LOS ANGELES, CA – I was supposed to fly to Chicago for business but with the mass delays and cancellations, this was the first time I was happy to cancel. For the first time, it felt like on a mass scale in separate parts of the country, people were finally pushing back against the shocking government overreach on the vaccine mandates.
I guess in California, you see the most conformity. From people driving around solo with masks to the Karens who will shout you down for not wearing one, to LA County businesses checking vaccination cards before allowing you in certain establishments; the lack of critical thinking is at critical mass. With tunnel vision to get everyone vaccinated, people aren’t even awake to the fact that many who have gotten vaccinated are actually getting full blown COVID. Yet, in the fear, people are complacent and ignoring the increasingly draconian government enforcement of vaccines, which claim they are promoting health and saving lives, but data says otherwise.
This week, we finally have some pushback. Not only has Southwest cancelled over 1,000 flights due to the employees striking against the vaccine mandate, but other similar situations are happening across the country. The Washington ferries have been fraught with delays due to worker shortage, as employees quit because of mandates. Rhode Island healthcare workers, though they lost a recent case, can appeal and go up the food chain, as they fight for religious exemptions. Even in California, the shortage of nurses is felt from the 190 employees quitting or getting fired due to the vaccine mandate, and current workers are feeling the added workload. The remaining employees are now threatening to go on strike.
Texas governor Greg Abbott has now banned any mandates, even on private businesses, which he had initially supported. But as the federal government ramped up its hardline, Abbott saw a need for balance and now sends a strong message to private businesses. “In yet another instance of federal government overreach, the Biden Administration is now bullying many private entities into imposing COVID-19 vaccine mandates, causing workforce disruptions that threaten Texas’s continued recovery from the COVID-19 disaster,” he says in his executive order.
Meanwhile, while power-hungry politicians are laser-focused on getting people jabbed, an Israeli study, just released, found that getting infected with COVID and recovering, with natural immunity that results, offers significantly more protection than a double shot of Pfizer vaccine. In addition, the vaccinated are actually 27 times more likely to get infected with symptomatic COVID and 8 times more likely to be hospitalized than those who were not vaccinated. Meanwhile, the vaccinated were 6 to 13 times more likely to get COVID than the unvaccinated based on this study.
This is not to say that the vaccine is necessarily bad. The same study found that in many people, it provides extra protection, but when considering overall public health, the rigidity in wanting everyone to be jabbed is not only unrealistic but very harmful in certain cases. These are what we call contraindications: accounting and customizing for those populations that can be hurt by the vaccine. The push to get these people who are willingly not vaccinated can cause more issues than is overall helpful to the goal of infection rates and deaths.
Which begs the question: is it better to leave things well enough alone, when it comes to public health now that we have over 50 percent vaccinated rates in most states? It seems so.
If we are about saving lives and reducing infection rates, the clear answer is a balance of making available the vaccine to those who want it, and maybe to encourage some populations to take it, but it has to be out of their own free will. Mandating the jab and threatening people’s employment is not only cruel but ineffective, but as seen with the shortage of hospital workers in a short two weeks, patients are suffering, and this isn’t just COVID patients. It also assumes that strangers know better about a person’s health than the actual person receiving the vaccine, which is the ultimate government overreach and arrogance.
Getting to an impossible 100 percent is currently the priority according to President Biden and some state governors. At best, this is misguided as it prioritizes tunnel vision over a true concern for public health, especially in light of this Israeli study. At worst, it is an opportunistic and hungry government who wants more control and cynically using this disease and vaccine to enforce compliance and grow their power. Neither is good, effective or sane.
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