COVID Politics Deteriorate

The inconsistent logic of Biden’s COVID-19 policy has been exposed with crystal clarity by recent events. The first of these events is the new Texas abortion law that went into effect on September 1^st. As expected, the reaction to this law once again brought up the sacrosanct progressive gospel of Roe vs. Wade. The well-worn legal bedrock upon which Roe vs. Wade rests is the presumption that a person’s (yes, we are using the woke pronoun here) right to privacy as regards their body can be derived from the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution. Any defender of Roe vs. Wade will unwaveringly assert that this “right” exists and is the inarguable law of the land.

Inarguable that is, unless you are unvaccinated. If you are unvaccinated, your right to privacy as regards your body is apparently a perfectly reasonable exception to that otherwise rock-solid “right”. There is, of course, no logic to this whatsoever. If a right to privacy for one’s body genuinely exists in the 14^th amendment, it must apply to ALL circumstances of the body – whether aborting a baby or injecting a vaccine. You can’t have it both ways.

We don’t buy the justification that forcing people to get a vaccine is a legitimate exception to the above because it is for the greater overall good of the population. If that is the reasoning, then why wouldn’t it also be for the greater good of the population to preserve the lives of 800,000+ unborn babies every year in the US? There is no subtlety here. The contradiction in these two positions is clear and obvious.

Another argument voiced by Biden and Harris that dissolves quickly is the “danger” posed to vaccinated people by unvaccinated people. On the one hand, it is quite reasonable for the Biden Administration to try and encourage people to get vaccinated. They can cite genuinely valid statistics showing how effective the vaccines are. On average, the mRNA vaccines have proven to be 94% effective at preventing symptomatic illness from COVID-19. There have only been a very small number of “break-through” cases. Thus, it cannot then logically follow that vaccinated people are somehow at grave risk of acquiring COVID-19 from unvaccinated people. Yet, that is exactly what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are claiming publicly.

The President (or more likely his speech writers) seem to realize this was a senseless contradiction because Biden quickly pivoted to a new claim – children are the ones who are really being put at risk by the unvaccinated. Biden knows that anytime children are mentioned, immediate sympathy is drawn into the discussion. He can be cast as “fatherly” and compassionate. While that political trick usually works, it would have benefitted him greatly in this instance to “follow the science” as he is so fond of saying; not medical science in this case, but the science of statistics. Children (12 and younger) have a 0.00067% risk of dying from COVID-19, and only a slightly greater chance of getting symptomatically ill from the virus. According to the CDC, more than twice as many children (12 years and younger) die in car crashes every year than die from COVID-19. So far in 2021, more children have been hit by a bullet in Chicago (261) than have died of COVID-19 in the entire country (217). In fact, the statistic most generally in use today for the COVID-19 death rate, the number of deaths per 100,000 people, can’t even be used for children. The reason is because the child death rate when measured this way would be statistically zero (0.1 out of 100,000). The plain fact is that children are not at risk from COVID-19 – period. Statistics don’t lie. People are being fooled into believing the risk to children is the same as it is for adults. They see news feeds showing a child in a hospital bed or a virologist proclaiming it is technically possible for a child to get symptomatically ill from COVID and then assume this is happening everywhere. The media purposely and consistently doesn’t mention how rare these cases actually are.

So, in the real world, exactly who are the unvaccinated adults a danger to? As much as the President wants to shame and force them into being vaccinated, the unvaccinated cannot be classified as being a danger to anyone but themselves. And even that is a stretch. Senior citizens and those with pre-existing health problems, the groups most vulnerable to COVID related illness and death, are now well over 80% vaccinated according to the CDC. Mathematically that means most of the unvaccinated population are younger and healthier and much less likely to get severely sick or die from the virus. Again, quoting the CDC’s website, a 75-year-old person is 220 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than a 29-year-old-person.

President Biden also boasted about how many more people got vaccinated after he became President than had been vaccinated while Donald Trump was President. This, of course, was purely a circumstance of the timing of the vaccine development and production cycles. Had Donald Trump or anyone else been sworn in as President on January 20^th, 2021, the pace of vaccine production and distribution would’ve been the same in the months that followed. At the time of the Presidential transition, the vaccine makers and distributers were already proceeding as fast as they possibly could (they had their own reputations to uphold). The only thing any President could’ve possibly done to change that trajectory would have been to slow it down (which thankfully Biden did not do). Biden’s proclamation that he somehow was responsible for the unprecedented speed of the COVID vaccine development and distribution is blatantly false and dishonest.

Finally, in the debates before the 2020 election, both our sitting President and Vice-President were asked if they would get the COVID vaccine after it became available. Their response was that they didn’t trust a vaccine developed under Donald Trump. On December 22, 2020, after the election was over but while Donald Trump was still President, Biden proudly got injected on national TV with that very vaccine serum developed under Trump’s “Warp Speed” initiative. Six days later, Kamala Harris got the same injection, also on national TV. Simply because Biden won the election, the vaccine developed by the Trump Administration magically became “safe”. If this doesn’t convince you that everything the current administration says about COVID-19 vaccines is political, nothing will.

The false statements and gross exaggerations about the true danger of COVID-19 for children and vaccinated adults are atrocious. Worse, about half the population in the US has completely given in to this manufactured fear, refusing to believe or even consider the statistical reality right in front of their faces. So convinced is this group that the fear is real, they have abandoned all pretense of logic and reason on this subject. And many are people who judiciously apply good critical reasoning in most other aspects of their daily lives. The inability or refusal to question a belief, even in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence, is now a far greater danger to our society than any political ideology.