The German Parliament just mandated that all workers in healthcare settings must be fully vaccinated to maintain their employment, a rule already in place in Greece, France, and Italy.
They will also be deciding soon whether to extend a mandatory lockdown to all unvaccinated Germans across the entire nation.
The Financial Times noted the country will be doing what Austria mandated last month:
“Using what is known in Germany as the ‘2G’ rule, soon only the vaccinated and those who have recovered from Covid will be able to go into shops and cultural institutions. Once the rules are implemented, a household of vaccine holdouts will only be able to meet two people from another household.”
Meanwhile, here in the United States, four Trump-appointed judges have put the kibosh on President Biden’s plan to use OSHA rules to require vaccination of workers in large companies and the healthcare industry.
Why would these Republican partisans in judicial drag make such nakedly idiotic rulings, knowing they will lead to more death and disability?
All you need do is roll the clock back a year to see their reasoning. All these clips are from 2020:
Boston Herald editorial by Grace Curley:
“The Democrats in D.C. are cheering for the coronavirus. Sad to say, but it is the truth. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her ilk want the president to fail at all costs. If that means a world pandemic, well, so be it. … [T]he coronavirus’ strongest allure as far as Democrats are concerned is the effect it is having on the stock market.”
Donald Trump Jr. on Fox “News”:
Freedomwire by Ryan James:
“Here is my theory in a nutshell: The Democrats want to increase testing because they know that more tests will increase the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, thus ensuring the economy doesn’t reopen for an even longer stretch of time. You might be asking why they would want this. … [It will] hurt President Trump’s reelection chances.”
“It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. … the media thinks this is the new Russia! This is gonna get Trump! They’re gleeful, they’re happy. This is gonna destroy the economy magically by November.”
“They’re doing it for one reason: They want to hurt Trump. They tried to do it with the Russia thing. They tried to do it with the Ukraine scandal. They tried to do it with impeachment. Now they’re trying to do it with coronavirus. … They’ll milk it every single day between now and Nov. 3, and guess what. After Nov. 3, coronavirus will magically all of a sudden go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen.”
You get the idea: you can find literally thousands of articles by Republicans last year asserting that Dr. Fauci and Democrats were hyping or “promoting” the virus because it would soften the economy, which is death in politics and would therefore cause Donald Trump to lose the 2020 election.
Ever since the election of 1800, almost every single time the economy goes soft political power shifts from the party in power to the party out of power.
Now that Democrats are in power, Republicans are pushing hard to keep the virus circulating in America to soften Joe Biden’s economy, believing that will reap rewards for them in the next two elections.
And they have lots of help.
While Republicans are trying to bring down Democrats, foreign autocrats who see democracy and democratic movements as their greatest threat are putting up armies of social media trolls pretending to be Americans who are “concerned about the dangers of the vaccines.”
Add to that the army of hustlers and grifters inspired by Trump’s example, pushing everything from Ivermectin to “Magic Dirt” to phony vaccination cards on the internet, and billionaire-funded front groups claiming that vaccine mandates are threats to “liberty,” and you have the perfect storm that they all hope will put the GOP back in power so they can further erode American democracy.
By now pretty much everybody in America must know that the first vaccine mandate in our history was when General George Washington ordered his troops vaccinated for smallpox: it literally saved us from losing the Revolutionary War.
Probably fewer Americans know that the Supreme Court decided this issue way back in 1905, when a fellow in Boston defied a Massachusetts vaccine mandate. The case was Jacobson v Massachusetts and the Court summarized the situation at the time:
“The defendant insists that his liberty is invaded when the State subjects him to fine or imprisonment for neglecting or refusing to submit to vaccination; that a compulsory vaccination law is unreasonable, arbitrary and oppressive, and, therefore, hostile to the inherent right of every freeman to care for his own body and health in such way as to him seems best; and that the execution of such a law against one who objects to vaccination, no matter for what reason, is nothing short of an assault upon his person.”
This, the Court ruled, was a patent absurdity.
