For the past year and a half, one mantra has flooded the public discourse about COVID. It has been the rallying cry of politicians and the commentariat: “Trust the Science!” Every mandate, every policy is enacted in the name of Science. “The Science” has come to represent a quasi-deity and those invoking its name behave more like true believers than objective observers of data. Vaccines and masks serve as religious shibboleths, separating the saved from the unbelievers. Politicians eagerly exploit the COVID panic to arrogate ever-expanding emergency powers to themselves. “In the name of public health!” they say, as they unroll each new edict. “In the name of Science!” However, it is clear that the new masking and vaccine mandates are being implemented on the basis of a COVID psychosis that is completely unmoored from scientific realities.

CNN reported on September 2 that more than 80% of Americans 16 and older have some level of immunity against COVID. This is according to a survey of blood donations conducted by the CDC, which also determined that twice as many people have been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus compared to official counts. Of the 1.4 million blood samples they tested across the country in May 2021, 83.3% of them contained antibodies to the virus. That’s up from a mere 3.5% when blood samples were first tested in July 2020.

The CDC survey noted that individuals who are seropositive from past infection, meaning those with natural immunity, have their risk of COVID infection reduced by 80 to 95%, similar to vaccine efficacy rates. In fact, a study from Israel indicates that natural immunity may actually be 27 times greater than vaccine conferred immunity.

This doesn’t even take into account the incidence of T-cell (or memory cell) immunity, which is believed to confer even broader immune resistance. According to The BMJ, “At least six studies have reported T cell reactivity against SARS-CoV-2 in 20% to 50% of people with no known exposure to the virus.” One study of blood donor samples in the U.S. found 50% of the samples displayed T-cell reactivity to the novel coronavirus. These are people who exhibit a natural immunity to COVID even without prior infection.

Taken in conjunction with the new CDC survey data, this indicates that a remarkable level of herd immunity already exists in the country. Not only that, but if twice as many people have been infected, this cuts the infection fatality rate (IFR) in half. Currently the IFR has been estimated at 0.26% across the general population. For children, it’s even lower – 0.01% under the age of 25 and 0.002% for children under the age of 10.

And yet you wouldn’t suspect any of this as the fearmongering of mainstream media and Democrat politicians reaches a new fever pitch.

A New York Times survey found that Democrats have the least realistic understanding of the risks associated with COVID. The survey found that 28% of Democrats believe your chance of hospitalization from COVID is 20-49% and fully 41% of Democrats believe that number to be over 50%. The true risk of hospitalization? One to five percent. And that includes everyone who incidentally tests positive while hospitalized for other reasons. Those who are most likely to support draconian lockdown measures or mask and vaccine mandates base their support for these policies in wildly distorted perceptions of reality.

President Biden announced sweeping vaccine mandates on Thursday, expanding the bureaucratic powers of the Department of Labor in unprecedented ways. Biden directed the DOL to require employers with over 100 employees to vaccinate all employees or conduct weekly COVID testing of unvaccinated workers. All federal employees must be vaccinated.

The mandate also extends to healthcare workers, all of whom must be vaccinated if they work in facilities accepting Medicaid or Medicare funds. Currently as many as 40% of healthcare workers remain unvaccinated. These are the frontline heroes who worked tirelessly over the past 18 months to care for people dying from COVID and yet they themselves refuse to take the vaccine. Healthcare workers are being denied the right to their own medical autonomy by government bureaucrats.

In a chillingly authoritarian speech, Biden declared that we are in a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” and chastised unvaccinated Americans: “We have been patient but our patience is wearing thin and your refusal has cost all of us.”

Our patience is wearing thin? What right does the government have to grow impatient with private citizens for any personal decisions they make, particularly regarding their individual medical health? It is not the government’s place to express either contempt or disappointment for the personal health choices of any individual.

