by Jane M. Orient, M.D.
Today we have two contrasting quotations from world leaders. One said: “Mandatory vaccinations will never be allowed because [this] is a free country and its people are sovereign.” The other said: “This is not about freedom or personal choice.”
The first was by Vladimir Putin. Russia, a free country! The second was by Joe Biden. The U.S. is no longer a free country, and the people are not sovereign. Nor are the once-sovereign states. If state governors won’t cooperate with him, “I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way.” It is not clear exactly how he would accomplish that. Invade the state and occupy its capitol and its courts? Arrest the governor and perhaps the legislature and throw them into prison without bail like some January 6 demonstrators? Already, many states are suing—perhaps we will learn whether the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has any meaning.
Who would have believed that a U.S. President would ever say such things?
Biden claims jurisdiction over 17 million healthcare workers, especially if they work in a facility that gets funding from Medicare or Medicaid. “If you’re seeking care at a health facility, you should be able to know that the people treating you are vaccinated—simple, straightforward, period.”
Never mind if the alternative may be having no qualified person to care for you. Never mind if the unvaccinated worker, who cared for people before there were vaccines, got infected, recovered, and now has better immunity than vaccinated people. Never mind that workers with 20 years of dedicated service will have their careers and their livelihoods ruined if they don’t obey the dictator. Never mind that some of the obedient servants die—just coincidentally?—a few days after the shot. Or that some experience heart damage or paralysis. The government with its sovereign immunity does not have to compensate them, and neither do the vaccine makers or administrators, who are protected under the mantle of government.
“This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” states Biden. This non-evidence-based assertion is false. The most vaccinated countries in the world, including Israel and Gibraltar, are having the worst outbreaks. Both vaccinated and non-vaccinated persons shed virus, get hospitalized, and die. In the UK, a majority of the COVID-19 deaths last month were among vaccinated people, with a death rate dramatically higher than a year ago, when there was no vaccine.
Why, besides vaccine failure, would public health officials be pushing for continued masking, distancing, and a “booster” injection a few months after a person is “fully vaccinated”?
Can we blame it on the Delta variant? Did unvaccinated persons make it? Or did the vaccine, with its narrowly targeted immunity, actually select out this variant, creating or worsening the problem? Dr. Robert Malone, an inventor of mRNA vaccines, talks about “escape mutants.” Could we be creating a “monoculture” immunity, which like monoculture agriculture, is disastrously vulnerable if a resistant pathogen comes along?
Not content with owning the bodies of healthcare workers and federal employees and contractors, Biden appeals to the private sector, such as employers of 100 or more persons, to exert his will on other Americans. “To those of you running large entertainment venues from sports arenas to concert venues to movie theaters, please require folks to get vaccinated or show a negative test as a condition of entry.”
To “protect” children under the age of 12, who are at very low risk, Biden wants everybody around them to get the vax—teenage siblings, parents, caregivers. Children over 12, that magic threshold, should get vaccinated, Biden says, and he “strongly supports independent scientific review for vaccine uses for children under 12.” He adds: “We can’t take shortcuts of that scientific work.” So far, the scientific process has been anything but independent. Moreover, studies are not scheduled to be complete before the end of 2022, and studies on myocarditis, to which teenage boys may be most vulnerable, until 2027. Any shortcutting there? And how long would fertility effects take to show up in a child who is 11 when vaccinated?
The satirical Babylon Bee has dubbed the program: “Your body, my choice.” Are you pregnant, worried about a miscarriage? Hoping to be pregnant? Aspiring to an athletic career? Do you have a history of allergies, but have not yet had anaphylactic shock from polyethylene glycol (PEG) or Polysorb 80?
The choice of what risks you have to take will be Biden’s. But the consequences will be all yours.
Jane M. Orient, M.D. obtained her undergraduate degrees in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Arizona in Tucson, and her M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1974. She completed an internal medicine residency at Parkland Memorial Hospital and University of Arizona Affiliated Hospitals and then became an Instructor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and a staff physician at the Tucson Veterans Administration Hospital. She has been in solo private practice since 1981 and has served as Executive Director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) since 1989. She is currently president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. She is the author of YOUR Doctor Is Not In: Healthy Skepticism about National Healthcare, and the second through fifth editions of Sapira's Art and Science of Bedside Diagnosis published by Wolters Kluwer. She authored books for schoolchildren, Professor Klugimkopf's Old-Fashioned English Grammar and Professor Klugimkopf's Spelling Method, published by Robinson Books, and coauthored two novels published as Kindle books, Neomorts and Moonshine. More than 100 of her papers have been published in the scientific and popular literature on a variety of subjects including risk assessment, natural and technological hazards and nonhazards, and medical economics and ethics. She is the editor of AAPS News, the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Newsletter, and Civil Defense Perspectives, and is the managing editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
