EXCERPT:
BET-DAVID: “America is supposed to be the one that offers the most freedom. That’s what America is supposed to be.”
DEGRASSE TYSON: “OK. So watch.”
BET-DAVID: “So — so — so for example — so for example, if you use that argument, so somebody may say, well, freedom of choice, I want to choose what I want to do with the body. You’re right.”
DEGRASSE TYSON: “What body? What body?”
BET-DAVID: “If you want to get an abortion, it’s all yours.”
DEGRASSE TYSON: “Oh, your own body. Your own body. Sorry. All right.”
BET-DAVID: “If you want to get an abortion, get an abortion. If I want to get the vaccine, I get to choose. So you can’t force — if I can’t force you to get an abortion, you shouldn’t be able to force me to get the —”
DEGRASSE TYSON: “Because it’s not about you. It’s about people you interact with. And that’s the social contract of public —”
BET-DAVID: “But we don’t — we don’t even know if the vaccine worked or not at the time.”
DEGRASSE TYSON: “Yes, that’s what the trials are! Dude, that’s why these trials — what — are you missing data out there?”
BET-DAVID: “But — but let me ask you a question. Are we saying only one type of scientists are right.”
DEGRASSE TYSON: “No, we’re saying that the system in place —”
BET-DAVID: “The 16,000 that signed that —”
DEGRASSE TYSON: “Hold on. No, no, no. The system in place to test vaccines.”
BET-DAVID: “Yeah.”
DEGRASSE TYSON: “There’s an entire system that’s in place, that — that — with review boards and all of this.”
BET-DAVID: “Yeah. And the average —”
DEGRASSE TYSON: “That’s in place. Now you can say — you can — what you can say is, I — I have a better idea than all these review boards and all these agencies and the CDC, I have a better idea. Here’s what you should do and that would have made everything better. OK. You can put forth that idea. But what I’m saying is, in a case where you can contaminate someone else, it’s not about you. It’s about the collective health.”
BET-DAVID: “You’re assuming. You’re assuming. You’re assuming because somebody can take the vaccine, won’t get Covid, which by the way, I don’t need to play the clips for you to see it what everybody said, ‘Hey, if you get it, you’re not going to get it. If you take the vaccine, you’re not going to get it.’ Rachel Maddow, Joe Biden, I can give you — Fauci — I can give you — and you’ve seen these clips before. It’s not like you’ve never seen it before.”
DEGRASSE TYSON: “Yeah. Yeah. What happened was —”
BET-DAVID: “They were wrong.”
DEGRASSE TYSON: “Hold on. So — so, the strain evolved, OK, so that the vaccine that prevented you from catching Covid was tuned to the variant of Covid at the time the vaccine was denied — was — was designed, OK. Over time, there were variants that arose. The vaccine provided partial protection against the new variants, enough to keep you from dying, statistically, and to basically keep you out of the hospital, allowing other people with more severe problems to get the hospital attention they required. And so then they would develop a subsequent, the booster and a subsequent mixture of the vaccine. This is what happens every year with a flu shot. They look at how the flu has evolved from one season to the next and we — what’s fortunate is, Australia tends to get the variant of flu before we do because they get their winter, in our summer and then — so we study that, have a forward projection for it, so that — so these annual flu shots are precisely out of the same idea of how this occurs.”