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August 31, 2022 - 2:15pm
Early on in the pandemic, a handful of far-sighted critics warned that if Americans were to accept mask mandates, vaccine passports, and other restrictions to deal with the supposedly unprecedented threat of Covid-19, there would be no way for them to resist future efforts to strip them of basic rights in the name of “public health”.
After all, the justifications offered for Covid mitigation measures — that you have no right to make personal decisions when those decisions can affect others — have no limiting principle. There is no a priori reason why they could not be used to rationalise punitive taxes on citizens who don’t go to the gym (and therefore burden health systems) or quarantines for people exposed to influenza (who might pose a danger to the immunocompromised). As the essayist Helen Andrews wrote last August:
Now, most jurisdictions in the United States have rolled back the vaccine passports they debuted last year, although there is no telling what they might do in the face of a new BA.5 surge later this year. No law prevents a return to passports, the infrastructure is already in place, and the citizenry has shown that it is willing to comply.
But for evidence of the ratchet in action, we can look to American college campuses, some of which are moving forward with vaccine mandates for influenza that were pioneered last year, when most of the country was paying attention to other things.
On Monday, the author Jennifer Sey noted on Twitter that for the upcoming school year, the University of California, Berkeley, has an indoor mask requirement for anyone who has not received a flu vaccine. Pursuant to an October, 2021 executive order from the University of California president, Michael Drake, all students, faculty, and staff in the University of California system — some 500,000 people — must either receive a flu vaccine or observe “additional non-pharmaceutical interventions” such as masking and “routine testing”.
The University of California system is not alone. Johns Hopkins University requires flu vaccines for all students and staff. Cornell and Barnard College required them last year, though, in Cornell’s case, that requirement seems to have been dropped for the coming semester (Cornell broke ground in another way, by mandating flu vaccines for white students only.) At the time, these mandates were enacted because “students with flu symptoms could mistake it for Covid-19 and overwhelm testing sites”. But in a twist that should surprise no-one, today, with transmission low and most students triple- if not quadruple-vaccinated, the mandates are in most cases remaining in place.
Perhaps it is a good idea to get the flu vaccine, although their efficacy varies greatly by year, with last year’s clocking in at an abysmal 16%. But prior to 2021, no American government, university, or employer — outside extremely narrow settings like the healthcare industry — had ever thought to require universal flu vaccination or force the unvaccinated to wear face coverings. And for good reason: until very recently, such demands would have been considered an intolerable violation of freedom, not to mention a highly symbolic endorsement of fear, neurosis, and conformity. Indeed, experts at the time generally warned that masks were ineffective.
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SubscribeThis article will come as no surprise to anyone.
I am sure that hoardes of people will scream for MORE restrictions and demands.
Look at this, is it real life? It sure looks like it.
https://youtu.be/OBsCHDdi_O4
NWO/WEF 101- enemies within the gates, how to cook a frog stuff…
The Postmodernists are all pawns of the Global Elite, and are about like Russia under the end days of Tsar Nicholas where the revolution is all under the surface but was like a tidal wave about to crash down and destroy the system ushering in brutality, hideous poverty, unimaginable cruelty, and complete loss of freedom. The worlds most brutal commie-fascists are growing in numbers like termites about to bring down a mansion, reducing it to a pile of wreckage – ushering in a similar system Orwell used to write Animal Farm and 1984.
These masks – the heads of these Universities are just the pig ‘Squealer’ from animal farm.
‘‘SquealerThe pig who spreads Napoleon’s propaganda among the other animals. Squealer justifies the pigs’ monopolization of resources and spreads false statistics pointing to the farm’s success. Orwell uses Squealer to explore the ways in which those in power often use rhetoric and language to twist the truth and gain and maintain social and political control.”
All the characters from the book are there, Fauci, Klaus Schwab, Biden, Boris, Macron, Trudeau.
They will have us locked in n everlasting, nightmarish prison, unless we do it to them first…those who conspire to bring in 1984….
This is not petty fools just doing this because they are idiots – it is all part of the plan for the New World Order where society is forever run by the Global Elites, those who own the Corporations, ie, a Fascist Corporatocracy.
The American Mid Term Elections will determine if the world is free, or enslaved. 70 days and the fate of the world will be decided – will the mandates go away and the NWO leaders impeached and indited? Or will they get handed total power?
“the only limits on authoritarian experiments in public health are a lack of bureaucratic imagination and the costs of ensuring compliance”
*sound of country swirling down a plug hole*
Private colleges in the US often the recipients of NIH grants and health industry donations are the pharmaceutical industry’s stormtroopers – families have no choice but to comply if they wish their child to get an education opening up the best career opportunities. The vaccination mandates are ethically indefensible and terrify us – to attend, our son is required to have both covid and flu.
You call the woke brainwashing education? Why would anyone send their kids to university these days?
So they can practise medicine, or law, or any number of skills our societies need.
Agreed, but even these subjects are being subsumed by a totalitarian framework within which laws and medical care are not equally applied.
You mean two professions who are at the heart of the global mess we find ourselves in.
Control the doctors and the politicians (many of whom come from the legal profession) and you control the world.
There are good doctors and lawyers, of course, but look at the struggle they’ve had for their voices to be heard.
These same very blue (leftist) campuses have fought tooth and nail for decades to prevent government intrusion in our lives. They have rallied for our “rights” to an obscene level, yet now seem to be arms wide open to government control……now that they are in control. The left has won this battle. The decision now is whether we sit back and watch our world descend into hell, or fight back?
The courageous example of Mario Savio, Berkeley 1964, is inspirational. Despite the paralyzing failure of the MSM to speak truth to power, perhaps somewhere, somehow, someone will follow his path. Those were heroic times to remember.
According to the following “debunking” web site, the article above is incorrect: There is NO exemption to the flu vaccine requirement for non-whites: https://misbar.com/en/factcheck/2020/12/11/cornell-didnt-racially-segregated-a-flu-vaccine-mandate