Avowed leftist Sean Penn has a strong position when it comes to unvaccinated people and how they should behave.
The 62-year-old actor recently made his feelings known while speaking with Extra. When asked by the interviewer how he felt about “anti-vaccine rhetoric,” Penn replied, “It’s a cowardice of conviction. I think that it is an unwillingness to engage in a culture of common sense. That at this point, it seems criminal to me, actually.”
He continued: “I really feel that if someone chooses not to be vaccinated, that they should choose to stay home. Not go to work. Not have a job. As long as we’re all paying for these streets, we gotta ride safely on them. And so I’m just hopeful that the mindset will change.”
Penn said “leadership” seems to be on board but hopes to get “everyone on the same page” about COVID vaccines.
His statements come on the heels of a report which found that the majority of individuals who contracted COVID and died were vaccinated.
As The Daily Wire previously reported, an analysis performed by The Washington Post’s Health 202 found that 58% of coronavirus fatalities in August occurred in instances where the person was vaccinated against COVID or had received a booster. This figure has more than doubled since September of last year.
“We can no longer say this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Cynthia Cox, vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told the Post.
It’s estimated that 80% of the U.S. population was vaccinated as of October. Of those, 68% are fully vaccinated, and 34% received boosters.
Meanwhile, Penn has advocated for mandatory vaccinations in the past, likening the shot to getting a driver’s license.
“This is one of those things that should be mandatory,” the “I Am Sam” actor told Yahoo Entertainment last year.
Penn spoke about how vaccine hesitancy was frustrating for him.
“A resistance that’s just based on a certain kind of … lack of imagination and understanding of anything that’s helpful to the human race, I’ve become very frustrated by that. But I can only work within my own bounds and say that, for me, it should be mandatory,” he told the publication.