You know, that was a bad assumption on my part commenting on an article about conservatives and their conspiratorial views, but it still just changes the specifics of things, rather than the grand picture, as your uncle still didn't live in a vacuum. The vaccine skepticism and other nonsense still made things worse for everyone, and caused needless deaths, aside from your uncle's. I get that it can be harsh for those who personally knew an individual, but you can't ignore the impact that line of thinking has on everyone else around them and pull out the surprised PIkachu gif when people are less than sympathetic towards them.

Personally, I had to deal with those sorts of yokels yelling at me and being jackasses because I was wearing a face mask in the fall of 2020, actively following up on the health issues that arose after I had the OG Covid and was left unable to walk more than two blocks from my apartment without being completely exhausted, and had to deal with my body deciding that it was an excellent time to develop an autoimmune disease and nerve damage. I'd be yelled at to take off "that face diaper" because Covid isn't real, and vaccines are fake, blah blah blah, from the same sort of people who were all in for Trump, so I've got a bit of a bias there. Still don't have much sympathy for them, though.

As someone else pointed out, they had access to the same information as the rest of us, and chose to go with the dumbest possible conclusions they could draw, yelling "Fake new!" and "Do your own research!" to the rest of us desperately screaming at them to knock that shit off, get with the program and stop actively making an ongoing pandemic worse for themselves and those around them. They decided that they and their misinformation monger(s) of choice knew better than the rest of the world, and now we all have to live with the consequences of it.