By Noah Rothman
Friday, September 10, 2021
Forget for a moment the dubious constitutionality of Joe Biden’s decision to
mandate that all medium- and large-size businesses oversee a COVID vaccination
mandate or administer a weekly testing regime for those who opt out—an
authority the president, his White House, and its executive agencies have repeatedly said they did not
possess. Let’s put aside the debate over the unknowable impacts this policy would
have on vaccination rates. Let’s even assume for a minute that we don’t have to
worry about exceptions for religious objectors, people with disabilities that
preclude vaccination, or the abundant wrongful-termination suits that are sure
to follow this mandate. Let’s focus on what
Joe Biden admitted was the goal of this extraordinary federal
intervention into the conduct of the public sector: to “protect the vaccinated
workers from unvaccinated coworkers.”
With this utterly bizarre flourish—one the Biden White
House took such pride in it chose to highlight it on the president’s Twitter
account—Joe Biden has given away the game. If this policy increases vaccination
rates on the margins, that’s a fringe benefit. The White House’s chief
objective is to mollify his own supporters—hyper-anxious, fully-vaccinated
Americans who have been getting mixed messages from this administration for
weeks over the efficacy of vaccines in preventing serious COVID infections
resulting in hospitalization or death. Joe Biden has just deepened their
confusion and heightened their undue sense of existential dread.
But why? No fewer than three recent studies have demonstrated that the fully
vaccinated are exceedingly unlikely to suffer a symptomatic case of COVID. The
risk of serious health complications arising from one such “breakthrough”
infection is vanishingly rare, according to the CDC. As the
intrepid New York Times columnist David Leonhardt has been
trying to communicate to the vaccine-skeptical left, even COVID’s delta variant
has not presented a threat to the vaccinated statistically significant enough
to justify the burdensome public health interventions to which this White House
so readily appeals. And yet, he notes that an ABC News/Washington Post survey
published last week found that “nearly half of adults judged their ‘risk of
getting sick from the coronavirus’ as either moderate or high—even though 75
percent of adults have received at least one shot.” Where are these Americans
getting this kind of misinformation? In part, from the pop public health
apparatus.
Take, for example, the ubiquitous Dr. Leana Wen.
“Remaining unvaccinated [and] going out in public is equivalent to driving
under the influence,” she
insisted. “You want to be intoxicated? That’s your choice, but if you want
to drive a car, that endangers others. No one should have the ‘choice’ to
infect others with a potentially deadly disease.”
“The vaccinated should not have to pay the price for the
so-called choices of the unvaccinated anymore,” she concluded. Beyond being a
terrible metaphor that has no bearing on the matter at hand, articulating this
thought reveals a discrediting level of paranoia. The data do not in any way
indicate that those who are immunized against COVID are threatened by those who
are not any more than they are by many other communicable diseases. That is
precisely the kind of irrational nosophobia that the Biden White House is
reinforcing.
Over the course of the pandemic, the American left
succumbed to a delusion. They were convinced that Donald Trump had so badly
mishandled this national health crisis that all it would take to restore the
status quo ante was better management and a more competent executive. That was
always an illusion, as the last eight months have demonstrated. And now, that
delusion is contributing to a neurosis that Joe Biden has promised to alleviate
through a presidential pen stroke. But you can’t outlaw mass hysteria through
an executive order. You can, however, contribute to it. By legitimizing a
panic, that is what this president is doing.
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