COVID denial: ‘You are welcome to leave, but you will be dead before you get to your car’

If only these poor victims of masks and vaccines and science and facts had enough magical American freedom sauce, which they can get only if they wear a certain color hat and vote a certain way. And anyone who says otherwise might as well be a nasty awful expertise-privileging, evidence-respecting journalist! Down with any institution, concept, or fact that that doesn’t affirm my pre-existing worldview!

Dr. Stu Coffman, a Dallas area emergency physician, says he has patients tell him they’re scared about vaccine side effects. They don’t trust the regulatory approval process and raise disproven concerns that the vaccine will harm their fertility.

The most surprising thing someone told him was that there was “actually poison in the mRNA vaccine” — a baseless rumor that originated online.

He can’t understand the pushback.

“If you’ve got a gunshot wound or stab wound, or you’re having a heart attack, you want to see me in the emergency department,” Coffman says. “But as soon as we start talking about a vaccine, all of a sudden I’ve lost all credibility.”

He sees the key to overcoming hesitancy as being to figure out where it originates. When people come to him with concerns about fertility, he can point to research showing the vaccine is safe and their issues are unfounded.

But he says of those who think the vaccines are laced with poison: “I’m probably not going to be able to show you anything that convinces you otherwise.” —Chicago doctor, others deal with COVID denial: ‘You are welcome to leave, but you will be dead before you get to your car’