Oh, zero but show like cozy robots. I'm Mike McCarg. Welcome to the cozy robot show. Thanks for letting me have the week off last week.

I was feeling under the weather, but I feel better now and it's good to see everybody. We are.

I'll just kind of let you know right up top having some technical difficulties with grace who I'm hoping will join us as the show unfolds her kind of screen froze moments.

Before it was time to start the show. So hopefully social media manager Grace Von will be here shortly, but in the meantime, I think I remember how to run this show on my own.

We will find out together. Welcome to the cozy robot show. This is a program where we talk about empathetic skepticism. We are live right now on YouTube and Twitch and Twitter and Facebook.

And we're so glad you're here as we explore our feelings and how to understand other people's feelings and how to think critically and how to have information literacy and media literacy and basically work together to make the kind of world that we'd all like to live in.

And tonight we've got a really special program plan for you.

We've had a lot of requests from cozy robots to talk about COVID-19 again. Why on earth? We didn't even want to talk about COVID-19 because we've heard a lot about that virus recently for the last year.

It's basically been all we've talked about as a society, but there are new developments with the vaccine and with the variants and with people trying to figure out what to do in life to be safe with those things in the air.

So we asked you to send in questions after you asked us to cover that topic and gosh, you sent in a lot of COVID-19 questions.

So we are going to work through those together tonight. Now as we talk about COVID-19, let me remind you of something.

I'm going to talk about your questions and we're going to go through them in depth, but we have to remember I am not a medical professional.

I am not a epidemiologist and I'm not a doctor. I'm a nerd who studies science passionately and I'm going to do my best to offer you an evidence-based incredible perspective.

But anything I say, you should fact check. You should double check and you should talk to doctors, physicians and healthcare experts and you should fact check me using reputable sources.

Not conspiracy theories on YouTube, but things like the CDC website and other credible sources before making any medical decisions.

Again, I am not a doctor. So I think I see Grace has returned here.

Hi, everybody. Hi. My internet is being really weird, but I am back again and excited to talk about the updates on COVID,

the news surrounding COVID, the virus and the vaccine. Mike, what are your thoughts about everything you've heard, all the updates?

Man, we are in such a wild place right now. I have this kind of cautious feeling. I didn't know what to describe as at first.

And it's a hope. I'm actually starting to feel hopeful. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of problems still.

You know, we have still inconsistent policy state by state. We have inconsistent vaccination rates across the world.

We have serious issues with how we're rolling out the vaccine in the US based on economic access barriers and racial and ethnic boundaries.

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