giant circle jerk, like a massive thread on Twitter of dump pluck anti-vaxxers basically feeling as if, oh, you know, they're the victims. They're being bullied and pressured because maybe they had a friend get irritated at their anti-vaxx misinformation. I mean, certainly if you ask my friends if I changed since getting the jab, I don't know that they'd say that I changed since getting the jab, but they've certainly realized that my patients has run out. My patients has run out. I log on to Facebook after not really going on for a while and I see like this huge array of anti-mask, anti-vaccine bullshit. It's so frustrating. So what do I do? I respond by trying to drown out their misinformation with facts. Now, I'm kind of losing hope in terms of how to get through to these people, but I do want to read this article for what it's worth. This is from Sophie Stroud, published in the Huffington Post. She says, I was an anti-vaxxer this year. I changed my mind. Changing your mind, especially strongly views held is hard. So we're going to read through some of this to see maybe if she has any insight that can help us convince our loved ones because look, we all know someone who refuses to get vaccinated. And we all care about these people. We want to make sure that they survive. So it's so frustrating that they, they feel as if, you know, us looking out for their well-being is like some sort of an attack. It just goes to show you how prevalent misinformation is. I mean, anti-vaxx sentiment was really this fringe thing. And then as, you know, Facebook exploded in popularity. So too, did all of these fringe beliefs, even like there's, it feels like there's more flat earthers now than ever before. It's just truly like we live in such a discouraging time. You think that you think that because we all have cell phones, like we all have basically unlimited information at our fingertips that we'd be smarter than ever, but we're dumber than ever. So back in the early days of COVID-19, when there were whisperings of possible vaccines, I was a hard no. Summer arrived and along with the heat came all the rumors of possible side effects. I was still saying no, I won't get it. Fall arrived and with it another wave. I lost track. Was it the third wave, fourth of infections and hospitalizations? The number of people dying from COVID kept rising. I along with so many others realized that our hope of this pandemic ending this summer with summer hadn't come to fruition. It was around this time that I realized. Sorry. It was around this time that I realized I might need to pay a bit more attention to all of the vaccine talk. And instead of just shaking my head, actually learn more and not from random people online, but from actual experts. See this right here? You can't insert this instinct into somebody. Most people, if they are going to have a change of heart, they have to have that spark that ignites in them because of them to want to search and actually do more. Find out what the facts are. I don't know how you trigger this in somebody. Force them to be introspective. Force them to actually do research that doesn't lead to fucking infowars. Because before, when you tell people to do research and look things up, you would expect them to find authoritative sources, legitimate sources. But now they can easily be duped by misinformation that is seemingly legitimate, that will use medical jargon that seems pretty valid, but it's not. And that's where people are getting duped by this veneer of professionalism, but it's just misinformation. So I still turn to people online, but this time it was epidemiologists and immunologists who were experts in viruses and vaccines. So, I mean, people, they'll turn to some other quack doctors. So, you know, I like that this person is writing this article, but I don't necessarily feel like this is going to yield any valuable information from our standpoint of trying to convince other anti-vaxxers because they won't even hear facts. They'll tune it out. They think that you're lying or think that you're some sort of a crisis actor. See what the last paragraph is here. Changing your mind, especially strongly held views is hard. It's hard to recognize that you were wrong or that you listen to the wrong people, but you know what I've realized. It's also very liberating. That is true. It feels good to allow your views to shift as you gain new information or new experiences and to recognize that as growth, rather than digging in your heels and trying to remain true to something that no longer feels right to you. Let's normalize changing your mind. Let's support people who choose to grow rather than stay stuck. And let's end this pandemic by choosing facts and kindness, even when we totally don't totally agree. Yeah, I mean, it is liberating. It is liberating to actually change your mind, right? It's liberating to know you were wrong and then make that shift. So, yeah, I mean, that's all I'll say about this. Anti-vaxxers are... I hope that they don't find out the hard way, but unfortunately for most of them at this point in time, if you haven't changed your mind yet, I think that you're not going to find out unless, you know, you get COVID.