![]() ![]() The information is out there and individuals, employers, and establishments can set and are setting their own rules based on what they want. We are now capable of setting and enforcing our own risk limits on what sorts of activities we want to do. The rapid development and deployment of safe and effective vaccines-a medical miracle that could have gone months faster had the Food and Drug Administration not acted as ploddingly as a wizened old draft horse-makes possible the return to normalcy that was promised in the early days of the pandemic. ![]() ![]() Age-adjusted death rates show the benefits of vaccination in unmistakable terms (see chart above). Unvaccinated people there are seven times more likely to catch COVID, 50 times more likely to be hospitalized, and 30 times as likely to die. Let Washington state’s King County-where the first cases of COVID presented back in early 2020-stand in for the nation as a whole. Vaccines are not only effective against getting COVID-19 in the first place, they virtually guarantee you will not die or even be hospitalized if you do contract it. From a public health perspective, it should not become the casus belli for a radical restructuring of society and a massive expansion of presidential (or governmental) powers. COVID, argues Singer, “will not be eradicated” and will become a small-scale, endemic problem that should be minimized by targeted interventions to protect the most vulnerable. We are not talking about smallpox, which affected all populations and had a fatality rate of 30 percent. Singer, a surgeon and senior fellow for the Cato Institute, has noted, COVID-19 has a “0.2 percent fatality rate among people not living in institutions.” Fully 80 percent of deaths have occurred among people over 65 and just 358 children under the age of 17 had died of the disease as of July 29, 2021. There are legitimate moments when rights can be abrogated due to actual existential threats, but this is certainly not one of them.Īs Jeffrey A. That libertarian sentiment defines America’s ethos and can’t simply be written out of the script because it gets in the way of what this or any other president wants. ![]() So tonight, I’m announcing that the Department of Labor is developing an emergency rule to require all employers with 100 or more employees that together employ over 80 million workers to ensure their work forces are fully vaccinated or show a negative test at least once a week.Ĭontra Biden, everything is always (or should be) about freedom and personal choice. My job as president is to protect all Americans. It’s about protecting yourself and those around you - the people you work with, the people you care about, the people you love. This is not about freedom or personal choice. After duly noting the “progress” made in terms of vaccinations, Biden pulled up short to say that we the people are just not doing what he wants when he wants: Yet the most important passage in Biden’s remarks reveals a governing philosophy that should give all Americans pause, especially in light of the massive and ongoing expansion of the federal government over the past several decades. It’s foundational to American life that the president is not a king who can subject citizens to his whims. This is what happened to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium. The courts will almost certainly strike down this executive branch overreach and the sweeping new rules that wave away longstanding distinctions between public and private spheres of activity. ![]()
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