Last month, my colleague Jerry Wilson shared a story about rock legend Eric Clapton announcing he would no longer play venues that require concert goers to show proof of vaccination against COVID. This came as Clapton’s native U.K. imposed vaccine mandates for anyone seeking to enter many entertainment sites, including bars and nightclubs.

Now, the guitar god has doubled down on his opposition to vaccine mandates by releasing a new song, “This Has Gotta Stop.”

Eric Clapton appears to level more criticism at Covid-19 vaccinations and the lockdown on his new song, “This Has Gotta Stop” https://t.co/kvr6eIuJm6

— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) August 27, 2021

As Jerry noted in his piece, and what the people attacking Clapton for his words and actions on COVID may not realize, is that Clapton is approaching the highly contentious issue from a personal perspective — his own, frightening experience after taking the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine, which he’s previously written publicly about. The lyrics of the new song hammer that point home.

“My hands and feet were either frozen, numb or burning,” he wrote at the time.

As he sings in “This Has Gotta Stop,” “I knew that something was going on wrong/When you started laying down the law/I can’t move my hands, I break out in sweat/I wanna cry, I can’t take it anymore.” In the chorus he sings, “This has gotta stop/Enough is enough/I can’t take this BS any longer.”

Rolling Stone added that the song is a stand-alone release, and that “[a] spokesperson for Clapton said there were no plans at the moment for a full album to follow.”

Lest anyone on the Right think they should hail Clapton as a conservative/libertarian standard-bearer over this, keep in mind that he holds progressive views in other areas, as the tail-end of this description of the song’s video illustrates:

The video includes images of people turned into marionettes or staring zombie-style at their phones; politicians or government officials addressing crowds; and others holding signs that say “Liberty” and “Enough Is Enough.” It also includes an illustration of Jam for Freedom, the anti-lockdown UK street-performer group that Clapton supports, as well as imagery of a world on fire from environment disaster.

In a situation like this, I think it’s important to give credit where credit’s due. Clapton might have been snookered by progressive ‘caring’ rhetoric about not destroying Mother Earth or whatever, but when it comes to whether or not an individual has the right to freely associate with other people — without the government telling them whether they can or cannot — he’s right over the target.

UPDATE [08/28/21, 2:19 p.m. EDT]: I would be remiss if I didn’t let readers listen to Clapton’s song for themselves, huh? Here ya go: