COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc in the United States, especially in states where the overall vaccination rate remains low, and most of those states just so happen to be in the South, especially rural areas of the region.

According to the latest figures, the case rate is highest in the states of North Dakota, Tennessee, Florida, Rhode Island, and Arkansas, making three of the top five in the Southeastern part of the country.

Yet despite those troubling numbers and the fact that hospitals in many rural areas are filled to capacity with patients who have contracted the deadly respiratory disease, those same states also have some of the lowest vaccination rates.

Missouri has a vaccination rate of 53.3 percent, but a Missouri man who spoke with CNN correspondent Elle Reeve said there’s absolutely no way he would ever agree to be vaccinated despite the fact that he was hospitalized with COVID-19 last year and had to be placed on a cocktail of treatments to save his life.

Wayland Bland told Reeve:

“I was on everything they had. Steroids, full drip, plasma from people that had COVID, drugs that they give my president, Trump, and they finally burned it out of me.”

And yet, Bland said he won’t agree to be vaccinated, explaining:

“They (Pfizer) shafted my president. They would have had the vaccine, already had it, but they wouldn’t give it to him because they know he would be reelected so they had to swindle around and… keep it from him.”

Of course, Bland neglected to add that Trump himself reportedly took the vaccine before he left office in January. That fact doesn’t exactly bolster Bland’s assertion that Trump was “shafted.”

Trump completely mishandled the COVID pandemic. He minimized the danger even though he knew it was a horrible virus that had already killed hundreds of thousands across the globe.

But those who support Trump are — just like him — fond of conspiracy theories and caught up in an endless cycle of thinking they’re the victims. No wonder so many of them are winding up in ICUs with a ventilator tube down their throats.

Here’s the video from CNN:

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