 Arkansas has one of the lowest vaccine rates in the country, and this is due to a very high level of vaccine hesitancy because the preponderance of people in the state of Arkansas either think that the vaccines are harmful or they reject the severity of COVID-19 or just think that the virus altogether isn't actually real. They believe that it's a hoax. And as distressing as it is to see fellow Americans, you know, become more and more detached from reality, nobody is more distraught by this than the nurses on the front lines who see this firsthand. They see people die on a daily basis. They see lives ruined due to this virus and then they go home and then their loved ones tell them that it's not actually that serious. And we're going to talk about a story involving a nurse who did have this experience. Now, a nurse from Arkansas, she worked on the front lines during the height of the pandemic and she saw all of this misinformation, anti-vax sentiment, COVID truthers and COVID deniers, and she decided to share her experience and try to educate people on TikTok. And I actually came across one of her videos on my TikTok feed. So it was nice to learn that she was actually interviewed by CNN where she shared her story and she talks about how she copes, you know, with all of the misinformation and the abuse that she puts up with from patients. And part of it is, you know, she trolls and tries to have a dark sense of humor. But at the end of the day, I feel really terrible for her. But, you know, she does seem as if she's holding it all together considerably well, given the circumstances that she's in. But regardless, you know, let's watch and then I have more to say when we come back. It was extremely difficult to watch so many people die. And then have people tell you, you know, on Facebook or in Walmart that you're a liar. Sunny worked on a COVID floor of a hospital at the height of the pandemic. Being a nurse was hard. But what made it surreal was living in Western Arkansas, where many people even some in her own family said COVID was overblown, just the flu. Nurses were really the symbol for this whole pandemic. And almost all of the hate has centralized around us. Nurses have PTSD. A lot of us are suffering from it from last year. And now we're having people come in and look us in the face and be like, no, I didn't get the vaccine and now I'm sick. Arkansas has the third lowest COVID-19 vaccination rate in the country. Just 36 percent of the population is fully vaccinated. Like many places with low vaccination rates, it's now seeing a spike in cases. Are you going to get the vaccine? I have not and I will not. I'm not a guinea pig. There's no change. You got COVID? I did. That's what he wanted to get. But then after I got over the COVID, I had a heart attack. So why would you not get the vaccine? Well, I have bad reaction to it. I see. That's good. That's better. You know, I believe that it's a freedom issue. And I've worn a mask, probably a maximum of one hour. And the entire whole thing that census COVID came about. It was so communicable. Why am I still standing? We had people accuse us of giving their loved one something else so that they would die and we could report it as COVID. We heard it more than once that we were just fudging the numbers or we were killing people on purpose to make COVID look like it was worse than it was or to make it look real when it wasn't. For the first majority of the pandemic, we wore the same in 95 for like one to two weeks at a time. Tell me what you think about the term health care heroes. I think it sucks. Why? So they dubbed us health care heroes. It just it gave the public this really wrong impression that we were sacrificial lambs and willing to die for them. We want to help people. You know, I want to save lives. I want people to get better, but not, you know, at the expense of my family's lives either. Then you have the public going, well, you signed up for this. No, I didn't. When I was 17, I enlisted in the army. I knew that I might die for my country. When I was 22 and went to nursing school, that wasn't on the agenda. You know, like I didn't volunteer to die for everybody. And even with the vaccine now, it's still a highly politicized thing for no good reason. People in my last year, Sonny started venting on TikTok. You're just trying to spread fear. If that's what it takes to get you to listen to me, sure. I had a weighted posting about COVID for a long time because of the negative reactions I got, like it hurts my feelings. But just a couple of weeks ago, I had people in my inbox starting to kill me, calling me a murderer, saying I helped kill those people. I get called a crisis actor all the time. It's my thing now to respond to hate comments for just $10 into my Venmo account. I'll tell you the truth about COVID-19 and crisis acting. I've made about $100, so. Wait, really? Yeah. When people like send you $10 and you're like, yeah, I'm not a crisis actor. I'm just like crisis acting isn't real and COVID is real. So it's like surprise. So to tell you the truth, not the truth you wanted to hear, but no. One of my biggest fears was like this new wave of COVID. We're seeing a lot of nurses with compassion fatigue and I am really scared how that's going to play out because a lot of the cases that we're seeing are in non-vaccinated individuals. If I had a patient come in that was vaccinated with COVID, like I have, like I'm obviously still going to treat them to the best of my ability. But I do know some nurses that had to quit because they just don't have it in them to do that. A lot of our Kansas, you know, would give you the shirt off their back to help you out for a stranger. Like, you know, I think that a lot of people being anti-COVID and anti-vaccine is just a product of the way that we