Washington, D.C. vaccine papers and Photo ID checks start tomorrow

by philg

Let’s check in to see how things are going at the Center of the Free World (TM). From the mayor of Washington, D.C.:

Adults need a photo ID to go more or less anywhere in the city. If we believe the Washington Post, restaurants, coffee shops, gyms, and bowling alleys in D.C. are about to get richer, whiter, more Anglophone, and younger… “Getting a photo ID so you can vote is easy. Unless you’re poor, black, Latino or elderly” (WaPo, May 2016):

many election experts say that the process for obtaining a photo ID can be far more difficult than it looks for hundreds of thousands of people across the country who do not have the required photo identification cards. Those most likely to be affected are elderly citizens, African Americans, Hispanics and low-income residents.

“A lot of people don’t realize what it takes to obtain an ID without the proper identification and papers,” said Abbie Kamin, a lawyer who has worked with the Campaign Legal Center to help Texans obtain the proper identification to vote. “Many people will give up and not even bother trying to vote.”

What does a Washington Post-selected expert on being poor, Black, Latinx, and elderly look like? From abbiekamin.com:

vaxdc.dc.gov provides a helpful poster for local businesses:

“Beginning on January 15, 2022, businesses shall display prominently, visible to patrons prior to entry, a notice informing patrons that proof of vaccination is required to enter any indoor portion of a covered location. Before patrons can access the indoor portion of the business, a business is required to check the patron’s proof of vaccination.”

Related:

  • “Coronavirus (COVID-19) Update: FDA Authorizes Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine for Emergency Use in Adolescents in Another Important Action in Fight Against Pandemic” (fda.gov): Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration expanded the emergency use authorization (EUA) for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine for the prevention of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) to include adolescents 12 through 15 years of age. (i.e., the medicine that 12-year-olds are required to take in order to eat in a restaurant is not FDA-approved, but can be used for “emergency use” (e.g., if a doctor thinks that a slender healthy 12-year-old might be killed by a virus that regularly kills senior citizens with multiple comorbidities, he/she/ze/they could roll the dice with the 12-year-old’s immune system and stick the kid))
  • ACLU on photo ID: Voter ID laws deprive many voters of their right to vote, reduce participation, and stand in direct opposition to our country’s trend of including more Americans in the democratic process. Many Americans do not have one of the forms of identification states acceptable for voting. These voters are disproportionately low-income, racial and ethnic minorities, the elderly, and people with disabilities.
  • ACLU on Civil Liberties and Vaccine Mandates: Far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further them.
  • ACLU on mask mandates: As millions of children head back to school, some states have banned mask mandates on school grounds [including Florida!]. As of this recording, school districts in eight states cannot require students to wear a mask in school; if they do, many risk losing crucial state funding. This ban ignores national recommendations by the CDC to wear a mask indoors for those who are unvaccinated or in an area of high COVID transmission. For children with disabilities or families with high-risk medical conditions, the ban makes in-person learning perilous. Many children are forced back into remote learning even though studies have shown students — particularly students of color and those with disabilities — fall behind when they can’t attend school in person. Excluding these children from in-person learning violates federal law which is why the ACLU’s Disability Rights Program is suing on behalf of groups of parents with vulnerable children in both South Carolina and Iowa.
  • “Voter ID laws a burden on poor, black Americans, research shows” (Guardian) (“research” can be considered another word for “Science”!)
  • “Why It Is so Hard to Vote If You’re Black, Poor or Elderly in America” (Newsweek): More than half of all states require voters to show ID when they cast a ballot, yanking the most vulnerable in U.S. society from the electoral process. On Monday, a federal judge ruled that Texas’ electoral law, which requires voters to show photo ID before casting a ballot, intentionally discriminates against black and Hispanic voters.
  • “Voter Suppression Is Warping Democracy” (Atlantic): Nine percent of black respondents and 9 percent of Hispanic respondents indicated that, in the last election, they (or someone in their household) were told that they lacked the proper identification to vote. Just 3 percent of whites said the same.
  • and… from the academic heavyweights: “Racial Microaggressions Related to Voter ID Laws in the United States” (Race, Gender & Class, Vol. 24, No. 1-2): This paper attempts to examine the microaggressions related to current voter ID laws along with various moderns tactics of disenfranchisement, many of which were adopted in 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.

