Covid Vaccines Are Not Preventing Transmission
What the SCOTUS Arguments Got Most Wrong About Vaccine Mandates
Last Friday the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) heard arguments regarding the Biden Administration’s OSHA and CMS Vaccine Mandates. I'll leave the deeper analysis on how these cases may resolve to the court watchers and legal experts, but I figured I'd add a note on the science of Covid and Covid vaccines being argued.
During the oral argument it was revealed to us that the SCOTUS justices are woefully misinformed regarding Covid. In particular many are bashing Justice Sotomayor for overstating the number of children in the hospital with Covid by a factor of 30! and claiming most cases were severe when in reality the majority of Pediatric Covid Hospitalization are incidental positives unrelated to Covid.
But it wasn't just Sotomayor. All the justices, particularly the 3 liberals on the court, were regularly spouting information and statistics about Covid which significantly overstated the risks posed by the disease, especially for the young. They made statements that hospitals are overflowing with Covid patients and at the breaking point. This does not comport with the reality where even as Hospitalizations “with” Covid have seen an uptick this winter, the overall hospital census has barely budged and is not near capacity.
But none of these were the most egregious error made last Friday. That would be the assumption, taken as ground truth by nearly all involved, that the vaccine prevents one from becoming infected with Covid and prevents one from spreading Covid to others. The Justices stated this, the government lawyers argued for it, and even the petitioners conceded this point without significant argument, but it just is not true.
We've known for at least 6 months that any sterilizing protection offered by the Covid vaccines wane precipitously, such that months after inoculation one has little protection against infection and transmission. And that data was relevant for older strains of Covid. Now that Omicron has become the dominant variant, this fact is even more true. As detailed in an amicus brief to the court provided by the American Commitment Foundation, the vaccines offer zero if not negative efficacy at preventing infection from Omicron.
Today even our Public Health Betters will admit this fact. They treat the vax'd and unvax'd the same when it comes to testing, masking, and quarantine policies. Yet the SCOTUS seemed trapped in the messaging sold to us by our Public Health Betters last year when the vaccines were first rolled out. And don't let their whitewashing since then fool you, they sold us a vaccine which would stop Covid from spreading, build herd immunity, and end the pandemic, but it doesn't!
If only the Court could catch up.
Arguing against the OSHA mandate, the Solicitor General of Ohio tried to make the case by referencing the ACF brief and calling attention to the fact that ever though he was triple vaccinated, he had to attend the hearing over Zoom because he himself had recently tested postive for Covid!! But it didn’t seem to breakthrough. Justice Sotomayor appeared to ignore this argument and immeditely redirected to more fearmongering Covid misinformation and the point wasn’t brought up again.
The stated goal of the OSHA Vax Mandate is to protect workers from themselves by forcing them to vaccinate. But faced with the question of why the government would force a medical procedure on workers who don't want it, the government argued vaccination wasn't just for them, “it would keep them from spreading Covid to others”. Wrong! All workers, vax'd or not, are equally likely to catch Covid and bring it into the workplace.
For the CMS Vax Mandate, the government's stated goal was to protect vulnerable patients from Covid by making sure all the health care workers around them are vaccinated. Wrong! In a world where the vaccine doesn't prevent spread, the world we live in today, why would that matter?
We already have California (among other liberal states in the NorthEast) as an example of how this policy will fail. In California today vaccinated, yet Covid postive, Health Care Workers are being allowed to work in hospitals due to significant staff shortages since so many of them are currently out with Covid. Yet California already mandated vaccines for all HCW's and fired all the unvaccinated workers who wouldn't comply!
Would you rather be treated by someone who's unvaccinated, or someone still positive for Covid?
Particularly in the CMS case, the SCOTUS seems poised to rule in favor of the mandate, yet there is no public benefit to a non-sterilizing vaccine.
I just wish someone would have argued this fact in front of the justices when it counted.
Anyway 0 and 2...