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Vaccination passport on a mobile phone allowing movement and travel - Vaccination against the coronavirus Covid 19 - Imunity passport - Health passport
Humanize From Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism
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Ezekiel Emanuel Pushes National Vaccine Mandate

Originally published at National Review

Ever the autocrat, Obamacare architect and Biden health-care adviser Ezekiel Emanuel has co-authored a call in the New York Times for vaccine mandates. From, “These People Should Be Required to Get Vaccinated:”

We need to sharply reduce coronavirus infections to turn the tide and quell the pandemic. The best hope is to maximize the number of people vaccinated, especially among those who interact with many others and are likely to transmit the virus.

How can we increase vaccinations? Mandates.

Vaccines should be required for health care workers and for all students who plan to attend in-person classes this fall — including younger children once the vaccine is authorized for them by the Food and Drug Administration.

Employers should also be prepared to make vaccines mandatory for prison guards, E.M.T.s, police officers, firefighters and teachers if overall vaccinations do not reach the level required for herd immunity.

Has Emanuel been asleep the last few months? Doesn’t he know that the erratic performance of public-health officials has cost them the confidence of a large percentage of the population? Does he want greater discord than we are already experiencing?

I can think of nothing likely to breed greater distrust in the vaccines — I received the Moderna jabs — than coercing people to take them. And how, precisely, would that mandate be accomplished legally? An executive order? Rule-making by the CDC? Fiats from state governors? That would only lead to further division among the liberal and conservative jurisdictions.

No, the real muscle would be the private sector, a way to avoid constitutional questions and checks and balances. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube might block those who argue against the mandate. In other words, more building of the corporatocracy that this way comes, further tearing at our bonds of affection.

Emanuel concludes:

All colleges and school districts should mandate that students who are authorized to receive Covid-19 vaccines get them. All 50 states already require certain vaccines for children to attend school. A Covid-19 vaccine should be no different.

Tens of millions more Americans would be vaccinated as a result, pushing the country closer to herd immunity. This approach would also ensure vaccination equity by getting shots to all children, including poor children. Religious or philosophical exemptions should not be allowed.

This is not the American way. We allow conscientious religious objectors to avoid military service in time of war!

Besides, COVID is different. Youth are at far less risk of serious disease and are not major spreaders. Those at most peril, the elderly and people with comorbidities, are already well along in obtaining protection. Good grief, we never had such a general national vaccine mandate for smallpox or polio!

Emmanuel is the fellow who argued that people should want to die at 75. He once wrote in the Times that he wanted every child in the country required legally to take a flu shot every year, he believes in health-care rationing, and he wants doctors forced to provide abortions. He is also the fellow who urged that the country be shut down for 18 months at the beginning of the pandemic, and indeed, wanted complete mandatory lockdowns put in place last summer — so his mandate advocacy is of a piece.

I don’t think Emanuel is someone millions of freedom-loving Americans will want to march behind. But the elites love him. What does that tell us?

Wesley J. Smith

Chair and Senior Fellow, Center on Human Exceptionalism
Wesley J. Smith is Chair and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. Wesley is a contributor to National Review and is the author of 14 books, in recent years focusing on human dignity, liberty, and equality. Wesley has been recognized as one of America’s premier public intellectuals on bioethics by National Journal and has been honored by the Human Life Foundation as a “Great Defender of Life” for his work against suicide and euthanasia. Wesley’s most recent book is Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine, a warning about the dangers to patients of the modern bioethics movement.