I just got back from getting together with family. Fortunately, my extended family is not completely psychotic. Most have received the jab but only because of pressure from their job. No one has been ostracized for refusing it, although I am the only one vehemently opposed. My uncle, aunts and cousins are all jabbed except for one who is a teacher and is holding out while her union fights the school district over mandates. My parents are unjabbed and will remain so. All of us still got together for dinner and no one wore a mask at any time. At dinner I was heavily outnumbered and so I decided to bite my tongue and just listen to what others were saying. A few times the topic of covid got brought up and the general feeling was that everyone is tired of all the requirements and think its stupid, especially the testing requirements. One of my aunts is double jabbed and still is required to get a PCR test twice a week because she works in a nursing home. My brother flew in from Europe and he needed to get tested before coming and again before leaving. He said it was ridiculously difficult to find a testing center in the states, but in EU they have walk in testing centers everywhere. Another cousin said he got covid last year before the jabs came out and it was nothing but a cough and sniffles for a few days, however he later got the J&J shot and it made him extremely sick for almost a week. He said he's not taking any more shots.

I did try to throw out a few red pills to my brother and uncle but that was met with laughter and complete dismissal. In the car I tried to ask my uncle "do you think it's wise to deploy a brand new vaccine onto the entire human population with no safety testing?" I couldn't even finish the question before he just kept repeating "Yes, it's wise. Yes, it's wise..." Basically, "Lalalalala I can't hear you." The one point that may have planted a seed was saying the vax is not fully approved, but authorized for emergency use. He didn't know the difference and after I explained it he said "well, I'll have to look into that."

My brother is a smart guy but he works as a government contractor and fully believes that the virus is real and all these restrictions are a genuine effort by the government to control the spread. I tried telling him about the PCR test and how it's technically impossible for it to give the kind of results they are claiming and the inventor even said so. That was immediately dismissed and his counterargument was "oh, so the entire medical field in the whole world got it wrong but YOU know better, huh?"

So at the end of the day, my takeaway is this:

Sometimes, you can't tell the people the truth, you have to show them. So here's to an interesting 2022.