I agree he has a huge reach, but I think the damage has been done. Maybe Joe gets an additional 100,000 20–40 something dudes vaccinated. The risk profile for that group is miniscule. That’s not the population of people who are getting sick and dying.
Putting the responsibility of public health on a pot-smoking punch sports comedian says a ton about how badly our public healthy authorities have screwed up.
It’s also really ghoulish how the media is farming the deaths of the unvaccinated. There’s a cottage industry of people laughing at unvaccinated people who are dying, and saying “haha we told you so!”
I engage in a dozen behaviors riskier than being unvaccinated, but if I die in a ski, mountain bike, remote camping, tree-felling or log splitting accident, no one will tweet about how much I deserved death. Ditto for the many human behaviors that have a risk profile that dwarfs the threat of covid within the world of public health.
Do people queue up to laugh and shame people who die from lung cancer after smoking all their lives or cirrhosis after drinking for decades? We have a legitimate obesity epidemic (which is a huge risk factor for many diseases, not least of which is covid!) and it’s considered in poor taste to even mention it.
All of this feels very gross and screwed up, and there’s plenty of blame for the lack of public trust to smear around before we can paint Joe with any.
The establishment has deceived the public or outright lied about vaccines at every turn, on purpose. They’re still lying about what this vaccine is and what it does.
Perhaps the biggest lie is that we can vaccinate our way out of covid. It’s endemic, so the story we were told last year about the vaccine and its efficacy was a lie. And they knew it. We won’t be able to end covid anymore than we can end the flu.
That might seem like a minor distinction when we know the vaccine can offer robust protections for many people, but it’s still a lie… and people don’t like being lied to even if they’re told it’s for their own good.