To justify his sweeping and constitutionally dubious employer vaccine mandate, President Joe Biden is claiming his order is necessary to “protect the vaccinated.” If that’s the case, what’s the point of vaccination in the first place?
The coronavirus vaccines are supposed to protect people from serious illness and death, and thus far, they have been highly effective at doing just that. Multiple studies have also shown that they protect recipients from the virus’s mutations, including the delta variant. In other words, vaccinated adults no longer need to fear COVID-19. They are more likely to die from a car crash or a bee sting or a dog attack than from COVID-19.
But Biden is trying to convince them that they’re still at risk.
“We cannot allow [the unvaccinated] to stand in the way of protecting the large majority of Americans who have done their part and want to get back to life as normal,” he said last week. “This is not about freedom or personal choice. It’s about protecting yourself and those around you — the people you work with, the people you care about, the people you love. … The bottom line: We’re going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers.”
Vice President Kamala Harris made a similar statement on Sunday:
By vaccinating the unvaccinated, increasing our testing and masking, and protecting the vaccinated, we can end this pandemic. That’s exactly what we are committed to doing.
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) September 12, 2021
Why do the vaccinated still need protection? Either the vaccines work, or they don’t. Right now, it seems like Biden and Harris believe they don’t.
It also seems like they believe a zero-COVID world is possible when it isn’t. Biden’s team has previously argued that the “threat” the unvaccinated pose to vaccinated adults is the chance that COVID-19 might become a more dangerous variant. But again, this downplays the effectiveness of the vaccines, which have proven to be very effective against the virus’s variants.
A couple of other common arguments Biden’s defenders have rolled out go like this: 1) The unvaccinated create a different kind of safety risk by filling up hospitals and emergency rooms, and 2) the unvaccinated are a threat to those who cannot get vaccinated even if they wanted to, i.e., children.
Neither of these accusations hold up. Multiple studies have shown unvaccinated children are safer from COVID-19 than fully vaccinated adults just by virtue of their age. And despite the recent wave of delta hospitalizations, our healthcare system has proved once again that it is capable and resilient. Indeed, the greater threat to hospitals’ operations seems to be Biden’s own vaccine mandate: A hospital in New York just had to shut down its maternity ward temporarily because so many of its employees chose to quit rather than get the jab.
In short, we need to learn to live with this thing, and that means accepting the fact that COVID-19 is never going away. Those who get vaccinated will stand a much better chance against the virus than those who do not, but ultimately individuals must decide for themselves whether the risk is worth it. Biden’s mandate is a violation of this right to choose, and there is no justification for it. The vaccines work — let’s stop pretending they don’t, and allow everyone, vaccinated and unvaccinated, to get back to their lives.
