Jason Isbell has been vocal in recent weeks about his support for Covid vaccines and continued social distancing in concerts and recently interviewed Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to discuss tactics for talking about Covid vaccines with unvaccinated friends and family members, and how to keep audiences safe at gigs.
“We have a lot of friends and family who are still reluctant to get the vaccine, and I just want to know what can I tell them to convince them that might help,” Isbell asked Fauci. “How do I give them confidence in the mRNA [messenger ribonucleic acid] vaccine? What do we say?”
“One of the things that we have to be careful that you don’t do, is to make them actually feel guilty and sort of point your finger at them and say, ‘You’re crazy, you’re stupid,’ or whatever,” Fauci responded. “That just doesn’t work. I don’t think that you’d be doing that, but just in general, you don’t do that. What you’re trying to do is to just get into a conversation or have them articulate to you what are the reasons why they’re hesitant, because some of them are very valid questions. And if you give them the answer to a valid question you might turn them around.”
Isbell recently had a Twitter spat with an anti-vaxxer which as entertaining as it was to watch, showed the strong resistance in some parts of the music community against Covid restrictions.
What a musician, but what a muppet…