{"id":10304,"date":"2025-09-10T18:31:27","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T23:31:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=10304"},"modified":"2025-09-10T18:38:01","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T23:38:01","slug":"i-inserted-myself-into-a-conversation-at-a-bar-about-covid-and-vaccines-heres-what-happened","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2025\/09\/10\/i-inserted-myself-into-a-conversation-at-a-bar-about-covid-and-vaccines-heres-what-happened\/","title":{"rendered":"I inserted myself into a conversation at a bar about Covid and vaccines. Here\u2019s what happened"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"panel body-content\"><div class=\"panel__container\">\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.statnews.com\/2025\/09\/06\/covid-misinformation-bar-strangers-public-health-science\/\">STAT<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>This essay was adapted from Jess Steier\u2019s newsletter, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/theunbiasedscipod.substack.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" aria-label=\"Unbiased Science, opens in a new window\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Unbiased Science<\/a>.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;<em>I did my best to stay out of it. But the science burst out of me<\/em>&#8221; For the last few weeks of summer, my mom visited from Florida. It was amazing, as it always is, to have her here spending time with the family doing lots of things and nothing at all. Going to the lake with the kids, playing board games, having hours of conversation, and taking endless trips down memory lane. The night before her flight, we stopped at one of our local spots, a dive bar\/restaurant where we can be super casual and enjoy greasy bar food over drinks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At the table next to us was a group of four men, in their late 60s or thereabouts if I had to estimate. It was clear they\u2019d been there a while, judging from the empty beer glasses scattered across the table (no judgment). They were talking at a high volume, so I couldn\u2019t help but hear when the topic of Covid and vaccines came up. My ears perked up like a retriever hearing the word \u201cwalk.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In particular, I heard one of the guys talking about how rushed the vaccines were and how \u201cthey\u201d lied to us and how mRNA was an experiment and we were guinea pigs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.statnews.com\/2025\/09\/06\/covid-misinformation-bar-strangers-public-health-science\/\">Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n<a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"\/secure-location.php\" style=\"display: none;\" title=\"SHHnapI HaVWJZDcydc  d NWxMVxg\">SHHnapI HaVWJZDcydc  d NWxMVxg<\/a><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>STAT This essay was adapted from Jess Steier\u2019s newsletter, \u201cUnbiased Science.\u201d &#8220;I did my best to stay out of it. But the science burst out of me&#8221; For the last few weeks of summer, my mom visited from Florida. It was amazing, as it always is, to have her here spending time with the family [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":10306,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-coping-with-covid"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Screenshot-2025-09-10-at-19.36.58.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10304"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10305,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10304\/revisions\/10305"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}