Based on what Justices said during last week’s hearing regarding the constitutionality of President Biden’s forced vaccination orders, the Supreme Court seemed to be prepared to rule based on numbers.
There are some questions about whether these numbers are correct. See “Sotomayor’s false claim that ‘over 100,000’ children are in ‘serious condition’ with covid” (Washington Post), for example:
But then Sotomayor went off the rails: “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.”
That’s wildly incorrect, assuming she is referring to hospitalizations, given the reference to ventilators. According to HHS data, as of Jan. 8 there are about 5,000 children hospitalized in a pediatric bed, either with suspected covid or a confirmed laboratory test. This figure includes patients in observation beds. So Sotomayor’s number is at least 20 times higher than reality, even before you determine how many are in “serious condition.”
Moreover, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been less than 100,000 — 82,843 to be exact — hospital admissions of children confirmed with covid since Aug. 1, 2020.
(We will not address remarks made by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, which some readers also thought were wrong. The official court transcript suggested he had made an inflated statement about the annual flu: “Flu kills — I believe — hundreds of thousands of people every year.” The flu kills between 12,000 and 52,000 people in the United States a year, but the audio of the argument shows Gorsuch actually said that “flu kills, I believe, hundreds, thousands of people every year.” So the transcript is incorrect.)
Let’s assume for the sake of this blog post that perfect numbers are available for every statistic and that all of the Justices are able to comprehend and remember these numbers. A reader sent me an interesting email:
What is the definition of small? And who decides? What can they force you to do in the future with this precedent?
What if we had a pandemic with a 5% death rate and a “vaccine” with a 4% death rate?
If the Constitution limits what the federal government can do, it shouldn’t be necessary to resort to a statistical analysis to determine whether the government can constitutionally force healthy people to take a medicine that they don’t want.
I don’t think this is as simply as making an analogy to vaccinations required for children to attend taxpayer-funded schools. As far as I am aware, all of those vaccinations were and are intended to protect those being vaccinated whereas the argument for forcing a vaccine on a healthy 20-year-old is to protect others (since Science proves that the vaccine will prevent infection and transmission). Also, those vaccines had been through a traditional (non-accelerated) testing and approval process. (I would point out that those vaccines are more than 37% effective, but that gets us back to turning law into a numbers game.)
Readers: Will you be sorry if the Supreme Court refers to numbers and statistical studies when it finally rules on this issue of how much power the federal government has?
Related:
- Why doesn’t the raging plague in Maskachusetts cause doubt among the true believers in Faucism? (if one did want to use numbers to determine legality, it is tough to find statistical support for ordering vaccines or masks)
- Use testing and tracing infrastructure to enforce alcohol Prohibition? (If we are going to use numbers to justify government coercion, I think alcohol prohibition would be the obvious conclusion from any spreadsheet)
- “Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers” (Politico, 2016) (if we follow the numbers, we would shut down low-skill immigration)
It should be apparent to everyone that the mainstream media has become a tool of propaganda for some unknown agenda.
Lies about covid deaths, $$$ paid to report questionable deaths as covid to inflate statistics, election issues not investigated or reported, and on and on…
Somebody is trying to destroy AMERICA from within! WAKE UP!
I think they’ll vote against Biden but cite numbers to avoid a constitutional ruling written in stone. So they can weasel out next time if some Ebola scenario occurs.
Yes, this is concerning. All previous plagues (including the real one) have ended naturally and people adapt their behavior according to the severity of the disease (e.g., AOC would not party in Florida and Biden would wear a mask in Nantucket in an Ebola scenario).
Anon: This is an interesting angle that I hadn’t considered. But I do think it confirms the reader’s fears. If what is constitutional depends on “the Science” and statistics that are often discovered to be flawed, the door is open for almost any government action to be considered constitutional, including following the lead of our greatest president (FDR) by establishing https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/08/22/internment-camps-for-the-unvaccinated/
After the recent NYT policy reversals, the WSJ is putting up resistance as well. The article contains the funniest vaccine cartoon I’ve seen so far:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-makes-bidens-vaccine-mandates-obsolete-covid-healthcare-osha-evidence-supreme-court-11641760009
By a Nobel-winner who found HIV! That’s one scientist nobody should follow! “Follow the Science, not the scientist.”
The WSJ has been a mostly credulous enterprise for the past two years, minimally skeptical regarding Science that ultimately proved false, e.g., that cloth face masks were “protective”. They’ve got the Nobel winner writing for them now, but someone who read the Daily Mail since March 2020 has had better access to what the righteous now consider the scientific truth.
philg: The British “yellow press” is fascinating indeed. Before 2020 I was a snob who wouldn’t have clicked on a Daily Mail link ever, now I consider them an investigative newspaper (if one navigates around the celebrity gossip).
It seems totally illegitimate or the Supreme Court to use numbers to rule on forced vaccinations and scares me that our law may become as consistent as Dr. Fauci statements and CDC policies that change every few months to the opposite of their past statements and policies.
How remarkable that the only thing that protects us is compilation of enlightened statements made around 250 years ago, they still beat all our “best and brightest” “experts” can come upo with.
Seems that the disagreement over basic facts — the numbers — is good grounds to reject the OSHA rule that is at issue. Typically before an administrative rule is promulgated there is opportunity for comment — something which has not happened here supposedly because of the dire emergency.
They are not going to rule in favor of Biden because no one holding the line against the vaccine is going to fold because the nine clowns said something. Upholding it would be a loss of face for the supremes and a loss of power for the Biden administration, striking it weasels out of direct defeat by the people refusing. The threat already got as many people to take it as they are going to get, if the goal is max vax losing the mandate now doesn’t lose shots in arms and preserves the façade of a constitutionally limited government.
I think that Ron Klain’s tweet will tank the OSHA rule; he suggested that the rule was the “ultimate workaround [of the Constitution]”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-work-around-may-go-aground-supreme-court-john-roberts-biden-vaccine-mandate-covid-osha-elizabeth-prelogar-11641597592
I also think the Biden Administration *wants* to lose at the Supreme Court, which is why Rochelle Walensky was making the media rounds yesterday pointing out that the vaccine no longer prevents transmission.
A loss in Court saves the administration from a host of worse outcomes: voluntarily admitting the mandate was a bad idea, angering the Branch Covidian base, and going ahead with mass firings and the protests that would result. Instead, they can blame the illegitimate Kavanaugh for creating new variants.
All that said, you raise a valid concern. The Supreme Court was always going to rule on the ‘SCIENCE!’ in part, which raises the concern that the federal bureaucracy will just lie about the science in its rulemaking process to get whatever it wants.
Imagine a hypothetical virus, with a vaccine that is 100% effective at stopping transmission, but 0% effective at stopping infection. (Suspend disbelief for a moment at how this is possible!) Wouldn’t you want the government to mandate everyone else take this vaccine, assuming it wasn’t lying about the science?
This reminds me of a meme I came across:
Crying Wojak: “How many people have to die before you give up your precious freedoms?”
Based Chad: “All of them.”
Jeff Bezos’ newspaper is already demanding that Congress should provide for vaccine mandates:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/11/congress-should-have-dealt-with-vaccine-mandates-long-ago/
“Whatever the court rules, Congress should have cleared this matter up long ago by providing expressly for vaccine mandates, either within these statutes or more generally.”
The long “argument” for this extraordinary position is convoluted and bureaucratic. It does not contain the terms “vaccine injury” or “checks and balances”.
The Silicon Valley people do not seem to understand that the power they currently hold may be transient and they might be on the losing side 10 years from now.