I thought protests were bad, or is that only when it’s Black people protesting? 

Hundreds of thousands of people dying, and these “Christians” want to love their neighbors by exposing them to a deadly disease. 

I like when there’s a friend who’s like, “Do the right thing!” It’s nice to know that there’s at least one person who isn’t walking around guild-ridden about their role in the eventual horror. 

So what, he’s now going to spend extra money and gas and time to drive to a whole different county because, god forbid, he might have to wear a strip of cloth over his face? 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis offered an endorsement blurb for this book (because of course he did): 

“In his famous Farewell Address, President Eisenhower warned about allowing public policy to become captive to a scientific elite without regard to the principles of our constitutional system and the goals of a free society. Eisenhower was prescient. During the COVID crisis, states like New York that embraced unadulterated Faucism saw poor results across the board, while states that pursued an Eisenhower-style approach like Florida protected freedom and performed better in education, economy and health outcomes. Executives are elected to lead and make tough decisions, and such leadership cannot be outsourced to health bureaucrats like Fauci.” —Florida Governor Ron DeSantis

Florida is the 10th worst state in terms of death rate. New York is higher, yes, but it was hit early in the pandemic, when we didn’t know how well masks worked and the vaccine was nearly a year away from approval. Florida’s biggest COVID-19 death wave happened … well, after that idiotic book was published. 

56,000 Floridians have died of COVID, per official figures, though actual numbers are likely much higher. A significant number of them would still be alive if DeSantis and other Republicans hadn’t blocked efforts by “health bureaucrats like Fauci” to protect their citizens.

Also, comparing the COVID response effort to Eisenhower’s warning about the Military Industrial Complex is … rich. 

See? Black people protesting is bad. Violence against them is good. That wouldn’t be “Nazi” at all, unlike the “Mask Nazis,” which are the worst Nazis. 

“When they delete, it’s the truth” is some twisted-ass logic. But as much as Black and other conservatives cry at Facebook’s half-assed ineffective attempts at cleaning its platform up, they’re not going anywhere. Where else will they spread their disinformation? 

If anyone clicked that Facebook warning label, they’d see how this meme is utter horseshit. I mean, unless you’re going to argue that more than 700,000 people have died from the vaccine. 

Not a single person seeing this meme clicked on that warning label.

This was posted same day as the previous meme. So … they are posting that more people have died from the vaccine than from COVID itself, and that the number of vaccine deaths is 6,207. So if that was the case … yeah, this COVID thing isn’t that big of a deal! 

That is one hell of a bubble, to think that so few people have died of COVID. 

So that we can all be properly educated as to their arguments, I did look into the source of this claim. The CDC maintains a self-reported database called the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS. 

Anyone [who can administer a vaccine] can report events to VAERS (vaers.hhs.gov/reportevent.html) and a disclaimer on the CDC’s website says: “The reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable” (here). When downloading the data, users are presented with a further disclaimer that the data do not include information from investigations into reported cases. The disclaimer also says, “the inclusion of events in VAERS data does not imply causality” (here).

The CDC requires the logging of all incidents following a vaccination, including deaths, in order for the CDC to investigate and catch any unintended side effects as quickly as possible. But as this excellent Science story on VAERS shows, follow up investigations by the CDC found no causality between the vaccines and the deaths. When you’re vaccinated hundreds of millions of people, random stuff will happen that would’ve otherwise happened anyway. Problem is, of course, that VAERS is public, so it’s easy for the anti-vaxxers to plumb it for supposed horror stories and ascribe them to the vaccine. DEATH! HEARING LOSS! 

But even honest reports can be used to spook the public. The reports themselves are not vetted, and, as CDC states in a prominent disclaimer, they “may include incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental and unverified information.”

People may misinterpret VAERS, which is easily searchable, as a catalog of actual side effects, rather than possible or suspected ones. And it’s easy to pull data out of context. “For those who are out to scare, there’s a lot of material there,” says Heidi Larson, director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

The irony, or at least one of them, is that these are the same people that accuse hospitals and the CDC of attributing every death to COVID. 

Projection. It’s always projection at every freakin’ turn. 

“Maybe” he’ll “consider” the vaccine if all those conditions are met (which, in the case of FDA approval, it was). That leaves a ton of room to keep moving the goal posts, which is what they’ve all done time and time again. 

The difference between a liberal and a conservative on something like COVID goes like this: The liberal will say, “I read that…” while a conservative will say, “I heard that…” I saw this play out while vacationing in the conservative Florida panhandle this summer. The daughters were talking about how they had read all this stuff on COVID and the Delta variant, and the men in the family were like “well I heard this and that…” 

So Facebook apparently has warning-labeled this “doctor,” likely with a link with information, and the response is “they’re wrong, and to prove it, hear him say the things Facebook says are wrong.” 

Anyway, I looked up who this doctor is. Here’s the fact check. There’s plenty of crazy there, but this one sort of encapsulates things nicely:

At the 3:25 mark, the man explains that vaccinated individuals shed the virus on to others.

Ivermectin and Vitamin D make an appearance. You get the gist. 

The vaccines were developed during Trump’s presidency. It would’ve been so easy for them to say “TRUMP WORE A LAB COAT AND DEVELOPED THEM HIMSELF” and everyone would believe it and rush to get their TRUMP VACCINE. Instead … this shit happened. 

And those are young girl bikes in that picture. They have kids at home, and they’re refusing to protect themselves to protect them. 

Yeah, this COVID thing is no joke. Would’ve been useful to deploy countermeasures to avoid this horrid fate. I mean, even if she survived at this point, she’d be physically and economically wrecked. Surviving a serious bout of COVID isn’t an unconditional win. 

Oh religion, throwing shade at your family during their time of grief because they worship their god differently. 

But more substantively, there is now yet another home with school-age kids without a parent, without a mother. All because they had to wear a strip of cloth at Ace Hardware.