were raised here, but they're not bad people. That was a lot. Let's let's unpack it piece by piece. So there was a period of time and they kind of addressed this in the video where we celebrated nurses and health care officials as heroes in the country. But it's interesting to me that she explains that that was actually not necessarily the best thing because that further solidified this idea in people's minds that this was all like this grand conspiracy. And now, rather than thanking nurses, people think that nurses are part of this conspiracy and they receive abuse and harassment because of it. And that's that's so sad because these folks, it's bad enough dealing with the pandemic, trying to save lives, watching your co-workers succumb to this disease to then have people demonize you. I mean, I don't know that I would be able to handle this and keep my job. I'm sure that many nurses have felt, you know, obliged to quit. I'm sure many, many will be dealing with PTSD for the rest of their lives because of this. And it's so sad to see how cruel people are because they're so, you know, they're so far gone that they believe that this is all a conspiracy to where her family thinks that it's overblown. Imagine that, like you work an eight to twelve hour shift and you try to save lives. Maybe you see a couple of patients die. Maybe you learn that one of your co-workers tested positive for COVID-19. You come home and then one of your Dick Head family member says, this whole coronavirus thing is overblown. I couldn't imagine. Like I would lose all faith in humanity. Like just listening to her tell her story makes me lose more faith in humanity. It's just it's so sad. People are so untethered from reality that even if there's something right in front of them that is empirically verifiable, they reject it because their feelings to them matter more. That's more comforting. I want people to live in the real world and it's just we're going in the opposite direction. Now, I love when she said that she trolled people into giving her money by saying that if you send me ten bucks through Venmo, I'll tell you the truth about covid, then she tells them it's it's real. That was awesome. Like the fact that she made a hundred bucks fulling people who are stupid, hopefully they learned their lesson. Like you might think that that's mean spirited, but I think that actually it'll teach them a lesson to not believe anything that that you hear. You know, if somebody thinks that they have the truth about something, you need to vet their claims, vet them, ask what their motivations are. And I'm not calling for people to be overly suspicious of everyone and our peers. Like I don't want to cultivate this culture of suspicion, which is already kind of the case in the United States, but I'm just asking people to do their due diligence. And now I recognize the dangers of even telling people to research things because that leads them down dangerous paths, oftentimes, because people don't necessarily have the capability to distinguish between what is a valid source and what is an invalid source, what is plausible, what's implausible. They don't know the difference between cause and effect. And if they do know the difference between cause and effect, they don't necessarily acknowledge that causation doesn't equal correlation. They don't know what causal mechanisms are. So it's like we want people to reject this anti intellectualism that's prevalent in the United States. But at the same time, I don't think there's any way to do this because, you know, people fundamentally mistrust government and there's reasons to mistrust government, but you have to be. You just you have to be at least a little bit savvy, have some level of common sense and think just a little bit deep. Be a little bit more nuanced about these things. Now, she talked about compassion, fatigue, and this is something that is it's going to be a thing like nurses. Are basically superheroes. The ones dealing with COVID-19, they're basically superheroes. The fact that they do this and don't quit walk off the job. But they're only human beings. There's only so much you can do. Of course, they're going to treat patients. But yeah, at this point, most of the people, the overwhelming majority of the people who are hospitalized, they're unvaccinated and it's now their own fault. And that doesn't mean that their lives are meaningless and that you should just let them die. But these nurses, they see this every single day. And with time, they're going to become desensitized and they're going to think, oh, here's another person who chose not to get vaccinated and thought that I was a crisis actor who's now relying on me to save their lives. It's just, you know, it's it's it's it's natural. I'm surprised that compassion, fatigue isn't a bigger thing that's talked about. Now, I've got to talk about the barber in that video who he said that he had COVID-19. He had a heart attack, but then he still said, I'm not going to get the vaccine because I might have a bad reaction to it. But you know already from experience that you had a bad reaction to COVID-19, but you're going to take your chances getting it again rather than getting vaccinated, even though there's an overwhelming amount of evidence showing how safe and effective these vaccines are. It's just I don't get the logic of people, but I don't want to be too doomer because there is some good news, right? So as a result of a surge in new cases, vaccination rates in states like Florida, Louisiana, Nevada, Missouri and Arkansas are finally ticking up. And that really is encouraging to see that, you know, with this new variant, people realize the severity of it and how transmissible it is. And they're trying to protect themselves. But having said that, though, you're not