The Supreme Court recently took up the question of whether elderly elites can order young peasants to get vaccinated against a virus that attacks the elderly. The argument took place in two parallel universes.
Let’s first check my usual source for truth… “Conservative Majority on Supreme Court Appears Skeptical of Biden’s Virus Plan” (New York Times):
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said the states and Congress, rather than a federal agency, were better situated to address the pandemic in the nation’s workplaces. Justice Amy Coney Barrett said the challenged regulation appeared to reach too broadly in covering all large employers.
The court’s three more liberal justices said the mandate was a needed response to the public health crisis.
“We know the best way to prevent spread is for people to get vaccinated,” Justice Elena Kagan said.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer said he would find it “unbelievable that it would be in the public interest to stop these vaccinations.”
The NYT has one sentence regarding Sonia Sotomayor, the self-described “wise Latina”:
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who has diabetes and has worn a mask since the justices returned to the courtroom in October, participated remotely from her chambers.
What about the Deplorables over at the Washington Examiner? “Liberal Supreme Court justices spread COVID-19 misinformation”:
Kagan began by claiming “the best way” to prevent the spread of COVID-19 is “for people to get vaccinated,” and the “second best way” is to “wear masks.” Neither claim is true. While the vaccines appear to slow the spread of COVID-19 and reduce the chance of death, there is absolutely no evidence that they prevent transmission, especially not against the much more contagious omicron variant. The cloth masks mandated in different parts of the country don’t prevent the spread of the virus either, as several public health experts have recently admitted.
Breyer continued to spread misinformation by falsely claiming that 750 million people — there are only 330 million people living in the United States — tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday. That would mean every single one of us tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday twice.
Breyer then implied, like Kagan before him, that Biden’s vaccine mandate would bring the number of daily cases down to zero. Again, this is not true. Fully vaccinated and boosted adults are testing positive for COVID-19 at about the same rate as unvaccinated people, which means everyone is going to get the virus one way or the other, vaccinated or unvaccinated.
But the worst falsehoods by far came from Sotomayor, who claimed the omicron variant is just as deadly as the delta variant was and that more than 100,000 children have been hospitalized by COVID-19, with “many” on ventilators.
he current national pediatric COVID-19 census from the Department of Health and Human Services shows 3,342 children with COVID-19 in hospitals. And, as Anthony Fauci admitted last week, there is a huge difference between children hospitalized by COVID-19 and those hospitalized with COVID-19. The vast majority of pediatric cases are from children hospitalized with COVID-19, meaning they were hospitalized by something else first and happened to test positive at about that same time.
“If you look at the children [who] are hospitalized, many of them are hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID,” Fauci said last week. “What we mean by that is that if a child goes in the hospital, they automatically get tested for COVID, and they get counted as a COVID-hospitalized individual, when in fact, they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that.”
There is almost no overlap between what the NYT reported as having happened and what the Washington Examiner reported as having happened.
How about the Sotomayor 100,000? That’s a lot of hospitalized and/or ventilated kids. But could we ever establish the truth or falsehood of her statement? I thought the whole point of the U.S. is that we can’t distinguish between people who go to the hospital because of COVID-19 or who go to the hospital for some other reason and then happen to test positive for what might be an asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Readers: Who wants to guess the outcome? (and when will the Supreme Court rule?) I’m 95 percent sure that the Supreme Court says it is okay for President Biden to order the health care industry around. The health care industry is essentially part of our government, with most of the costs socialized (albeit with the profits privatized). I’m less confident regarding the order directed at private employers, but I still think it will be approved since Americans desperately crave central planning and management whenever a crisis is declared. A ruling against President Biden would be taking away the president’s emergency powers. Who on the Supreme Court would be willing to risk a lifetime Facebook and Twitter ban by saying “COVID-19 is not an emergency”?
