Misinformation

Misinformation is out there – and she’s being such a bitch.

I let it go yesterday evening, when we overheard a grown young man mansplain to a trio of grown young women outside a downtown bar in Walnut Creek that, “the CDC is a business. The CDC is a business!”

It’s like, yeah, motherfucker, this is the United States of America: Everything and everyone is a business – but the CDC isn’t the nefarious organization the ignorati are making it out to be, OK. It’s just…not.

’Twas safe to presume they were discussing vaccines and I couldn’t help but venture to guess dude was/is camp no-go. Why any o’ that was happening (so loudly…so publicly…so…persistently, as we round the bases on Year 2 of the Fuckin’ Pandemic) – was the smoky haze from the Dixie Fire clouding these people’s judgment? – was beyond me, so we walked passed the scene and I let it go.

But the CDC is a business, therefore Mr. Smartypantz won’t get a shot? Doesn’t want anyone to get one? What…? I know he’ll actually yell at a group of women out in public about it. And fuck everyone else. Fuck the 2021 school year, fuck everybody else on the planet, who wants a shot, fuck me and fuck you, too. (Getting into a shouting match to remind the entitled to wear a mask, a year ago, now that I am still proud to have done. I may not have been right to have stooped, but I wasn’t wrong, Karens.)

The misinformation is real. It belies a lack of discipline and respect for the situation that we cannot afford anymore.

At best, for whatever reason, some of these  anti-vaxxers are conflating the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with, I dunno, Pfizer, one of the makers of the available vaccines being administered slowly and inequitably to mitigate the continued mutation and spread of the COVID-19 novel coronovirus. Two different things.

For the record, the CDC is the national public health agency of the United States. Meanwhile, Pfizer, a multinational pharmaceutical and biotech corporation, is a private company that, yes, is a business, a for-profit business.

Why aren’t more folks insisting companies like Pfizer release the patents, already.

While the privileged on Earth’s privileged nations can – still! – argue about the efficacy of vaccines designed in record speed (thanks for funding some of the effort, Dolly Parton!) to make our experience better, as well as question the accuracy of the science behind our collective response to the global pandemic crisis, and continue to avoid doing, giving, suffering just a little more, Earth is burning, flooding, at odds with our most desperate populations. And we are not going to be spared ’cause we pretty.

Wake up. C’mon now: Seek peace and good information, do your part.

Let’s get COVID in the can, worldwide.