 Well, at least one of the COVID-19 vaccines now has full FDA approval. Pfizer and Biontech were awarded full FDA approval. So now the anti-vaxxers are totally out of excuses. Now I'm sure that all of them will be lining up to get vaccinated at once. But no, this is really good news. It speaks to the safety and the efficacy of these vaccines. I mean, I don't want to put too much stock into this because it's not like the emergency authorization from the FDA before wasn't sufficient. There is overwhelming evidence that the vaccines are safe and they're effective. So if you if you really felt the need to wait until, you know, at least one of these vaccines were fully approved, OK. But now there's no more excuses. You are all out of excuses. Now is the time to try to get this virus under control. Protect yourself and get vaccinated. But unfortunately, individuals are likely still going to be vaccine hesitant if they were already vaccine hesitant because mainstream media outlets like Fox News are still pushing fear mongering over these vaccines, even if they're now FDA approved. So as Catherine Ellen Foley and Lauren Gordner of Politico explain, the Food and Drug Administration marked the pandemic milestone on Monday as it approved the first COVID-19 vaccine for youth and adults, raising hopes that the decision will convince some holdouts to get vaccinated and spark a wave of employer and school immunization mandates. The agency's decision, which applies to people 16 and older, comes as the country battles the highly contagious Delta variant. New infections have soared since early July, as the strain has spread nationwide, filling ICUs in the hardest hit states and raising concerns about the safety of children returning to school. If you're one of the millions of Americans who said that they will not get the shot until it has full and final approval of the FDA, it has now happened to President Joe Biden said Monday. The moment you've been waiting for is here. I don't think that this is going to lead to an influx in vaccinations, but I really would love to be proven wrong. But where this does matter is that this is going to empower local governments, businesses to actually institute vaccine mandates, which, in my opinion, is the only way that we're going to get this virus under control. And this is not something that I think is, you know, easy to recommend. I mean, vaccine mandates, they should have been the absolute last resort. But unfortunately, that's where we're at kind of at this moment. We can either mandate vaccines and at least get the virus under control here in the United States, or we can choose to not mandate vaccines and let anti-vaxxers choose to keep all of us in a prolonged, if not permanent state of plague for however long. Like we shouldn't allow the most uninformed people, the most anti-science people to keep the totality of society in a pandemic because they're uninformed. No. So vaccine mandates are absolutely necessary. And hopefully this will allow more schools to institute vaccines, more employers to institute vaccines. Now Biden has to do what he can do at the federal level. He's kind of leaving this up to businesses and just like implying that this is what they should do. But you actually have to use your power as president to make the vaccine passports mandatory, make it so that we can't travel unless you show proof of vaccination or proof of a negative COVID-19 test within 48 hours. But having said that, though, like this is why I'm really skeptical about the FDA approval of the COVID-19 vaccine, leading to people making better decisions because things like this happen. There's a word for you now. The FDA just giving full approval to Pfizer's COVID vaccine. It's the first vaccine to get that full approval and in record time, too. That has critics asking if the process was rushed, was it? Oh, shit. Here we go again. So I mean, with things like this, how can we ever expect to get to a point where we've reached herd immunity because it's constantly nonstop fear mongering? OK, well, you know, I didn't want to get the vaccine because it wasn't FDA approved. OK, now that it's FDA approved, well, maybe the approval process was rushed. There's always going to be some excuse and unfortunately, the fear mongering from Fox News won't stop. But objective reality and science exists outside of the vacuum. That is Fox News that sucks people in and misinforms them. So the only way that we're able to reach herd immunity is through vaccine passports and vaccine mandates. I'm not saying that we, you know, hold people down and forcibly stick a needle in them. What I'm saying is we incentivize good behavior through public policy. Otherwise, you're not going to get to herd immunity by simply begging people to do what's right for their own health. Like by now, they would have done that. And thankfully, there's a lot of people who are getting vaccinated now because the Delta variant is that serious. There's been a million shots, I believe, three days in a row because people are seeing the seriousness. They're seeing ICU's fill up, but there's still going to be a large enough portion of the population that just will never budge. And what really makes me the most angry is that, you know, these news networks like Fox News, they will fear monger about the vaccines. But behind the scenes, they have requirements as it relates to the vaccines and masking themselves. You know, they're requiring all employees to disclose their vaccination status and they're also requiring masks in certain workplace settings at Fox News. So I mean, as they push vaccine hesitancy, they're doing everything in their power to protect themselves like as Tucker Carlson, fear mongers about the vaccines, you know that he's vaccinated, but he won't disclose whether or not he is vaccinated. And it's because this is all about money. It's all about ratings. They're actively and knowingly misinforming people because they're too afraid to lose ratings because if they say, well, you know, you should get vaccinated. They know that their viewers will rebel and they'll go off to a competitor like Newsmax or, you know, OAN TV or whatever the fuck other networks they're watching. I mean, even Donald Trump was booed at a rally in Alabama when he encouraged people to get vaccinated. So Fox News knows that their far-right audience will turn on them if they encourage vaccinations, and that's going to lead to them losing viewers, which will amount to them losing advertisers. If there's not enough viewers to warrant the money, you know, into advertising, which will ultimately hurt their bottom line. So that's why they're pushing misinformation, even if they know that it's it's wrong, even if they know that the vaccines are our only hope of reaching herd immunity at this point. So it's just, you know, I'm going to just cross my fingers and hope that people use the full FDA approval as like the reason to get vaccinated and that the polls, you know, that were showing that people were waiting on FDA approval are correct. I'm going to assume that that's the case. But am I actually optimistic enough to think that FDA approval is going to change anything if people are already vaccine hesitant? No.