I also explore how political ideologies, both conservative and liberal, influence our approaches to critical issues like vaccination mandates, gun safety, and mental health.

Drawing on my personal and professional experiences, I discuss the often difficult balance between scientific evidence and political biases in shaping public health policies.

The featured image for this episode was created by DALL-E artificial intelligence from OpenAI.

This year, I've seen many people claim to be of one religion but act nothing like it. We see it all the time with the current Administration in the White House, right? We have someone who claims to be Christian but puts their needy neighbors in cages. And their followers, who also claim to be Christian, love every minute of it.

It's not just a problem with Christians, but they are who I am passing judgment on because they are the people with whom I identify. They are the ones that trouble me because they're the majority in the place where I live, and they are not acting at all like they should. They have too much power, and they're being wicked.

This pandemic would have been over in a matter of weeks if we all would have just stayed home, worn masks and got tested. If we all cooperated with contact tracers, this thing would be a thing of the past like it is in New Zealand and other parts of the world where people did their part to follow recommendations. But no, not us. Or, rather, not U.S.

We will justify everything we did wrong in the pandemic by saying that we had to live our lives, that life is short, that businesses are people, or that one year off from school could prove fatal. Even as more than 300,000 people (and counting) are dead, we kind of just do what we do, and the novel coronavirus is laughing all the way to the bank.

Lucky for you, we have these things called vaccines, right?

So, no judgment and no talking down to you, I'm just going to put it out there that we are no better than one another in how we reacted to the pandemic.

A lot of what we do day after day -- without thinking about it -- we do on faith, with a lowercase F. We don't really think too much about stuff because doing so would drive us nuts. So, we just go with it.

Should something go wrong, we do have mechanisms of making people, institutions and companies accountable. And the people who choose not to believe that all the mechanisms to make sure that something is safe are doing their job... Well, those people are in the minority. They may be loud and obnoxious -- or vociferous -- but they're in the minority. Don't be bullied away from an effective public health intervention because they call you names.