From Day One this whole Covid affair has been about power: governments taking away your freedom to augment their power. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:
The Biden administration on Thursday announced sweeping new mandates. The new mandates require that all employers with more than one hundred workers require workers to be vaccinated or to test for the virus weekly. The mandates also require covid vaccinations for the 17 million workers at health facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid. Moreover, vaccines are mandated for all employees of the federal government’s executive branch, and for all contractors who do business with the federal government. There is no option to test out in these cases.
The new mandates extend an earlier mandate from this summer which required vaccinations for nursing home staff to other healthcare settings, including hospitals, home health agencies, and dialysis centers.
Employees who don’t conform face termination. Employers who don’t play ball face the wrath of federal regulators.
Clearly, this represents yet another dangerous frontier in using a perceived or real crisis to justify an immense expansion in state power and state control over the population.
The Vaccinated Still Spread the Disease
The reasons given for the mandate continue to shift. Some supporters of vaccine mandates continue to claim that the continued spread of covid-19 ought to be blamed on the unvaccinated.
Yet the facts do not support this position. We know that the vaccinated spread the disease freely, even if the vaccinated do not suffer the effects of the disease to the same extent as the unvaccinated. The infected vaccinated even carry a viral load similar to the unvaccinated. In fact, health officials so freely admit that the vaccinated spread the disease, that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends mask mandates for the vaccinated.
Some other advocates of mandates, recognizing the incoherence of the “stop the spread” position, instead have reverted to the same rationale behind the old “flatten the curve” slogan of 2020. In this case, it is asserted that the unvaccinated are more likely to need hospitalization and thus are using up “too many” beds in intensive care units. That is, it’s no longer about stopping the spread of the disease, but about limiting use of medical resources.
