 So I think that a general issue that we all anticipated with regard to the COVID-19 vaccine is getting people to want to take the vaccine. We can't actually end the pandemic if people are skeptical about the vaccine or are afraid to take it. So we have to get them to want to take it. We have to combat the spread of misinformation. That's something that I think we all knew was going to be part of this process. But one thing that I didn't necessarily anticipate was getting people who don't want to take the COVID-19 vaccine to not want to stop others from taking the COVID-19 vaccine because that's what happened. There was a small protest at the Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles and they blocked traffic and ended up shutting down the entire vaccine site temporarily. So this is something that we also have to deal with. So as Mary Poppenfuss of HuffPost reports, anti-vaxxer and far-right protesters blocked the entrance of a mass vaccine site at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles on Saturday, forcing officials to temporarily shut down the operation. Dozens of protesters holding aloft signs reading save your soul and COVID equals scam, halted traffic, stranding hundreds of people desperate to get the life-saving injections. The Los Angeles Fire Department closed the site at mid-afternoon, the Los Angeles Times reported. It was reopened about an hour later reported to NBC News. The protest was apparently organized on social media. The quote-unquote scam-demic-march organizers warned participants to refrain from wearing Trump slash MAGA attire as we want our statement to resonate with the sheeple the Times reported. This is completely wrong, said German Jack Kez, who drove some six hours to get to the site. I've been waiting for weeks to get an appointment, he told the Times. I'm a dentist. I'm taking a big risk being around patients. I want to be safe for my patients and for my family. Yeah. Now here is a quick video that gives you a little bit of a taste of the insanity that ensued followed by a shot of the traffic jam that this caused and it was massive. Needless to say, my faith in humanity is at an all-time low. There were these fact sheets, quote-unquote fact sheets that were handed out to people in cars and some of these so-called protesters were harassing individuals in cars, calling them sheeples and whatnot. There's actually a clip of that as well. A lot of people will tell me. Your dog needs a mask. That is just insane. This is really depressing and I was starting to feel a little bit more optimistic, but this kind of got me back into that doomer mindset. Seeing this really, it kind of rattled me because look at the way that we're responding to something that theoretically shouldn't be that confusing. If we can't even address a pandemic in a competent way and you see all of these conspiracy theories pop up, how the hell are we going to solve a much more pressing issue like climate change? Seeing things like this, it makes me feel hopeless and they were saying, have fun being a byproduct of Bill Gates and there was another lady walking around filming the people in the car and I think she was calling them sheep. You had a lady on that had a shirt that said fake news and she was referring to CNN, but ironically I'm sure that she gets her news from Facebook memes and OAN. The problem is that folks, they've arrived at the correct conclusion in a way, but the way that they got there has led them astray. They have this vague idea about elites like Bill Gates and they know that elites in general, billionaires in general, are bad, but they don't know why they're bad. They can't articulate an intelligent reason why we should fear people like Bill Gates. Like for me, from my perspective, Bill Gates is a billionaire. He exploited the labor of his employees to get rich, make billions of dollars and the wealthy elites in this country in a capitalist system, wealth equals power and they use the power that they have to perpetually rig the system in their favor so they continue to increase their wealth while the poor get stuck with crumbs. So that's why we should not like the elites. But to these individuals, the reason why they don't like elites is because they think that people like Bill Gates are either satanic pedophiles or in the case of COVID-19, he's not actually trying to fund the vaccine to stop the spread of the virus. He's trying to inject people with like the mark of the beast or RFID chips. I don't know what the conspiracy theory is in particular related to Bill Gates and I will say that we shouldn't have to rely on the generosity of billionaires to fund projects like this or help fund projects like this, whatever his role in this was and we should just be taxing him and funding these initiatives through the government. Like big farmers should be nationalized. Like I'm aware that there are criticisms with elites, but the conclusions that they arrive at, like how they get from point A to point B, point B being that elites are bad, is where all the problems arrive. It's why you can't work with right-wingers because even if they agree that the establishment is the problem and elites in this country are bad, well, since they arrived at that conclusion differently, the solutions that they would apply are completely different. So in this instance, these folks think you just don't get vaccinated because, you know, it's bad. You're getting sick from the vaccines on top