Speaker 1: Welcome to the show. We're going to be doing a variety of different vaccine
related discussions today, some of them are very depressing, like this first one. Some of them have
me sort of cautiously optimistic, even if it's for sort of weird or cynical reasons. But we'll get to
that in a moment. I want to start with a new poll that can contextualizes the why of so many people
not getting the vaccine, the covid-19 vaccine, any of the covid-19 vaccines that are available. And
we've been talking about these really pathetic low numbers where we have endless millions,
millions, millions of vaccines available and we're struggling to even vaccinate 500000 people
per day in terms of one dose. Remember it being mostly to dose vaccines. That's probably only
about two hundred and eighty or three hundred thousand additional fully vaccinated people
per day. We know that it's Republicans who are overwhelmingly the anti vaccine individuals.
And we've sort of seen some polling generally talk about, oh, you know, if
the vaccine were to be fully approved by the FDA, one third of the current anti vaccine would go and
get vaccines. And then we say, well, is that true or is that just the excuse they're coming up with
now? And when the vaccines are fully approved rather than just for emergency use, they'll
come up with some other reason or they just won't come up with any reason and they'll just never go.
We have a disturbing new poll which finds that 20 percent of Americans believe the government
is injecting microchips into their bodies, hit the body with a microchip in the vaccines.
And this is shocking. Half of Americans believe it is possible, believe it is possible. OK,
listen to this. Where is the start of this polling information? An Economist YouGov
poll released last week did not attempt to link false beliefs to social media use, but it did
find wide confidence in a popular conspiracy theory among one in five Americans. The Economist
YouGov asked fifteen hundred Americans to respond to a set of statements,
including the US government is using the vaccine to microchip the population.
Five percent of all respondents, one in 20. This is a representative sample.
One in 20 said it is definitely true that the US is micro chipping people with a covid-19 vaccine.
Fifteen percent said it's probably true. So you've got 20 percent of the country who believes it is
either definitely or probably true that people are getting microchips by the government for
some kind of subsequent tracking, presumably by the covid vaccine. And then look at this,
fewer than half of respondents, just forty six percent, said it was definitely false. So
between the 20 percent who think it's definitely or probably true and those who think it's
definitely false, you've got an additional huge portion of the population that thinks,
you know, it's unlikely but possible or plausible that people are being micro chipped by these
vaccines. As the article points out, the debunked theory has circulated widely in the last year.
Proponents suggest implanted chips will be used at some future date to subjugate humanity. Reuters
reported in twenty twenty one, video in support was viewed twenty seven thousand times. Well,
that's not that much, but it's still disturbing. The belief in the microchip conspiracy was the
most commonly held, was most commonly held by lower income voters, white, non college educated
Americans that that white, non college educated group continues to be a very problematic group.
And Hispanic respondents, and I've spoken about that before, as well as an immigrant from South
America myself, was very in touch with a variety of these communities in the U.S., that is. And and
when I was doing the Spanish show in the lead up to the election on the Australia Network,
the amount of anti vaccine conspiracy type stuff I was getting in Spanish was disturbing. I told some
stories about InterAction's a couple of weeks ago in Miami with some Cuban-Americans who believed
the vaccine magnetized my mom. I told that story on the bonus show and others. So nothing there
is particularly surprising. Now, the one thing I continue to bring up about this, this microchip
conspiracy is other than, you know, when the first question that I don't listen, I don't know
what the first question is. One question we would ask would be, does the technology exist to inject
such a microchip into people through a vaccine, through a syringe that is the size of the covid
vaccine syringe? The medical research I've looked at says it's not even possible. We don't we're not
aware at least of that technology now. It's a good conspiracy theorists would say, well, David, come
on, they're keeping it secret that they have such little microchips and that becomes indefeasible
and it's endless cynicism. But the bigger question for me is. Why would you need to do this to track
people when almost everybody is carrying something around that provides a wealth of information about
us, including our location, meaning our mobile phones? In addition to that, most people's
credit cards, debit cards now also have chips on them, which, if you wanted to have it, do dual
do the dual role of also tracking people. You could do it that way. Why would the government
need to microchip people via an optional vaccine when everybody is already carrying around a phone
and most people are carrying around a debit or credit card? So it doesn't even pass the
sniff test. But this is really it has spread like a mine virus. Now, just one other thing,
too, out of a couple. So so just a few other notes from this poll, 17 percent of respondents thought
that it was definitely or probably true that vaccines have been shown to cause autism 17
percent instead of 20 who believe the microchip thing also completely debunked. And then lastly,
two out of five Americans said the statement, millions of illegal votes were cast in the 2020
general election and the threat of the virus was exaggerated for political reasons were probably
or definitely true. That's 40 percent. More than half of respondents who identified as Trumpet's
believed that there was truth to those statements. So this is really, really bad. It doesn't seem
to be getting dramatically better. But but. But but there is one little bit of news about which
we can maybe be optimistic when it comes to vaccines. And I want to talk about that next.