Related:
- Why doesn’t the raging plague in Maskachusetts cause doubt among the true believers in Faucism? (infections and transmission in a 95% vaccinated population doesn’t dim anyone’s faith in vaccines)
- Email received today from a hospital in Massachusetts: “As you may know, hospitals and health care providers across the country are busier than ever. The number of hospitalized patients is the highest since the start of the pandemic. The high demand for care and staffing challenges are causing longer than normal wait times for all types of care, which we know can be frustrating.” (Summary: NYT says nearly everyone in the state is vaccinated; CDC says they are therefore protected from severe illness; this email says that the vaccinated righteous are nonetheless hospitalized…)
It is official the “elite” are geriatric inbred retards. And these people are expected to have the final word on the interoretation of the law?
“Breyer continued to spread misinformation by falsely claiming that 750 million people — there are only 330 million people living in the United States — tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday.”
I wonder what he actually meant. 750 million positive tests through Thursday? The actual number is about 60 million, so that’s not it. Maybe 750,000? That is actually roughly the “new case” rate.
If he is consistently wrong by three orders of magnitude, Justice Breyer can get a post-retirement job as a COVID-19 scientific forecaster!
Sotomayor claimed that the federal government has “a police power to protect workers,”. That’s a new word in jurisprudence in this country.
Perhaps the Supreme Court should be informed that the two greatest respiratory virus pandemics have stopped naturally without vaccines or major government intervention. Both of them lasted less than two years:
https://www.britannica.com/story/how-long-did-the-flu-pandemic-of-1918-last
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E2%80%931890_pandemic
I’m glad that the Washington Examiner calls out misinformation, but scared at the same time that some Supreme Court Justices apparently get their medical information from NYT online articles written by interns.
Actually, the NYT has published this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/briefing/omicron-risk-milder-pandemic.html
and this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/us/omicron-california.html
which seems about right to me and aligns with the information I learn from my physician wife.
It is unfortunate that there has been a tendency to conflate infectiousness with virulence (severity) and the impact of vaccines on both, and to conflate what was true for one varient with another, and what is true for cloth masks vs. N95s. And finally, it is unfortunate that there has been a tendency to impugn the motives of people arguing for one approach vs. another.
My feeling is that if the data were teased apart into some matricies / tables to show the impacts of mitigations on various variants, it would be possible to come to consensus and avoid tremendous inefficiency in public health response.
Gill: You don’t think that the disparate interests of Americans would prevent a consensus? Consider a healthy 20-year-old. Why does he/she/ze/they want a lockdown or a mask order when a virus that kills those 65+ is circulating? And then consider someone 65-year-old who believes the lockdowns and mask orders are effective. Why does he/she/ze/they want to allow the 20-year-old to leave his/her/zir/their apartment?
We can ask the same question with jobs. The small business owner is likely to be anti-lockdown. The state government worker who can get the same paycheck while sitting comfortably at home might see lockdown very differently.
And we can ask the same question with wealth. The person who lives in a 4,000 square-foot suburban mansion with a big yard might say “staying home is no biggie” while the person who lives in a studio apartment would take the opposite position.
That first NYT article is kind of strange. It says “Before Omicron, a typical vaccinated 75-year-old who contracted Covid had a roughly similar risk of death — around 1 in 200 — as a typical 75-year-old who contracted the flu.”
According to everything previously written in the NYT, it is a mark of idiocy at best and hate speech at worst for anyone to compare Covid to the flu. Yet here they are saying Covid and the flu represent the same infection fatality rate as what prevailed in 2021 (nearly all of America’s old/vulnerable folks were vaccinated 9 months ago?). If so, don’t we need to do permanent lockdown, school closure, mask orders, and vaccine orders? Influenza isn’t going away and a disease with the same fatality rate scientifically justified all of the foregoing.
From one of the Times articles: “California was always doing better than Texas and Florida in per capita deaths, but today the per capita death rate in Texas is about 35 percent higher than California’s. In Florida, it’s 50 percent higher. Those are massive differences. If Texas and Florida had California’s per capita death rate, they would each have 20,000 more people alive today. Forty thousand lives saved. To me, that’s nontrivial.”
Anyone care to comment?
PhilH: Unless you have a virus that kills without discriminating by age, you will perhaps want to look at what happens to comparable age groups. Adjusted for overall population size, Florida has nearly 50% more residents 65 and older compared to California (see https://www.prb.org/resources/which-us-states-are-the-oldest/ ) so a virus that kills primarily those 65+ should find 50 percent more targets in FL compared to CA.