of that. They think that you are going to receive the mark of the beast. I'm guessing there's so many conspiracy theories related to the COVID-19 vaccines that I can't keep up, but this is dangerous. This is dangerous. People are dying in America. We're almost at 450,000 deaths and you have people like this blocking traffic and literally getting an entire vaccine site shut down. This is the largest vaccine site in Los Angeles and just a small group of people shut it down. Imagine if the rest of the conspiratorial people who are Trump supporters knew how easy it was to do something like this. This is horrifying. Absolutely horrifying. Now I want to show you some additional pictures here. You have one guy holding a sign that says, and the lockdown. You have this guy. He has a sign with really small text that you can't even read, but you can kind of see exactly what it's alluding to, that vaccines are bad. They have a bunch of chemicals in it. He can't necessarily explain why vaccines are bad, but they're bad because chemicals sound scary. So, you know, I don't know what it is. Ignorance breeds fear. You have this person that has a sign that says, I only like muzzles in the bedroom. So she's just so clever, so edgy. And the other side of the same sign, as you can see from the picture on the left says 99.96% survival rate. Now I've seen this statistic a lot as reason to not take COVID-19 seriously. First of all, that's wrong. That is not the survival rate. It's about 1%, but it really varies depending on your age, your medical conditions, if you have any co-morbidities. And furthermore, when you just look at that number, 1%, it seems small in a vacuum, but we as human beings, we don't exist in a vacuum. So you need some perspective here. Back in May of 2020, the attending physician for Congress predicted about 70 to 150 million Americans would contract COVID-19. Now, currently we're not there yet. We're at around 26 million cases with 440,000 deaths. But if that early estimate actually did bear out, here's what a 1% mortality rate would actually look like. Quote, a 1% mortality rate at that scale of infection is between 700,000 and 1.5 million dead, roughly the population of Washington DC on the low end, or the entire population of Hawaii on the high end. So yeah, 1% might sound small in theory, but if you just look at the raw numbers, that's a lot of human lives that are lost, if like the worst case scenario bore out. If Hawaii just suddenly disappeared like that, wouldn't we be concerned? Or would we think, well, it's only like 1% of the US population or the human population. So, you know, there's a lot more humans. Statistically, you're not likely to disappear. So we shouldn't care. No, of course not, because we're human beings. We have empathy for other human beings. I just, I don't get this thinking. Well, you know, if I'm young and healthy, it's probably not going to impact me as badly. So, you know, if old people die, fuck it. I just, I don't understand this thinking. I don't get it. How selfish and disgusting this is. And it's not like, oh, well, we shouldn't care because there's a high survival rate of COVID-19. Most people do survive COVID-19, but the issue is that there are long term health effects that linger for who knows how long, how long do people with COVID-19 lose their sense of taste or smell? Is it permanent? We don't know. And also, this photograph provided by Texas Tech University shows that the people who had COVID-19, their lungs, even compared to smokers, looks absolutely terrible. Like you don't have to be an expert or be able to read x-rays to know why it looks so different, why it's much worse than normal lungs or even smokers lungs. Like this is serious. And like, even when it comes to the common cold, we all get colds. We know that we're going to survive this. But still, if someone had a cold, would you just let them cough in your face? Because you know that there's going to be a high percentage that you survive that? Of course not, because it still sucks to get sick. So this line of thinking is fucking stupid. And not wanting to get the vaccine yourself, that's one thing. But to literally actively stop people from getting the vaccine under the guise of you are protecting them, you're trying to save their soul, which tells me this is some like nutty evangelical thing. It's just the species cannot survive with this level of stupidity. And then you have figures who spread misinformation with large platforms about vaccines. And that also compounds makes the issue much worse. It's just, it's really, really frustrating. So the vaccine is needed to save lives. You're not helping, you're hurting people. If you're against this, you're hurting people by doing this. And if they genuinely believe that like, they care about these folks, then wouldn't calling them fucking sheeple, not persuade them to your side, like that sounds fucking stupid. How many of these people who are using the term sheeple, watch OAN, follow Trump religiously, subscribe to a religion, and they're calling other sheeple like these people are the dumbest in society, like they are the absolute dumbest of the dumb. And it's individuals like them who hold the entire human race back. So these folks should be absolutely ashamed of themselves, but they had no shame. They genuinely believe that what they're doing is noble, and they think that they're saving lives. When in actuality, they're not. They're hurting all of us.