Dave Mustaine took a moment during Megadeth’s show last night (September 15) to sound off about the current state of the coronavirus pandemic.
Introing “Holy Wars…The Punishment Due,” the band’s final song of their set, Mustaine addressed the crowd saying, “I just wanna tell you how great it is. Look around you, guys. Look to your right, look to your left, and look how wonderful this is. We’re all here together. We’re not freaking out, and we’re not yelling at people, ‘Where’s your f—ing mask.’”
He continued, “Listen, it starts with this kind of a sensation that we build right now. We feel together, we feel like [there’s] strength in numbers. We feel like we are invincible. People will not be able to stop us. See, the thing that’s going on right now is tyranny. This is called tyranny. Look it up when you get home. And tyranny isn’t only in government. Tyranny right now is in the schools and tyranny is in the medical business.
He concluded, “We have the power, especially us…heavy metal fans, we have the power to change things. If you look what happened in the Middle East right now. I said it a long time ago with this next song, ‘Holy Wars’.”
Per the World Health Organization (WHO), there have been over 226.2 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide resulting in over 4.6 million deaths. Of those figures, the United States accounts for over 41.2 million confirmed cases and over 659,000 deaths. The Delta variant of COVID-19, which the CDC notes is more than 2x as contagious as previous variants, continues to spread.
Per The New York Times, “Vaccines are effective in preventing severe disease and death, but 47 percent of Americans are not fully vaccinated, allowing the highly infectious Delta variant more than enough opportunity to inflict suffering and disrupt daily life. Health officials say that most of the patients who are being hospitalized and dying are not vaccinated, and that it is those unvaccinated people who are driving the current surge and burdening the health care system.”