What’s more, Biden is lying. The unvaccinated haven’t cost anyone anything. If you are vaccinated, your risk of dying from COVID is 0.001%. You have immunity. It shouldn’t matter to you whether anyone else is vaccinated or not. You’ve made a personal choice to protect yourself and significantly reduce your risk of dying from COVID. If you are unvaccinated, you’ve made a personal choice to accept the risk of catching COVID – a viral infection with a recovery rate greater than 99.8%, based on the latest CDC data. More than 80% of the population already has immunity according to serology testing. Who are these mandates meant to protect?

According to Kamala Harris, they’re meant to protect the vaccinated. The Vice President tweeted this past weekend: “By vaccinating the unvaccinated, increasing our testing and masking, and protecting the vaccinated, we can end this pandemic.”
Protecting the vaccinated? The vaccines are intended to protect the unvaccinated. Is she tacitly claiming that the vaccines don’t work? If so, then why are we mandating them for the unvaccinated?

This type of logical incoherence characterized Biden’s vaccine mandate announcement as well. He told Americans, “If you’re vaccinated, you are perfectly safe.” But later in the same speech he promised that the federal government would “protect” the vaccinated from the unvaccinated. Why do they need protecting if the vaccines provide “perfectly safe” immunity? And if they don’t, then why are we mandating vaccines that offer no protection? Biden is counting on you being too scared of the threat of COVID to notice the inconsistencies in his despotic arguments.

The fact is, the vaccines do not offer perfect protection. They aren’t designed to. These are not sterilizing vaccines. They are intended to reduce the severity of the illness, not to stop its spread. In other words, the vaccines can provide protection to an individual from serious complications from the virus, but they do not provide protection to others.

When Biden says, “This isn’t about freedom or personal choice. It’s about protecting yourself and those around you,” he is lying. Vaccines may offer protection for you. But they do not protect those around you, nor are they intended to. It is inherently about personal freedom of choice.

In Israel, a country with one of the highest vaccination rates at 80%, they saw one of the highest surges in COVID infection rates in the world in the past month. Sixty percent of those who were hospitalized were fully vaccinated. This is not a pandemic of the unvaccinated.

Those who are vaccinated carry just as high viral loads as those who are unvaccinated if they become infected. The Department of Labor now requires employers to test unvaccinated employees weekly for COVID. Why should vaccinated employees be exempt when they are capable of spreading COVID as well? Don’t they present a threat to the unvaccinated?

The policy mandates make no coherent sense. But the guiding principle of the mandates isn’t logic, it’s compliance. “This is not about freedom or personal choice,” Biden menaced. Americans should take note.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is now advocating for vaccine passports for air travel – a de facto “no fly” list of the unvaccinated – despite the fact that studies have found that air travel results in only one case of COVID transmission for every 27 million travelers.

The Maryland General Assembly just approved a statewide mask mandate for all schoolchildren, despite the fact that Dr. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist who served on Biden’s COVID advisory team, explained that masks are essentially useless against containing the aerosol transmission of the Delta variant and no evidence exists that mask mandates have any effect on the virus transmission within schools.

Zeke Emanuel, the Obamacare architect and another former member of Biden’s COVID advisory team, is calling for mandatory vaccinations for children ages 12-15, despite the fact that children are at statistically zero risk of dying from COVID. Unvaccinated children are less likely to die of COVID than fully vaccinated adults in all age groups. Throughout the course of the entire pandemic, only 439 children under the age of 17 have died from COVID. More children die from suicide in any single year than the total number of COVID fatalities in children.

Vaccines may in fact present greater health risks to children than the virus itself. The UK just announced they are shelving their vaccine passport plan after a major study found teenage boys are six times more likely to suffer from heart problems as a result of the vaccine than to be hospitalized from COVID. But Zeke Emanuel is willing to put young boys at risk of actual harm in order to preserve the appearance of concern for public health. Optics over reality. This is medical theater.

Zeke Emanuel is the same bioethicist who argued against tranching out the vaccine according to vulnerable age groups because, even though it would save the most lives in absolute numbers, it might save too high a percentage of old white people. More people should die for the sake of equity. These are the experts who believe they have the moral authority to dictate your personal medical decisions.