going to win everyone over no matter how bad it gets. And some people are just too far gone. And there's a couple of people that are definitely too far gone, that Barbara being one of them, but also these two individuals. Did anyone you know get COVID? My son had COVID. How old is he? Eight. Wow. So that's like pretty rare for like a young kid. What was that like? He was sick a lot. He's been sick a lot for a while and he's still sick. So I wanted to go get him looked at and see if there's further damage. I don't know. I mean, he got real sick. Fever every day for weeks. Are you guys going to get the vaccine? No, no vaccine. How come? I just don't trust the government. Are you going to get the vaccine? Absolutely not. My kids are not going to get any of us. How come? I mean, I figure I'll just let the world work its natural ways. OK. We've taken none of the vaccines ever, so. Are you able to get like religious exemption at schools for your kids? Is that how? No, I mean, we take the stuff that we have to. So what do you mean when you say you don't usually get a vaccine? We didn't do the pig swoop flying thing or whatever that was. We didn't do any of the, any of the before's. It's something that I don't, I don't believe in. You know, I mean, I haven't never. It seems it only comes about every presidency and it seems like it's either crowd control or whatever you want to call it. But I want my family have nothing to do with it. We've always been healthy and this seems to work better that way. So that first lady, like hearing her speak almost made my head explode. Her son got COVID. He was very sick. He's still suffering with the health issues from COVID-19. He's eight years old and they still won't get vaccinated because I don't trust the government. Some people are just too far gone. And as, you know, the interviewer said it's pretty rare for younger children to get COVID-19. So what she can do if she truly cares about her child is vaccinate herself, her partner and anyone who's eligible to, old enough to. So that way they don't bring it back and, you know, reinfect their child or make a different kid or family member sick after seeing for his hand how severe the disease is. But no, just I don't trust government. Okay. So you trust the virus more than government? I mean, this is basically child abuse. Is it not? It's just, it is, you're not meeting the basic requirements of what is needed to raise a child healthily. Like this is gross. And the other guy, you know, he said he won't get the vaccine because vaccines come up every four years and the purposes are maybe, you know, crowd control. That's why these vaccines keep popping up, which is not true. But I mean, I just, this logic is so ass backwards to me because if anything is going to be deemed crowd control wouldn't be the virus itself. I just, I'm so confused by their thinking. Like I don't even know that they've thought about this too much. Perhaps they haven't thought about this hence the ignorance, but still, there has to be some basic level of common sense. And I am in no way excusing the government because the government is absolutely responsible for fundamental mistrust of, you know, that they've been cultivating due to widespread and rampant corruption. But people, they don't necessarily know why not, you know, accepting everything that the government says is a good idea. Why questioning authorities is good. They just kind of like know that government bad and that's as far as their thinking goes. They don't extend that logic further. They don't try to explore why sometimes questioning people in power is a good thing or always is a good thing. They just think, well, a government official said it, so it's bad. But yet, you know, people who support Donald Trump many of which or most of which possibly are anti-vax, you know, Trump got the vaccine. They'll watch Tucker Carlson who won't admit that he's been vaccinated spout off this, you know, misinformation and they don't change their minds. You're just, you have to accept as difficult as it may be that you're not going to reach every single person. But I absolutely think that we have a responsibility to try to reach as many people as we can because I don't want these people to get sick. I don't want them to suffer. I don't want them to die as stubborn and insufferable as they may be. I want them to protect themselves, okay? It doesn't make me a big pharma shill as some dipshits say to tell you to get vaccinated, right? It doesn't make people, you know, shills of companies that produce insulin or EpiPens to take what is medically necessary for their well-being and health. People just like they apply whatever buzzword or label to it that makes them feel better and justify their bad position and work, backwards to validate that position. I don't even know what I'm saying anymore. Like watching these people, it makes me feel like my brain is melting, but I just hope that more people like this nurse continue to keep strong and try to push through the misinformation with her TikToks, which are brilliant by the way. And yeah, we'll leave that there. I really, really hope that we continue to see this trend of increased vaccinations continue on because it's important. I want this pandemic to come to an end, not just for my own selfish reasons, but for other people's sakes as well, but mostly for my own selfish reasons. I don't want it to continue to spread. And then we end up getting a new variant that's, you know, resistant to the vaccines. Like I want to move on. I'd love to move on if you all would let us. But you know, the people like, you know, we saw in this video, they're holding everyone else back and it's really important that we gently guide them to the correct conclusion and stop being, you know, fuck wads. I'll leave that there.