25 thoughts on “Washington, D.C. vaccine papers and Photo ID checks start tomorrow”

  1. I was wondering how a person under 18 without an ID can prove that he/she/ze/they is under 18. Also, if one would need proof of vaccination to enter a vaccine center. But the situation is quite rosy, several super-spreader events can be attended without proof:

    https://coronavirus.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/coronavirus/page_content/attachments/DCHealthVaxDCGuidanceFAQ1.10.22.pdf

    – Grocery stores (they are not yet starving the resistance)
    – Houses of worship (major spreading events in the first wave)
    – Hotels
    – Homeless shelters
    – Health care facilities and pharmacies
    …

    It is enlightening though that all of a sudden ID mandates are non-discriminatory. And I’m afraid of the teeth in that picture!

    • Anon: I think it could work the same way as for walking across the southern border. A person who is under 30 can simply identify as a “child” and, when asked for his/her/zir/their ID, explain (preferably in some language other than English), that he/she/ze/they is a child.

      It is strange that the righteous are forced to risk their lives by coming into contact with the potentially unvaccinated at grocery stores. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a special hour or two each week when the impure could go to a grocery store? Employees could don N95 masks, covered with surgical masks, during the plague hour, then toss the contaminated surgical mask as soon as the store reverted to the safe all-vaxxed situation.

    • Like many of your proposals, I think the one about different shopping slots for vaccinated and unvaccinated is disingenuous. But actually a version of it was implemented for some time during the 1st wave in some European countries. Namely the elderly were not allowed to leave their houses except during some 2-4 hours before noon. The others were not allowed to shop during those hours.

    • Second Anon: That version (protecting the elderly) would actually make sense, if one assumes that transmission occurs in grocery stores while everyone is wearing a KN95 mask, which is probably completely wrong.

      Current measures in Europe are even more draconian than in DC and useless: The Unvaccinated are basically only allowed in grocery stores and pharmacies. We can see how well this works against Omicron in Germany’s fifth outbreak, which occurred after the Christmas/New Year gatherings, just like last year. But officially it is the Unvaccinated who are poisoning the wells!

    • “Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a special hour or two each week when the impure could go to a grocery store?”

      Publix did this in FL for a couple months during mid-2020, and opened for seniors only 7:00am – 8:00am, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

    • I think trhat someone should be checking papers at hangouts for Democrat Party interns in Washington DC. But only there.

    • @Anonymous,

      > And I’m afraid of the teeth in that picture!

      Not me. I’m afraid for what’s inside that skull and more afraid of those who vote for her and the like!

  2. Note that the mayor is timing the lockdowns to come into effect precisely on the date of the January 15th 2021 peak, a slight of hand that European governments have been diligently practicing many times. This year it is a little late, since “cases” have already peaked on January 10th.

    Still, the “courageous” measures will be credited once Omicron fizzles out soon:

    https://www.italy24news.com/health/337467.html

    “You have insisted on attributing each wave decline solely to your own actions, and so according to your false propaganda ‘you have defeated the plague.’ And then again you defeated it, and again and again.”

  3. Oh, my goodness, there’s so much to process here but I can tell you that the Academic Heavyweights at “Race, Gender & Class” owe me about $300,000 and approximately ten years of my life, which I hope eventually to extract from those poisoned minds. Reading the article is déjà vu all over again. It is a firm block of Academic Class Warfare post-digestive product.

    I’ve seen that room! I’ve walked that floor! Danger, Will Robinson! Danger! There’s no way out once you’re in! The difference between my wasted life and now is that there’s so much more money supporting it, and that’s terrifying because our addled President, once a moderate Centrist, has been INJECTED.

    https://youtu.be/ItXygU9SJCA?t=196

    • averros: I wonder if you failed to notice the explanation from the ACLU, above: “Far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further them.”

