Is it legitimate for the Supreme Court to use numbers to rule on forced vaccinations?
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)
