Gosh, Jen, How do You *Really* Feel About the Federal Vaccine Mandate?

Three things wrong with the announced COVID vaccine mandate, and a fourth I despise:

• No recognition that individuals who’ve already had COVID have immunity.  
• No recognition that individuals who are vaccinated can still be infected and contagious.
• No recognition that the vaccines work. 

Seriously, y’all: I am fully vaccinated.  I don’t need you to be vaccinated in order for me to be protected from serious disease.*

The announced mandates are a punitive, coercive measure that is fake public health policy.  It completely ignores the many factors that affect the severity and spread of the disease.  But, far worse: Civil rights much?

The fact that the mandate roundly ignores major facts about the nature of the disease makes it abundantly clear, but the part where a medication that has been approved by the FDA for less than a month must suddenly be prescribed for anyone who wants a job?

This is insane.

For your own sake, I think you should get probably get vaccinated.  For the sake of our country, I’d love it if you’d also be up for resisting compliance with the mandate in whatever way and to whatever extent is feasible given your state of life.   Because this is madness.

Just because you’ve gotten the shots doesn’t mean you have to show your card.

Photo by Dave Pape of a lineman changing a transformer, Public Domain.  Not a metaphor: An acquaintance was put on leave for five weeks from his job because his asympotmatic wife tested positive for COVID after exposure to another infected person.  The husband tested negative, but still had to take five weeks mandatory vacation lest he infect anyone.  At his job doing this: Climbing utility poles.  Policy created with no regard whatsoever for the actual possibility of transmitting the disease.

*FYI the reason I still wear a mask around my kids’ school is because I’m interested in reducing my exposure to the round of colds and flu that circulate every fall.   The reason I’m so interested is because I used to get bronchitis about a month every year, back when I was young and fit and otherwise the picture of health; eventually I came down with a case that left me with a cinematic-quality Cough of Death that lasted years.  The thing that finally cured the Cough of Death?  N-Acetyl-Cysteine.  Which the FDA just decided Americans can’t have OTC anymore.  It’s not about public health.  It’s about the triumph of the rule of rules.