See https://twitter.com/DrJBhattacharya/status/1442656553845334016 for a comparison of CA and FL by age group (from a heretical Stanford Medical School professor).
I’m predicting the court will find the federal vaccine mandate to be an overreach simply because the narrative is already shifting towards Omicron <= flu and we must learn to live with it (like you predicted). There is no federal mandate for flu vaccinations, although I believe some federal agencies like VA hospitals can require staff to have flu immunizations.
Back in the 90’s I worked overseas supporting the military as a civilian contractor. At that time, the big concern was that North Korea or Iraq would use Anthrax against us during a conflict. The military required all personnel, including civilians working for the military to take a series of Anthrax inoculations. Imagine the fear of an Anthrax vaccine and it’s potential negative long term effects. The anti-vax fight within the military raged, but eventually (around 2004) the courts ruled that a vaccine mandate wasn’t legal. Of course by that time we had invaded Iraq and no chemical weapons were used against us. I believe we will find the outcome the same with this court challenge.
Breaking news: two officials (vax’d and boosted) who argued (remotely, over the phone) to the supremes against vax mandates have just tested positive for covid. Does this prove their point that mandates are useless, or will it scare the geriatric justices?
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/state-lawyers-arguing-against-biden-vaccine-mandates-test-positive-covid-19-2022-01-07/
They may seem like parallel universes, but fortunately for the preservation of Truth and the promulgation of Sonya Sotomayor’s Latina Wisdom, the one occupied by the New York Times is probably several orders of magnitude larger than the one containing the Washington Examiner – and we know that Truth prevails because of not just who is saying it, but how big and powerful they are.
I think the Supremes will find a way to split the baby – they will strike down the mandate on some narrow grounds in some places, but preserve the concept in case the public health emergency takes an even worse turn. Why? Because this pandemic hasn’t even begun yet!
Bancel, the CEO of Moderna, hinted at that in a Goldman Sachs conference call when he said that even a fourth dose of vaccine would likely not be the “end-all” and furthermore gave a tantalizing hint that much more deadly variants are just around the corner.
So the Supreme Court doesn’t want to cut the legs out from under Biden’s vaccine mandate powers just yet. This plague is just getting started, and Biden has three years left in his term.
““I will be surprised when we get that data in the coming weeks that it’s holding nicely over time — I would expect that it’s not going to hold great,” Bancel said, referring to the strength of the booster shots….” “,,,We have been saying that we believe first this virus is not going away,” Bancel said. “We’re going to have to live with it.”….“What is totally impossible to predict, is there a new mutation coming in a day, a week, three months that is worse in terms of severity of disease,” he said. “That’s a piece that we’ll have to just be cautious about.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/06/moderna-ceo-says-people-may-need-fourth-covid-shot-as-efficacy-of-boosters-likely-to-decline-over-time.html
Alex I love you! Kiss Kiss.
@Toucan Sam: You are indeed a rare bird! I appreciate it!
My guess is the Court will rule against the Biden administration — seems that a substantial number of Americans are opposed to the vaccine mandate & therefore any mandate will be widely ignored. Affects the Court’s legitimacy to uphold law that will be ignored & will encourage civil disobedience. Also, as a matter of numbers, the statist justices are in the minority.
Regardless of what they rule the amount of purebloods that take the vax because of a SC ruling will be statistically zero. The only thing at stake is whatever shred of credibility they have left.
Predict struck down and that it’s a blessing for Biden. It’s obvious it doesn’t stop the spread so all a mandate could possibly do is create onerous bureaucracy people hate.
JT: Great point! Supporters of Biden can be cheered up that he tried his best to impose a proven-by-Science muscular method of “controlling the virus.” Both supporters and opponents, however, won’t have to suffer the consequences and hassles of the rule because the Science-denying Supreme Court blocked its implementation. By the 2024 elections, both Republicans and Democrats will have forgotten that a Democrat president tried to impose a restriction on society that even the generally pro-government-power Supreme Court found to be unconstitutional.