I was WRONG
Previously, I came out in favour of Joe Biden's 'soft' vaccine mandate. I have since realized that I was wrong in this.
President Biden has come out in the last few weeks with a so-called ‘soft mandate’ of the covid-19 vaccine mandate.
I came out in favour of this last week. My reasoning was that receiving the vaccine is a public service that we all need to do, and, given that the vaccine works, I viewed it as a no-brainer that we should do everything we can to the point where every single person who can get jabbed gets jabbed.
Now, part of my reasoning here is completely accurate. The vaccine does work. There is no doubt about that.
Every study done about its effectiveness has come back saying that it is a good preventative measure for covid.
The clearest example of this was a French study of over 22.6 million people over the age of 50. That study showed that receiving the vaccine cuts the chance of being hospitalized or dying due to the disease by over 90%. The vaccine works. That is not up for debate.
What is up for debate is whether the government should play any role in forcing people to take the vaccine.
A hard mandate is, in my opinion, out of the question. The government should not have the right to force someone to take a vaccine that, for all its effectiveness against covid-19, has the potential to have long-term side effects that we simply do not know about it.
For that matter, I am opposed to forcing people to take any vaccine. As much as I completely support the use of every vaccine on every person, I also don’t think that it is the role of the government to force them to do that. I would much prefer that they (and their parents for underage children) make that decision themselves. Forcing people to put a chemical in their body can easily be construed as government overreach.
Now, as I say, get every vaccine. There is zero evidence supporting anti-vax movements, but setting the precedent of allowing the government to force you to do put something in your body is simply not a precedent that I can support being created.
That leaves a ‘soft' mandate, like the one that Biden implemented in which workers at companies with over 100 employees need to either get vaccinated or get tested every week, or no mandate, and we just try to convince people to get vaccinated as much as possible.
There is a moral question here: do we prioritize safety or personal civil liberty? How do we strike a balance between these two?
This is the question we need to answer. Previously, my answer was that a soft mandate like the one implemented by Biden gave people enough choice between receiving the vaccine and getting tested.
My reasoning was that the balance of public safety and liberty was fairest here. This way, they have a chance to not get the vaccine and merely get tested, which means that they have some freedom. It also means that, as some of currently unvaccinated citizens will inevitably get vaccinated as a result of this, the rest of us can probably go back to normal life.
However, this isn’t enough freedom. Choosing between a test that people who work way too many hours (because capitalism) can’t really get to and a vaccine that could cause side effects that cause them to take a couple of days of work, which means that they don’t get paid (because America doesn’t offer paid time off by law), which can in turn cause people to dive even further into poverty.
That is simply not a choice. These people have no opportunity here. The other thing that can happen here, with workers being seen as no more than pawns in a chess game by owners of multinational corporations, if they have to take time off work for either a test or a vaccine, they can even lose their jobs because bosses only really care about their pockets. They aren’t getting any work out of this person for this time, so that person is expendable. That is how management at these multinational corporations look at their workers. That’s all they say. And, rather than helping them, all that Biden is doing is helping them potentially struggle out of their only source on an (admittedly negligible) income at these companies. If they don’t have this, they will struggle more than they already do economically.
There is also just the idea that the government shouldn’t have the ability to enforce even a ‘soft’ mandate that people put chemicals in their body. I agree with that. Governments simply should not have that right.
The other thing that I want to mention here is that I am coming out here to tell you that I was wrong about something. This is an action you will occasionally see from some hosts in new media. That’s not because they are a grifter: it’s because they grew to understand more. There is only one host in new media who is clearly a grifter who doesn’t believe a word they say (Dave Rubin). Everyone else, no matter how much I dislike and disagree with whatever they say, is not clearly a grifter. That is why they are willing to come out and tell you that they were wrong.
This is not something you will ever see in the Mainstream Media. There is only one circumstance this year in which someone working in the MSM came out and told us that their company was wrong about something: Sanjay Gupta on the Joe Rogan Experience. Rogan, who has caught covid and used a cocktail of drugs including ivermectin, was smeared by CNN as encouraging his many followers to take horse paste. This is not true. He was encouraging people to take the human version that has been prescribed to billions of humans for a plethora of reasons. Now, as we have already gone over, the evidence on ivermectin as a treatment for covid is mixed. We don’t really know if it works. That’s not to say it doesn’t: we just don’t know. That is irrelevant. This is about CNN smearing Joe Rogan.
Rogan pushed Gupta (who did not partake in the smearing) on why CNN were telling their audience that he was encouraging the use of horse paste, and asked him why they were lying. Gupta admitted that they shouldn’t have said that.
That is something I respect Gupta for. However, what happened next is the problem.
Don Lemon, a well-known CNN host, had Gupta on his show and basically made him apologize for admitting that CNN were lying (they were).
Brian Stelter - a host making $1 million a year despite having the charisma of a boiled potato (bear in mind he is only 36 despite photographic evidence to the contrary) - also refused to apologize for smearing Rogan.
This is because CNN, just like the rest of MSM, will never admit that they were wrong about anything. They think that lying but not admitting that they were wrong helps their credibility. It doesn’t. On the other hand, people like Joe Rogan and I in new media are upfront and honest, know that we are a bit stupid, get it wrong sometimes, admit it when we do, and move on from there. That’s a skill that CNN don’t have.
To sum all this up: get the vaccine, but the government shouldn’t be forcing you to. Read and listen to new media rather than MSM. Pretty simple.