Speaker 1: Well, I wish I had something better to start with today.
I do, but unfortunately, covid cases in the United States are absolutely exploding thanks
to not having vaccinated nearly enough Americans yet and because of the unvaccinated doing
things that they really should not be doing, plus the highly contagious Delta variant.
And understandably, the vaccinated are growing increasingly furious with the unvaccinated
who refuse to take the steps that everybody can take to help end this pandemic.
I mean, aren't we sick of this?
Wouldn't you accept and willingly and excitedly go towards an action if there was something
you could do to help end this pandemic?
They won't get vaccinated.
They won't wear masks and they'll insist on large gatherings of unvaccinated people.
CNN reporting that some vaccinated Americans have lost their patience with those refusing
the shot as covid-19 cases surge and mandates return.
We'll tell you in a bit about what's been going on in Florida.
The Washington Post reporting that, quote, vaccinated people are ready for normalcy and
angry at the unvaccinated getting in their way.
They claim to want everything to go back to normal, back to normal.
And in fact, many of them never thought we needed to depart from normal, even in May
or June or whatever of twenty twenty in the middle of the pandemic.
They never wanted to do anything.
And yet they won't do the things that would help us get back to normal.
And you know what?
It's correct to be resentful of these people.
You know, at the start of the pandemic, things were crazy.
We didn't know how contagious or deadly covid was.
We didn't know how much social distancing would work or to what degree masks would mitigate
the spread.
And there were differences of opinion in the midst of not yet having full information.
And while it started to become clear that there was some bad faith actors, there were
there were still more unknowns about what needed to be done.
And then when it became clear, well, OK, yeah, the masks we need we need to stop large indoor
gatherings, the bleaching, your papayas.
That didn't make sense, but these other things did.
And we learned more and more and they still didn't do anything then.
It was frustrating, I think is the way I would describe it.
And then the vaccines became completely widely available, I mean, in a way that other countries
can only dream of.
And a ton of those other countries are desperate for vaccines.
And yet here you have tens of millions of people who just won't get vaccinated.
Instead, they are more interested in spreading vaccine disinformation and conspiracy theories
wildly, irresponsibly and humiliatingly.
That's their choice.
And so now we have another surge.
It's mostly unvaccinated people getting sick and mostly unvaccinated people getting seriously
sick and overwhelmingly unvaccinated people dying.
But not only covid is here, it's endemic.
And we are now stuck with these people in a veritable idiocracy.
So now it is anger and now it is resentment and now it's fury and it's desperation.
And the world looks at us and wonders what on earth is going on over there?
We're desperate for vaccines.
We want well, wow.
We just I think Joe Biden just sent like four million vaccines to Nigeria.
Maybe it was a small, small numbers.
We have hundreds of millions.
You just walk in and you get vaccinated and you're almost certain not to get seriously
sick from covid and they won't do it.
So I have to tell you, before this pandemic, I knew how partizan and divided the country
was over political issues.
But I guess naively, I thought if something serious happened like a pandemic, we would
come together and do what needs to be done across party lines.
What an idiot I was.
I mean, boy, was I wrong.
My faith in even the most basic ability to count on the United States as a society, to
do simple things, wear masks when it makes sense to wear masks, get yourself vaccinated
when you can, which is now for everybody who's 12 or older, play by the rules.
Don't spread insane conspiracy theories about a virus.
My faith has been completely eroded by what we've seen.
I was reminded of a Kurt Vonnegut quote that applies perfectly to our situation here in
the United States.
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running
the country.
Now, my high school class was actually OK.
There were lots of smart people, but a lot of my high school classmates are also spreading.
He's on Facebook, so it's more like we've woken up and the people who had no business
running a lemonade stand in high school are now running the country.
And part of it has to be past generations didn't have such ready access to misinformation
and conspiracies about anything that happened.
Like they had it with a lot of stuff.
There was war, propaganda, whatever.
But now there is no break to the signal boost.
If you get a notion in your head that the vaccines are evil and Bill Gates and whatever,
you can just go on Facebook or wherever and you can find information that just reinforces
that hairbrained belief where in times past on some issues there's always been propaganda,
but on some issues there was not such an easy way to signal boost any crazy notion that
you had.
You don't really want to accept the science.
Well, here's a full social media platform from Uncle Bob, and you can choose to just
insulate yourself with that stuff.
So we are in real, real trouble here.
And as I've been telling you guys, we are starting to see this Delta wave pass in Europe.
I mentioned I'm going to be in Spain next week and we'll have some great guest hosts
here.
It looks like Spain, UK and other places they are, they are seeing a rapid decline after
the Delta variant took hold there as vaccination continues.
And many of these countries, including Spain, have surpassed the US in percentage of people
vaccinated.
Will look at those numbers a little later.
It's not clear how long the numbers are going to continue worsening in the United States.
We're at 100000 cases a day again, and we'll look at that a little bit later.
Florida, it's unconscionable what's happening.
Record hospitalizations in Florida, like record going all the way back to the beginning.
So we're in real trouble.
And it's correct.
It makes sense that the resentment of the people who just choose not to get vaccinated
is growing dramatically.