This moral superiority is predictably spreading among religious adherents of the COVID panic cult. It is not merely that they have made a personal medical choice to vaccinate themselves, it’s that they believe they have made a MORAL choice. And everyone else must be forced to submit to their morality for the sake of the common good.

There are two phenomena at play here. One is a moral dependence on government born out of fear and fostered by a suffocating safety culture that has emerged in America. Notice how much of the discussion about COVID is framed in terms of our RIGHT to not get sick. The government must force individuals to be vaccinated or to wear a mask in order to prevent someone else from potentially getting sick. But no right to be free from illness exists in natural law. It cannot exist by definition because to get sick (and eventually, to die) is part of the natural state of what it means to be human. The government cannot protect you from the fundamental risks of being human. And the government has no right to force someone else to protect you. Whatever precautions you choose to take for your own health are just that, personal precautions.

Yet we as a society have encouraged this immature fantasy that life is supposed to be free from suffering and that any adversity is a sign of oppression. If I get sick, it must be the fault of someone else and the government must protect me from them. This is adolescent thinking.

As children, our parents protect and care for us. As we grow into adulthood, we are supposed to learn how to care for ourselves. But in this current culture of Peter Pan adolescents, who continually complain about the mundane inconveniences of “adulting” and yearn for the carefree days of childhood, adults merely transfer that responsibility to the government. This childish sense of entitlement permeates every aspect of the Progressive agenda: The government should pay for my healthcare, my education, my rent, my food. And it finds its latest expression in the COVID panic: The government should keep me from getting sick.

Once you have ceded all personal responsibility to the government, you have now accepted the government as the ultimate arbiter of your personal behavior. Wear the mask. Take the vaccine. Do not question, just comply. Irrational fear and an abdication of personal responsibility create the perfect breeding ground for authoritarianism. In steps Uncle Joe with his folksy assurances that if you just do as he says, he will keep you safe.

And if you don’t? You are the selfish ones, the “bitter clingers,” as Obama once termed it, clinging to your antiquated notions of individual rights and freedoms, standing in the way of Progress. Why can’t you just go along with the rest of us? Why do you resist the compassionate dictates of Big Brother? Don’t you see it’s for your own good? Why won’t you comply?

It is very easy to justify any number of atrocities in the name of the common good once individual rights are trampled on. Recall that Robespierre’s Reign of Terror was conducted under the auspices of the Committee of Public Safety. The rights of the individual must give way to the good of the collective, even if that means smashing a million eggs in the process of making the omelette.

And this is the other phenomenon we see taking shape. The tribalistic pitting of citizens against each other, of vaccinated against unvaccinated, clean against the unclean. Jonathan Haidt has explored the powerful impact of the moral psychology of disgust on our political behaviors, particularly as a driver of authoritarianism. And Dr. Jordan Peterson has examined the strong correlation between societies with high levels of infectious disease and the rise of authoritarian regimes. Hitler framed his broadsides against the Jews in terms of public health and disease control. And the Germans used Zyklon B to fumigate warehouses before the Nazis used it to exterminate human beings. Disgust is a powerful motivating factor. The more that demagogues drive up the fear and disgust factor around COVID, the more people see their fellow citizens in dehumanizing terms, and the more willing they are to accept authoritarian solutions.

Look at the diabolical solutions currently advocated in mainstream media. From Jimmy Kimmel to Don Lemon to editorial boards of newspapers, it has become commonplace to argue that people who are unvaccinated don’t deserve to be treated at hospitals. Doctors are asking if they can refuse to treat patients based on their vaccination status. Vaccine passports would prevent citizens from engaging in any aspect of public life from dining to grocery shopping. Why? Because “The Unvaccinated” are a plague. They are the unclean. They must be ostracized from society and cast into the outer darkness in order to protect those who are clean from becoming contaminated by other human beings.

No one needs to wonder how people throughout history could so easily turn against their neighbor. We are witnessing it in real time.

It is this environment that clears the path for the authoritarian state to emerge. And those consumed by fear welcome it with open arms, not recognizing the inherent threat underlying the government’s promise of protection.

As Roman historian Suetonius wrote: “Hail, Caesar, those who are about to die salute thee.”