It's like the start of a bad joke. Vaccines are a tool in the toolbox of fighting disease. The COVID vaccines are a new tool in that toolbox. The vaccines are not an amulet against illness, not even COVID and they are new so science is evolving. There are also side effects of the vaccine that are still being discovered. Like all drugs, hopefully the benefits outweigh the harms.
Addressed here are mandates regarding a COVID vaccine and how through a marketing campaign the COVID vaccine has been used as a political tool to further divide the country's population and to strengthen the authority of government and the wealth of big pharma by lumping a medical treatment into the make believe world of identifiers as to who is "progressive" and "the others." I am against mandates for the COVID vaccine. That is enough to characterize me as an "other," and I'm proud of it.
It's ethically impossible to believe that anyone is "certain" enough of the COVID vaccines to force them upon another. I wouldn't even dream of forcing someone to take a vitamin! COVID marketing and alleged "information" is so wrapped up in agenda and money that has nothing to do with health that the punch line to the title joke is that's who today's extreme self-labeled progressives worshp.
For me, without marketing the COVID vaccines with behavior- modification tools it would likely cause even the most desperately entrenched to pause before they insisted, supported and bullied anyone to take a COVID vaccine.
Behavior-mod is part of marketing, make people feel like they belong, that their lives are richer, more colorful, more meaningful if they buy your vodka, your car, your product. Reinforce the idea through behavior mod. Positive reinforcement, punishment, ignoring the "problem" behavior are "acceptable" methods of behavior mod. And then are the more sinister cousins of these behavior mod techniques, force, shaming, blaming, shunning and peer pressure.
The rapid leap to not only approve these drugs, but to ignore WHAT'S DIFFERENT about the COVID vaccines and their mandates has unfortunately only strengthened people's mistrust of the motivation behind the mandates.
Even before there was "approval," the different status of a governmental emergency use authorization and approval was played down as most marketing and talk about the vaccines used the two terms interchangeably. They're not interchangeable.
Even as late as the OSHA mandate, now delayed, side effects were carefully downplayed as people compared side effects to the risks of getting COVID. These risks did not emphasize, at first, the variation in risk if precautions were taken or the risk faced by certain age groups. There is still no clarity on the effect of these vaccines on those with a variety of health issues, co-morbidities.
The marketers let the marketing campaign fly but it wasn't working fast enough, and so we started shaming and blaming the unvaccinated for COVID as murderers or any other number of character assaults, even dumping them in with the devil-image itself (sarcasm intended) of Trump supporters despite numbers that indicated the falsehood of both these claims.
So, the "vaccinated" went from early adopters at best to suddenly somehow seeing themselves as morally superior. Sorry, that doesn't fly. Because these forced-vaccine supporters actually IGNORED the very significant and ongoing groups who are not included in their morally superior fury.
They quickly started spouting the next twisted reasoning used by some "fact-checkers" regarding reports of "exempt" individuals. So here let's dispense with the word exempt and address the swaths of people NOT mandated, from the postal service which is not subject to federal mandates and is governed by OSHA to the judicial branch and to Congresspeople and their staffs, these groups are NOT mandated. The millions of illegals being "absorbed" also not mandated because allegedly this is a "job-based" mandate.
Of course, forced-vaccine supporters ignore these people as they viciously support forcing their peers to get the COVID vaccine as if COVID recognizes these distinctions or perhaps because they don't hang out with judges, Congresspeople, postal workers or illegal immigrants. Not persuasive reasoning.
The certainty about the safety and efficacy of COVID vaccines is absurd. The true believers are certain. Certainty isn't even true of other drugs that have been around a lot longer than the COVID vaccine. None of them is 100 percent effective. If you're part of the 40 to 60 percent for whom the flu vaccine isn't effective is it the unvaccinated's fault that you got flu? There are always a percentage of people who do not get the immunity they desired from a vaccine.
With the COVID vaccine it's even more unknown because there's already a lot of evidence that the vaccine works a bit differently than promised, it's not the amulet expected but instead requires boosters, and more boosters to remain effective. The variants could be transmitted by those already vaccinated and they can still get COVID.
But the marketing continues that somehow the variants are coming from the unvaccinated lepers of our society passing it on to the vaccinated. Not even worth addressing, just a sign of a great marketing campaign.
And remember the emergency attached in front of emergency use and OSHA's emergency mandate? What is an emergency? A pandemic? Great. How do we define pandemic. The numbers are not established and by law such emergency powers should have a closing, an end, otherwise they're not temporary, they're permanent. Without a number, there is no end. Yeah, true believers don't care, the marketing worked.
The sheer ignorance, that's what it is, of believing what the politician, the bureaucrat and big pharma are pushing and selling absolutely without a doubt has gotten even worse. Suppressing side effects. OSHA came right out and said its mandate would not allow reporting/recording of side effects (in violation of federal law) because it didn't want to discourage people from getting the vaccine and the endless boosters. The politicians, the bureaucrats and big pharma should never get to decide what truth we need to make a decision.
The FDA has asked a federal judge to give it till 2076 to release all its documents relating to the drug approval of the Pfizer vaccine in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
Mandates are part of a marketing extravaganza pushed by extremists who support governmental overreach as some sort of way of achieving "fairness" in society, though even expanding government power through using the COVID excuse already should illustrate that caution is best, after all, the "those who aren't mandated" list includes "lawmakers," not the rest of us.
The politician gets to brag that he's got 150 percent of people vaccinated (ignoring those who were not mandated or are illegal or have a legitimate exemption). The bureaucrat gets to write children's books about how he's the hero (not acknowledging his hand as perpetrator) in getting us safe with his ever-changing messages. And big pharma, well, they just need more time to really let us know how that approval went through, you can't intelligently decide that until 2076 if the judge goes for their plan.
We all fall for marketing because marketing works. However, when it comes to forcing a person to take a vaccine or else face unemployment, ineligibility to go places or worse, COVID vaccine-forcers are perpetrators. No one wants COVID and everyone is somewhat afraid, but your fear does not justify becoming a perpetrator.