    • Doublethink is strong with these ACLU folks, I see.

      No, really, I cannot even imagine mental contortions required to twist a mandate enforced by the cop batons into a “liberty”. These people are beyond sick.

  5. It’s all for Hollywood. They need the mandates and other rules so they can run their sets. They can’t run their sets without the union agreement, so they have to have the mandates.

    “As vaccines against COVID-19 became widely available and safety protocols became a regular part of the business, however, production ramped back up again for much of 2021 (though the highly transmissible omicron variant of the coronavirus has led to a number of temporary shutdowns in the past month).”

    https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/peak-tv-scripted-series-all-time-high-2021-1235075677

    • So far I have been over an hour setting up the “Clear App” to adhere to the “Rules” for going out to dinner set by the “management” of the District of Columbia.

  7. The only way she could be more white would be to change the color of her clothes… and paint her fingernails white.

  9. Some weeks ago the French government reached the peak of ridicule (so far!) by prohibiting bars and cafés to serve food and drinks to patrons that are standing. They must be seated.

    The Health Secretary publicized his 3rd shot and advertised his vaccination strategy of using another vaccine for the 3rd shot, saying that it increases the protection. He got covid two days ago. A newspaper reader observed dryly: ‘He must have drunk his coffee while standing’.

  10. I think the poor white woman who has spent her life chronicling how terrible it is for BIPOCs should realize by now that this is a two-sided story: the White Side and the Other Side. The former relates to how the problem is discussed by white people and credentialed intellectuals on NPR. They inevitably highlight the victimhood angle.

    Then you go to the places where the victimhood people actually live and find out that it’s not that much of a hardship, but they don’t want to do it! Why? Because it’s good to have white people on NPR feel sorry for you!

    • BTW this works out well for almost everyone: the credentialed white people have things to study, credentials to earn and grant monies to spend. The uncredentialed and undocumented other people can count themselves as victims and say: “See, even these white people say so!” It’s kind of a endosymbiotic parasitic relationship.

    • @Viking: That’s a good point! I am probably not current on the cutting-edge meaning of BIPOC and have probably grievously offended someone with a Ph.D. You’re going to have to ask Vox how complicated this term is. I’ll do some remedial reading myself, because I know that using words outside their contextually-appropriate and socioculturally-linguistic definitions (at least, as currently as one knows them, which requires constant attention) is a terrible way to paint a target on one’s back. For example:

      https://www.vox.com/2020/6/30/21300294/bipoc-what-does-it-mean-critical-race-linguistics-jonathan-rosa-deandra-miles-hercules

      “There’s this anxiety over saying the wrong thing,” says deandre miles-hercules, a PhD linguistics student who focuses on sociocultural linguistic research on race, gender, and sexuality. “And so instead of maybe doing a little research, understanding the history and the different semantic valences of a particular term to decide for yourself, or to understand the appropriateness of a use in a particular context, people generally go, ‘Tell me the word, and I will use the word.’ They’re not interested in learning things about the history of the term, or the context in which it’s appropriate.”

    • @Viking: I know that when I misuse these terms, I have committed “a violence.”

      “But miles-hercules argues that while people may not intend harm when they use identity labels inaccurately, their inaccuracy is still harmful. “People tune in to this, ‘What is the word? Do I call you African American? Do I call you Black? What is the word that people are preferring these days? I know I can’t call you Negro anymore! So just tell me the word so I can use it and we can go on from there,’” they say. “But that lacks in nuance. And that lack of nuance is a violence.”

    • I’ve never been sure what BIPOC means since it started showing up everywhere a few years ago and haven’t cared enough to look it up. My guess the first time I saw it was that it stood for “Bipolar Condition,” and I’ve found that if you sub Bipolar for BIPOC, the sentence usually makes sense.

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