“But the liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction,” the majority wrote in the very next sentence, “does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint. There are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good. On any other basis, organized society could not exist with safety to its members.
“Society based on the rule that each one is a law unto himself would soon be confronted with disorder and anarchy. Real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own, whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others. …
“Upon the principle of self-defense, of paramount necessity, a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members.”
In other words, a maskhole’s right to spread disease is not more important in America than the right of the rest of us to stay free of that disease. That’s been part of American law since 1905.
Which is why when Oregon’s Governor Kate Brown showed a steely spine and stood up to Republicans calling her a “tyrant” for enforcing a vaccine mandate on all state employees, she handily won the day.
After months of loud squeals and pathetic braying from Republican politicians and talkshow hosts who wanted Oregon to fall into a perpetual state of Covid crisis until a good Republican could take over, the headline from a local Portland paper, The Skanner, summarized the entire situation with regard to the 40,000 people who work for the state: “Dozens of Oregon Workers Fired for Not Getting COVID Shot.”
That’s right: dozens.
Nonetheless, to paraphrase Mitch McConnell, they persist:
- In New Jersey, Republicans are defying state police to walk into their chamber without a mask or proof of vaccination.
- In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has changed the state’s unemployment laws to make being fired for refusing to get a vaccine a reason to instantly and easily get unemployment benefits.
- Kansas’s Republican legislature and governor have done the same, as have Iowa’s and Tennessee’s.
- Oklahoma’s Republican Governor Kevin Stitt wants to defy the Pentagon and allow his National Guard troops to avoid getting vaccinated.
- The Republican partisan who runs Chicago’s police union has urged officers to take their and their family’s lives in their hands by refusing to get the jab.
- The New York City Firefighters’ Union head unsuccessfully tried the same trick.
- In rightwing parts of northern California, it’s school districts defying the governor’s vaccination order.
- The Republican governor of Missouri commissioned a study to find out if masks work to stop Covid, and when the results came back that masks work really, really well he buried the study.
There’s no evidence that in 2020 Democrats were “trying to make the pandemic worse” or “hyping” it “just to hurt Trump.”
- Democrats never called the virus a “hoax” or refused to wear masks.
- Democrats never argued against the science, spread bizarre conspiracy theories, or promoted the use of phony cures like hydroxychloroquine.
- Democrats never tried to discourage people from getting vaccinated when the vaccines first became available at the end of the Trump administration.
That said, there’s little doubt that Republicans learned from their virus/economy political loss last year and think they can turn that trick around against Biden.
Other democracies, also under assault from foreign trolls and internal anarchists bent on disrupting their own nations, aren’t putting up with it. As the AP has compiled:
- Greeks on their version of Social Security (which kicks in at age 60) are losing a quarter of their monthly payments if they refuse to get vaccinated.
- In Israel they’re debating using cell-phone tracking to identify Covid scofflaws.
- Police in the Netherlands are taking on protesters in the streets, “despite what appears to be overwhelming acceptance of the rules.”
- Britain has instituted a national mask mandate and they’re enforcing it.
- Slovakia is trying the carrot: a $568 bonus to anybody who gets vaccinated.
- South Africa has instituted both a curfew and a ban on alcohol sales.
- Chile has passed a ban on unvaccinated people going out in public to restaurants, hotels and public gatherings, and is heavily enforcing it.
The Biden administration shouldn’t put up with these trolls, either.
Americans have put up with a year of Trump incompetence and malice that unnecessarily killed a half-million of our fellow citizens, followed by 11 months of Republicans doing everything they can to drag out the pandemic to screw with Biden.
Those of us who did the right thing, got vaccinated and boosted, wore masks and socially distanced or worked from home deserve a break.
Let the Trumpies and Maskholes argue it out on social media and in their chatrooms, but keep them the hell out of our stores, bars, restaurants and theaters. Enough is enough.
Lock down the unvaccinated so the rest of America can get back to normal!
Originally posted at The Hartmann Report