Actor and comedian Patton Oswalt announced the cancellation of four planned shows in Florida and one in Salt Lake City after he said venues declined his request to require that audience members show proof of a negative COVID-19 test or proof of COVID-19 vaccination.
Oswalt shared the cancellation of dates on his “Patton Oswalt Live: Who’s Ready to Laugh?” tour in a video posted last week on Instagram.
“The good news is we are keeping everyone who is coming to these shows safe and healthy because the numbers are going up,” he said. “Now, the bad news, of course, is there are five venues on the tour that are not complying with this.”
Oswalt said the cancelled shows include four in Florida set for December and one in Salt Lake City in 2022.
“I know, this sucks,” he said. “This difficult decision was made due to the rising number of COVID cases, and also because I have an ego, but my ego is not big enough to think that people should die to hear my stupid comedy.”
In Florida, businesses that ask customers or visitors for proof of COVID-19 vaccination can face $5,000 fines.
In Utah, government entities are prohibited from setting COVID-19 vaccination rules under a law passed earlier this year, according to The Salt Lake Tribune. Oswalt planned to appear at Kingsbury Hall on the University of Utah’s campus, and school officials had not determined whether outside groups would be allowed to make their own vaccine policies by the time Oswalt’s team decided to cancel the show, the Tribune reported.
Oswalt said last week that he hopes to be able to reschedule shows in Florida and Utah in the future, “when sanity holds sway again.” He called Salt Lake City “an eerily beautiful city where the sun refracts through the mountains and gives everything this otherworldly glow,” while adding, “I love Florida.”
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“Oh well,” he said. “Please stay safe, and for the cities I’m coming to, I’ll see you there.”
The highly transmissible delta variant of COVID-19, combined with ongoing vaccine hesitancy, has fueled new spikes in COVID-19 cases reported nationwide. Research has shown that fully vaccinated people can spread the delta variant, which accounts for more than 80% of all COVID-19 cases reported across the U.S.; however, officials have noted that vaccination protects well against severe and life-threatening symptoms of the viral infection.
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As of Wednesday morning, just over 53% of Americans, or 177.1 million people, have been fully vaccinated, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly 63% of the population, or 208 million people, have gotten at least one dose of any of the available vaccines, according to the CDC.
Since the start of the pandemic, officials have confirmed nearly 40.3 million COVID-19 infections and reported more than 651,000 deaths nationwide, according to numbers compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
More than 222.2 million COVID-19 cases have been reported worldwide, resulting in nearly 4.6 million deaths, according to Johns Hopkins.
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