Science-y!

Dear Saint Paul bars and restaurants,

I get it. You’re between a rock and a hard place. Many of you know how stupid the mayor’s vaccine mandate is – someone who got the Pfizer vaccine a year ago can come into your establishment, hacking their brains out and contagious as can be, while someone with natural immunity a month old is kept out. And your employees have no vaccine mandate, even though they’re the ones who will be standing around the place for hours at a time – which, the science shows, is where the real risk comes from.

And it’s not like I don’t take this pandemic seriously. I’ve got very vulnerable relatives. I’ve had Covid, donated all kinds of convalescent plasma, been vaccinated, and take all the care necessary. I’m not laughing this whole thing off.

But even the CDC and other public health authorities are starting to admit that vaccine mandates and lockdowns are completely counterproductive, that masks are about as useful at public health as aluminum foil pants, that eventually everyone is going to get Omicron, and that the right approach is likely going to be to protect the vulnerable, but go on living our lives.

Which is the exact opposite of the approach the Mayor is taking with this idiot mandate.

So I’ll tell you what.

If you agree with the mandate? Feel free to make your sentiments public. My response should be obvious by this point. You needn’t worry about making room for me.

If you want to go along with the mandate because you have to, that’s fine. I won’t be patronizing your establishment for the duration. I get the bind you’re in, but at some point people have to say enough is enough. Feel free to tell the mayor, the Chamber of Commerce, and all the other people who support this idiot policy I said so. Do you want me to help you put pressure on them? I’m there. And I hope we can get together when the crazy is over.

If you don’t want to go along with the policy, but you need to be discreet? Pass the word around – under the table, discreetly, obviously. I will do my best to be there, and bring friends. I get it, you don’t want to be made an example of like the places that stayed open last year. “Test cases are for other people”, in public health as in self-defense. I’m not going to ask you to be a hero. But pass the word; I will do my best to make it worthwhile.

Enough is enough.

20 thoughts on “Science-y!

  1. The United States has a lower vaccination rate than any other country tracked besides Russia.
    https://morningconsult.com/global-vaccine-tracking/

    Let’s see if I got this right. The President can’t require businesses to have their employees vaccinated (SCOTUS) but a GOP governor can fine businesses if they require vaccines. To be fair, it is entirely consistent with modern day conservative ideology to have government dictate decisions to private businesses.

  2. Shamrocks, Bennett’s, and Cecil’s, my business will have to wait until the mask mandate is over.

  3. I see The Big E are suffering the same problem as Justice Sotomayer: they don’t understand the framework of the United States government. That whole federalism thing, enumerated powers and reserved-to-the-states concept, it’s just too confusing. Understandable. Tyrants have had that problem for millennia.

    One thing I’d like clarified, though: which modern day political scholars advocate government achieving its aims through private business? Could we have some names, please, maybe links?

  4. The people in favor of Biden’s one-man vax dictate hate Trump and think that he should not be in office because of his — get ready for it — “authoritarian tendencies.”

  5. Private businesses giving a mandate for continuous employment happens on the regular. And employees are not indentured servants and have the choice to leave if they object. But the federal government requiring this mandate is a huge step into authoritarian territory. Employers that wanted political cover have already moved forward, and the mandate on federal and healthcare workers would seem to provide lot of cover already. I’m in favor of keeping it local as opposed to federal.

  6. Just a reminder; when Ebola came around, Ed Garcia, a man with no medical training whatsoever, put the kibosh on it at Firestone Plantation by quarantining the sick in an improvised field hospital using Firestone’s PPE. Here in the U.S., a legion of trained doctors allowed COVID to rampage through the country by trying to quarantine everyone while letting the sick into nursing homes.

    Just sayin’.

  7. Thankfully, knowing that Herr Brandon’s dictatorial over reach would be challenged in court, my company waited for those results. While they have encouraged us to get jabbed, we are not required to do so.

  8. No names, then, E? No modern conservative political philosophers to support your 11:43 calumny? Just a flat-out libel, I guess.

  9. I was a pressman on a 4 color press in MN, and we had two mandates: you had to wear steel toed shoes, and have some kind of hearing protection. No one complained. I would have quit before I would let someone give me injections (with no end in sight) that would not stop me getting the Communist Chinese Wuhan Bat Flu Lung Rot.

    Big diff with the mandates.

  10. States have plenary power. The federal government does not have plenary power. Some people have a hard time believing that the president does not have arbitrary power to do things that he thinks are a really, really good idea.
    Most of these people are in junior high school.

  11. Hobbes, Burke, Kirk, even Goldwater, but DeSantis? Abbott? These are the modern Conservative political philosophers who shape the ideology of the times?

  12. 🚨 @ Woolly, do you have any thoughts regarding Australia refusing entry to Novak Djokovic for the Australian Open?

  13. My take on mask and vaccine mandates is that cloth masks slow things down hardly, surgical masks aren’t much better, and the vaccine isn’t of much use versus Omicron. You can generally tell when government officials are desperate for something when they try to mandate something–if it worked well, you wouldn’t have to use compulsion.

    Which is my ordinary response to the Aussie government. They’ve got a healthy guy with no known exposure that they’re putting through the wringer because….panic.

  14. Dems don’t want you to show an ID to vote so they can get elected and require you to show an ID to buy food…

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.