Forced vaccination in the Land of Liberty (TM)

“Should the Government Impose a National Vaccination Mandate?” (New Yorker, by Jeannie Suk Gersen (quoted in the Domestic Violence chapter of Real World Divorce) provides a good window into the thinking of the elites:

Despite claims to the contrary, there are many routes to legally requiring COVID inoculation.

The pre-covid legal landscape, in other words, was quite clear: a state could require vaccinations to protect public health, even imposing criminal penalties for noncompliance. And vaccination as a condition of attending school or of government employment has been widely, if not universally, accepted.

There has been a plethora of legal challenges to covid-vaccine mandates imposed by public and private institutions, but courts have been quick to dismiss them.

No city or state has yet issued a straight-up requirement that all private citizens be vaccinated against covid-19, along the lines of the Massachusetts smallpox-vaccination law upheld in Jacobson, but some have edged toward it. The closest so far is New York City’s requirement of proof of having received at least one dose for access to certain activities, including indoor dining, gyms, and performances. Various states have also ordered certain subsets of their populations, including health-care and nursing-home workers, school teachers, and state employees, to be vaccinated or face regular testing. The F.D.A.’s full approval of the vaccine this week makes it more likely that cities and states will impose general mandates on residents. If they do, they can feel confident that such requirements will be upheld by the courts, so long as they include medical and religious exemptions.

The only real question is whether it is a state governor’s job or Presidents Biden and Harris’s to order residents to be injected:

And, in fact, the government has never issued a national vaccination mandate—perhaps because, in the past, leaving that role to states and localities has sufficiently contained epidemics. If any federal statute currently provides authorization for a national covid-vaccination mandate, however, it would be the Public Health Service Act, which gives several agencies the authority “to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases” from foreign countries or between states. The government can use this law to pursue quarantine policies, and the statute, broadly construed, may also allow the government to mandate vaccinations to prevent interstate spread of covid-19.

After the tens of $trillions spent on defending liberty from foreign bogeymen (our military is our #3 federal expense, after Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid), will it ultimately turn out that foreigners enjoy more freedom to choose which medical interventions to accept?

Separately, most of the above examples of forced vaccination wouldn’t apply to someone who stays home playing Xbox in public housing while shopping for food via EBT. Instead of emigrating to Sweden or a similar foreign haven, perhaps an American who loves freedom could simply transition to disability/welfare.

14 thoughts on “Forced vaccination in the Land of Liberty (TM)

  1. Everyone always leaves out that the law upheld in Jacobson was get the shot or pay a fine. I think was 5 bucks.
    Why such tyranny for something with a 99.8% survival rate? Total mortality was down in most countries until widespread C-19 vaccination. Not that we are supposed to notice.
    If they try they will only create a better world for the nonvaxxed to thrive in, there are already nonvax job boards, there was a nonvax dating app but it was banned by big gay tech.

  2. Are you not linking the original because

    1 too busy enjoying the beach in Florida to proofread blog posts

    2 advancing age has made the text and hypertext indistinguishable

    3 adopting the woke Twitter practice of refusing to link material that makes you angry or emotionally unsafe

    4 hauled off by federal authority for thought- or covid- crime while finishing post, no time to add link

    • Ryan: Fixed. Thanks! (I spent the morning flying a helicopter with a couple of friends. I spent the rest of the day cleaning out two hangars and packing up some stuff that was left behind in Boston.)

    • They only started to do that recently… but FL did quite well on cootie mortality before that, especially considering that parts of the state are open-air nursing homes. Sunlight and fresh air do wonders.

  3. For anyone who thinks it is the unvaxxed getting sick or driving any of the current illness I suggest you peruse the information coming out of the UK and Israel.

    • Israel especially. Proponents of forced vaccination are playing the ultimate “heads I win, tails you lose” game. COVID rates are going down? It’s because the vaccine is great, let’s force everyone to get it. COVID rates are going up? It’s because people aren’t getting vaccinated, let’s force everyone to get it.

      Nevermind the fact that COVID rates and vaccination rates have been increasing together. Vaccination is a new sacrament in the Church of Shutdown, and to a true believer, there is no possible evidence that wouldn’t point to “get everyone vaccinated” as the solution.

    • What I’ll be interested to see is if Church of Shutdown believers who were promised salvation after two shots will start to balk when they are told in October that they aren’t fully vaccinated until they get their third. I bet they lose a few adherents with each booster, but we’ll see how many.

  4. The legal argumentation is besides the point since any law must eventually be backed by physical force. So NYC bans untaxed cigarettes. Some morbidly obese guy is selling untaxed cigs on the street corner. The police wrestle him to the ground when he refuses to stop doing what he is doing. He has a heart attack and dies. All hell breaks lose. That does not sound tenable in this situation.

  5. > a good window into the thinking of the elites…

    In a different domain, and not directly pertaining to forced vaccinations, but since we are also talking about cars recently: Jay Leno’s Garage covers the 2022 Mercedes-Benz EQS featuring Sylvain Wehrnert, Vice President of Design, Mercedes-Benz North America.

    Fascinating and worth a careful watch.

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