The editorial board of the Salt Lake Tribune is calling for the government to use the National Guard to make sure people who have not taken the experimental COVID-19 shots be kept at home.
“We might have headed off omicron with a herd immunity-level of vaccinations, but that would have required a vaccination mandate, which our leaders refused,” the board complained. “Instead, we get, ‘No one could have seen this coming.’ That is patently untrue. They were told what to do, and they refused.”
The board continued, “Were Utah a truly civilized place, the governor’s next move would be to find a way to mandate the kind of mass vaccination campaign we should have launched a year ago, going as far as to deploy the National Guard to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.”
The commentary warned that Utah is “waving the white flag of surrender in the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“Gov. Spencer Cox and the new state epidemiologist, Dr. Leisha Nolen, let it officially be known Friday morning that there are so few tests available in the state, and so many people who reasonably fear that they have contracted the coronavirus, that anyone who is feeling the kind of symptoms associated with the disease should just assume they are infected and stay home,” the commentary said.
“The elderly and those with underlying conditions are still encouraged to test. But the hope that the state’s schools could remain open with a test-to-stay policy (show a negative test and go to class, show positive or refuse and go home) can only be dashed when there are no tests to be had.”
It continued, “For more than two years now, officials at all levels and in all branches of our government have missed chance after chance to get a handle on this rapidly spreading and rapidly evolving virus. Rather than call for the kind of patriotic coming together that Americans responded to after Pearl Harbor and 9/11, we were assured that it was not a real problem, that it would ‘magically disappear,’ even that it was all a hoax, a plot to extend the power of the federal government and/or further enrich Big Pharma.
“Government officials, mostly but not exclusively Republicans, were apparently determined not to be caught governing in the face of this challenge. Any move or recommendation to mask up or, when safe and effective vaccines became available, to make vaccination a requirement of admission to public places and society in general was shouted down as an unwarranted imposition on individual freedoms.”
“Cox and others have correctly said that the best tool for fighting the spread of the virus, individually and collectively, was to get two — then three — doses of the vaccine. That is absolutely the correct advice,” the newspaper promoted.
But the failing has been, it claimed, in not forcing the shots on people.
“President Joe Biden tried to pull a couple of useful levers by ordering vaccine mandates for health care workers and vaccine-or-test rules for workplaces of more than 100 employees. The U.S. Supreme Court this week upheld the former while quashing the latter, foolishly holding that a communicable disease is not a workplace hazard,” it said.
It even blamed Biden for some of the issue.
A posting at a political blog reacted harshly to the board’s demands:
“While we view the scenes from Australia, Austria, and Germany with horror, the American radical left is jealous we don’t have those policies here. Although vaccinated individuals can also contract, transmit, and die of COVID complications, the wannabe authoritarians only want to punish non-compliant Americans,” it said.
“If you critically think and don’t follow the herd, they demonize you for not ‘following the science’ or ‘listening to the experts.’ They want to control every aspect of your life and lock you inside your home if given the authority.”
The post continued, “It’s scary that these anti-science, totalitarian-minded writers think they’re the good guys in the imaginary battle against COVID-19.
The truth is Omicron is out of control everywhere. Even in places with mask and vaccine mandates. We always push vaccines, but even vaccinated ppl are catching it. It’s easy to take shots from the cheap seats but this is the sort of nonsense that makes editorial boards irrelevant pic.twitter.com/Zladdqnulc
— Deidre Henderson (@DeidreHenderson) January 15, 2022
While we look at Australia, Italy and Germany as horror stories… the radical left looks at it and wishes that we had it here. https://t.co/aqn5qjpKW9
— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) January 16, 2022
Salt Lake City Tribune Wants National Guard To Bar Unvaxxed Americans From Going ‘Anywhere’ https://t.co/dZEAe1ci99 pic.twitter.com/VGyzofbrjU
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) January 16, 2022
The Salt Lake City newspaper wants the Utah national guard to not allow unvaccinated people to leave their homes. This is mindless, anti-science insanity — omicron is infecting everyone — but these “journalists” are demanding totalitarianism. And they think they’re the good guys. pic.twitter.com/BYoskGNQ5R
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) January 16, 2022
Explained the blog, “These are people that would send you away to COVID-19 concentration camps if given the chance.”
There are several complications to the idea of jailing vaccine critics, however, in addition to the obvious constitutional rights issues. One is that Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has admitted two doses of the vaccine his company produces with BioNTech “offer very limited protection, if any” against the dominant omicron variant.
Adding a third dose, he said in an interview with Yahoo Finance, provides “reasonable protection against hospitalization and deaths.”
“Against death, very good (protection), and less protection against infection,” the Pfizer chief added.
The European Medicines Agency advised countries instead to mirror the seasonal influenza vaccination strategy tied to the onset of the cold season, Bloomberg News reported.
In January, Israel became the first nation to administer a fourth shot, targeting those over 60.
The EMA’s head of biological health threats and vaccines strategy, Marco Cavaleri, spoke at a press briefing Tuesday.
“We need to think about how we can transition from the current pandemic setting to a more endemic setting,” he said.
A pandemic becomes endemic, like the common cold or flu, when it becomes seasonal and more manageable as a population gains immunity.
Recognizing the inability of the shots to stop the spread, the U.N. health agency said future vaccines against COVID-19 must “be more effective in protection against infection thus lowering community transmission.”
“It’s over, people,” was the response from Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter who has devoted his independent reporting to the pandemic, publishing several books on the subject.
“Aside from a few unlucky Israelis, no one is going to receive a fourth dose of the original vaccine; everyone with eyes can see it doesn’t work against Omicron,” he wrote on his Substack page.
Separately, the WHO said vaccination status should not be used to disqualify people from traveling internationally, advising governments to implement vaccine mandates only as a “last resort.”
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