With hysteria surrounding the Delta variant in full swing despite COVID death numbers bottoming out, the media have found a new way to feed their vaccine fetish — mocking dead people.

Yes, this is apparently a thing now as the case of a man who recently died after battling COVID illustrates. Imagine this being one of your family members and how this would make you feel.

Stephen Harmon, a 34-year-old congregant of Hillsong Church and graduate of Hillsong College, who tweeted, "I got 99 problems but a vax ain't one,” died Wednesday after a month-long bout with the coronavirus https://t.co/sYofn73meI

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) July 23, 2021

A man who mocked Covid-19 vaccinations on social media has died at a Los Angeles-area hospital after contracting the virus.

“I got 99 problems but a vax ain't one," he wrote in a tweet last month. https://t.co/aviDHiH2fV

— NBC News (@NBCNews) July 24, 2021

I’m really struggling to figure out what his going to church has to do with any of this. That’s obviously just a cheap shot to insinuate that his Christianity played a role in him making a joke about the vaccine and to be clear, for all we know it was just a joke. We do not know if this guy was actually rabidly anti-vaccine.

Of note is that Blacks (the man in question was black) and Hispanics as demographics have the lowest vaccination rates in the country, but the media never seem to want to make that connection in their messaging because everything must pass through the lens of intersectionality. Christians are near the bottom of that calculation for the left so they take the brunt.

Regardless, how is this national news? Literally millions of people die a year in the United States largely because of lifestyle choices they chose to make. Whether that be obesity, smoking, riding a motorcycle without a helmet, not wearing a seatbelt, high cholesterol, getting an STD, or a hundred other things. Does NBC News rush to mock those people after they are dead in a misguided attempt to prove something? Of course not, because that’s objectively disgusting and ghoulish.

An ABC News affiliate went even further, actually posting a picture of the man dying because there are apparently no boundaries anymore.

A Southern California man in his 30s who openly mocked vaccines in social media posts has died after a hospitalization for COVID-19. https://t.co/CRiR4PjTg6 pic.twitter.com/Bkq7RDqRVI

— ABC30 Fresno (@ABC30) July 24, 2021

That guy in the picture is dead, and his family is grieving. They do not deserve to be drug through the mud because the guy made a joke on social media. I understand wanting to push the vaccine. I’ve said many times that if you haven’t had COVID already (i.e. you don’t have natural immunity), statistically, you should probably get the vaccine, especially if you are above the age of 40 or have any health issues, including obesity. But no amount of wanting to push the vaccine justifies trashing a man post mortem to feed one’s political narrative.

The news industry is completely out of control. What they are doing here should be roundly condemned. I don’t care about the arbitrary distinctions people are going to try to draw regarding how urgent it is to push the vaccine. People die, and sometimes deaths are preventable. Despite that, those people deserve basic respect after they pass. This kind of gross scorn is unseemly. Anyone participating in it should seek help.