Television’s “science guy” Bill Nye ripped Americans who are refusing to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, saying “it’s not fair” to put other people at risk.
Appearing Sunday on MSNBC, Mr. Nye, who hosts the podcast “Science Rules! with Bill Nye,” was asked by anchor Mehdi Hasan how “irresponsible” and “deadly” he finds the “anti-vax message” pushed by conservatives like Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson.
“You can get furious with these guys, but you know the expression, ‘It’s not helping,’” Mr. Nye responded, laughing. “This idea that everybody has the freedom to do anything, we all know that’s not exactly right. You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater if there’s no fire and so on. You can’t drive on both sides of the road even though you pay taxes on both sides of the road.
“The argument that I’ve made for many years — I’m not the first guy to make this argument — is if a person doesn’t get vaccinated and he or she gets infected, it’s going to mutate in that person,” he continued. “Now, I’ve noticed that people don’t like to use the word ‘mutate,’ because that’s associated with evolution, the facts of life, we’ll use the word ‘variant.’ Fine. It will vary in that person and then that could infect me, and that’s not fair, right?
“Everybody on the other side says, ‘It’s not fair to make me wear a mask. It’s not fair to make me get vaccinated.’ Well, it’s not fair to everybody else if you become an incubator for a variant, doggone it,” he added.
Mr. Nye’s comments preceded an announcement by President Biden Tuesday afternoon saying he hopes to have 70% of Americans with at least one shot and 160 million Americans fully vaccinated by Independence Day.
