My good friend, William Teach, wrote something that our friends on the left just really cannot understand:
Despite what you might think from posts, I’m very much pro-vaccine. I’m anti-mandate. I got the vaccine the minute I was eligible to protect myself. And I will get the booster to continue protecting myself, so, this is good news, as I’d like something different from Pfizer if possible.
If Mr Teach is “very much pro-vaccine”, why, so many on the left wonder, doesn’t he believe in requiring everybody to get it?
The New York Times, a much bigger voice on the left, decided to tell us why vaccine mandates are such a good thing:
Their Jobs Made Them Get Vaccinated. They Refused.
The willingness of some workers to give up their livelihoods helps explain the country’s struggle to contain the pandemic.
By Sarah Maslin Nir | October 24, 2021 | Updated: October 25, 2021 | 5:22 PM EDT | Print edition: October 25, 2021, Section A, Page 1
Under the threat of losing their jobs, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers finally got a Covid-19 vaccine. Teachers, nurses and home health aides accepted their occupations’ mandates. The mass resignations some experts had predicted did not occur, as most workers hurriedly got inoculated.
Josephine Valdez, 30, a public school paraprofessional from the Bronx, did not.
Failing to meet the New York City Education Department’s vaccination deadline, Ms. Valdez lost her job this month. She is among the 4 percent of the city’s roughly 150,000 public school employees who did not comply with the order.
There’s more at the original, but 4% of 150,000 employees works out to 6,000 people.
- Ms. Valdez, an anti-vaccine mandate activist who has been involved in protests against vaccines and masks in the city, is also part of a sizable, unwavering contingent across the United States whose resistance to the vaccines have won out over paychecks, or who have given up careers entirely.
Much of the article is devoted to individual stories of the reasons given for some people refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccines.
- Their resistance goes against reams of scientific data showing that the Covid-19 vaccines are overwhelmingly safe and effective and have reduced hospitalizations and deaths.
To public health officials, and the majority of Americans, the defiance is unreasonable and incomprehensible. Who would jeopardize their families’ financial security over a shot that has been proven safe and effective at preventing death?
Yup, that’s the liberal line, that “defiance is unreasonable and incomprehensible.” The Times Editorial Board, very much in favor of vaccine mandates, wrote:
- As incursions on bodily autonomy go, this is pretty mild stuff. No one, the Times columnist David Brooks wrote in May, is being asked to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima.
An odd statement, given that the Editorial Board is very, very concerned about bodily autonomy when it comes to abortion, even though getting an abortion kills a living human being. But, of course, to the left, that’s different!
The article author included the worst part:
- And the mandates appear to be working. About 84 percent of adult New Yorkers have now received at least one vaccine dose in the face of state and city mandates, as well as requirements imposed by some private companies.
Translation: under the threat of hunger and homelessness, many people knuckled under and complied, even though they did not want to do so. Many people surrendered in the face of government and its brute force.
The Philadelphia Inquirer was even more gleeful about this:
- In the study, researchers found that people were more likely to say they would get a vaccine if they were told the vaccine was mandated than if they were told they were free to choose to get vaccinated. This held true across racial and ethnic groups. Even people with a tendency toward psychological reactance — people who tend to balk at being told what to do — were more likely to say they’d get the shot if they were told it was mandatory.
The left, who are pro-choice on exactly one thing, are very happy when the government tries to give people no choices. To them, the belief that everyone should be vaccinated translates to everyone must be vaccinated, and they are perfectly willing to use government power to run roughshod over individual rights and choices to achieve their goals. More, they simply don’t understand that conservatives would put people’s individual rights over the goal of getting everyone vaccinated; it is simply outside their conceptual framework.
When it comes to the vaccines, the left simply believe that the needs of the state outweigh the rights of the individual.
“When it comes to vaccines….”? I can’t think of a single thing where the left thinks the rights of the individual supersedes the wants of the state. Can you? I cannot recall any time where the left gave way to personal Liberty at any time since Obummer.