Blue state coronavirus Karens have escalated their mandates from draconian to outright ridiculous. More than a year after the initiation of our COVID vaccination campaigns, school boards are mandating that students at near-zero risk of dying from the virus mask up even harder, with an assist from President Joe Biden, who is conveniently distributing 400 million KN95s more than two years into the pandemic. Major metropolises such as New York City and Washington, D.C., have citywide vaccination mandates imposed upon private businesses, with the latter doing so on top of its continued indoor mask mandate.
The attempts of the White House, local governments, and teachers unions to make this biomedical security state permanent are among the grossest overreaches of government power since the War on Terror. What they are not remotely comparable to is Nazi Germany, as anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed during a D.C. rally over the weekend.
“Even in Hitler Germany, you could, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did,” Kennedy said. Atrocious as such a comment is, it’s really only the tip of the iceberg as to why those of us rightfully challenging dictatorial coronavirus mandates ought not to join forces with actual anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists like Kennedy.
The resistance to the Biden Labor Department’s vaccine mandate for 80 million private employees was, as affirmed by the Supreme Court earlier in January, firmly grounded in the law, and the belated but finally burgeoning revolt against the widespread masking of students is grounded not just in science — statistically speaking, unvaccinated 18-year-olds had a lower death risk from the more fatal delta variant of the coronavirus than fully vaccinated 30-year-olds — but also basic human decency.
Kennedy and his movement are anything but decent, and joining forces with his ilk will only further help the pro-mandate coalition draw a false equivalency between those opposed to mandates and actual conspiracy theorists.
Contrary to the contemporary narrative crafted by the corporate media, the modern anti-vaccine movement long predates the coronavirus, originating with disgraced former physician Andrew Wakefield’s utterly disproven paper correlating the lifesaving MMR vaccine with autism. Wakefield’s conspiracy theory likely would have remained on the ash heap of history had the news and entertainment media not chosen to mainstream his delusions.
Just one month after The Lancet published Wakefield’s original paper in 1998 promulgating the bogus correlation between autism and the MMR vaccine, a panel of 37 fellow British scientists rebuked the claim, and a month later, a 14-year Finnish study conducted on 3 million children — Wakefield’s studied just 12 children — concluded that not one of the MMR vaccine recipients developed autism.
That didn’t stop CBS’s 60 Minutes from profiling Wakefield as an expert on the matter in November 2000. Shortly thereafter, Wakefield found his greatest ally in Kennedy, who penned an article parroting the MMR vaccine conspiracy theory in Salon and Rolling Stone. Jenny McCarthy, the Playboy model most famous for posing without pants on the toilet, completed the unholy trinity, fully mainstreaming the lie with her memoir blaming her own son’s autism on the MMR vaccine. McCarthy and her then-boyfriend Jim Carrey scored a spot on the holy grail of Hollywood pseudoscience, The Oprah Winfrey Show, where they sugarcoated the conspiracy theory into a parental sob story of “just asking questions” — and the rest is history. (As an aside, it comes as little surprise that Wakefield and Kennedy would go on to shack up with fellow celebrities Elle Macpherson and Cheryl Hines, respectively.)
People rightly concerned about the government’s callous legal overreach and flagrant disregard for childhood development should not consider these pseudoscientific grifters and charlatans fellow travelers. Let’s lay out the difference.
Safety: The coronavirus vaccine is much safer than the virus itself for the overwhelming majority of its recipients but not for all. In the two years we’ve spent administering the vaccine in trials and to the public, we’ve discovered that the risk of myocarditis for men younger than 40 is actually higher in recipients of the second and third Pfizer shots and the first and second Moderna shots than in those who contract the coronavirus. By contrast, the MMR vaccine has been on the market for over half a century. We have real-world evidence across hundreds of millions of people that the MMR vaccine is both extraordinarily effective and safe.
Necessity: We know down to the percentage point what share of the population must have the MMR vaccine to maintain herd immunity, blocking nearly all community transmission. By contrast, while the coronavirus vaccine is extraordinarily effective at minimizing the risk of severe disease, hospitalization, and death from the virus, it is much less so at reducing transmission. There’s a case to be made for mandating vaccination in some public spaces, such as federally funded hospitals or public schools, when those vaccines prevent disease transmission. There’s absolutely none when the vaccine does not, as the omicron variant has revealed. Furthermore, unlike measles, which is most dangerous for children, the elderly are disproportionately at risk of dying from the coronavirus, and they’re the demographic that across partisan, racial, and state lines is already protected. (99.9% of seniors have received at least one dose.)
Practicality: The rules of the MMR vaccine schedule have not changed in decades. Children get two doses in infancy, with four weeks between doses. You need to show proof of vaccination exactly once upon entering kindergarten and then never again. By contrast, public health “experts” and our government overlords are currently flying by the seat of their pants with regards to the coronavirus vaccine. In less than a year, Anthony Fauci and friends have gone from considering a single dose of Johnson & Johnson full vaccination to teasing a fourth booster shot. By government diktat, minimum-wage cashiers in D.C. and New York City are forced to act as de facto bouncers, not just by requiring your government ID to have a cup of coffee indoors but also by vetting whether your CDC card affirms the number of COVID vaccine doses Fauci decided he desires today.
The coronavirus control regime deserves unprecedented opposition because its power grabs are indeed unprecedented. Allying with bad-faith actors who see this as little more than an opportunity to discredit vaccine science in general would be an unforced error with chilling implications for generations to come.
