President Joe Biden has recently said the DSHA will be requiring all businesses with over 100 employees to require all workers to either get tested weekly for COVID-19, or be vaccinated.
Many vaccinated Americans, including myself, feel the dirtiness that this decree implies. I totally understand individual businesses requiring vaccines or proof of a negative test because of the costs of workers getting sick or customers not feeling safe in areas where people might have COVID-19.
It is the right of a business to decide who works in their store, and if they want to allow you to work or not work there is ultimately the business’s choice.
I also understand the requirement for healthcare workers, specifically those that work for the elderly under Medicare and Medicaid, to get vaccinated. They come in contact with many people that are at a much higher risk than the average person of getting and dying from COVID-19. The cost of spreading the diseases through doctors, nurses or other frontline workers is often too great not to get vaccinated.
But, the reasons President Biden articulates as to why the average worker should be mandated by law to get vaccinated do not make sense and are inherently anti-American.
The two groups he aimed to protect with this mandate were the vaccinated and children that could not get vaccinated. We are protecting Americans who are young or vaccinated, making COVID-19 much less deadly than the flu for these individuals.
Obviously, there will be more variants such as delta and lambda, for which the vaccine seems to be less effective against. Still, according to every bit of data, those that are vaccinated or young are very protected against COVID-19.
In 2019, if there was a vaccine that made 99.999% of the population not die from the flu, it wouldn’t have been made mandatory whether Trump, Clinton or Biden was in office. The bottom line is that we have an effective vaccine for COVID-19 and the cost to others if someone chooses to not get the vaccine is much less than other accepted costs we have, such as the aforementioned flu.
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The intellectual justification for this vaccine mandate does not exist, not to mention the legal, political and moral justifications that are needed to require a substance to be put in someone’s body by the government in order to do their job.
But, though this part of President Biden’s new order was wrong, it does not mean there aren’t some reasonable steps that can be taken.
For example, like was mentioned earlier, a mandate for healthcare workers to get the vaccine does make sense. They come into contact with immunocompromised people, so they should take every step they can to keep any and all diseases out of their systems.
Making at home testing more widely available would also help. If you can just go into your medicine cabinet and get a test for yourself before you go to work, it limits the cost of testing which will mean more people will make sure they don’t have COVID-19 and therefore don’t spread it to others.
There are many solutions that President Biden and others have suggested that would have great mitigation effects without requiring the vaccine. But, none of those solutions will get the light of day if President Biden and the DSHA try to mandate unvaccinated Americans to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
Therefore, we need to stop the rollout of the vaccine mandate while still trying to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 through non-invasive and bipartisan solutions.
