Alice Salles – August 12, 2021
Vaccine mandates are coming. Good, said Indiana University chief health officer Aaron E. Carroll.
“When it comes to incentives, most people like carrots,” Carroll wrote in his New York Times essay. “Sometimes, though, people need sticks.”
Carroll laments the fact that incentives such as access to events, donuts, french fries, and even hard cash are no longer moving many Americans to fall in line with what’s expected of them by the vaccine pushers.
Does he mean that only the threat of violence will? His silence on what exactly the stick would be speaks volumes.
Carroll then points to George Washington, asking, If the Revolutionary War general could force the thousands of new Continental Army recruits to inoculate against smallpox in early America’s war against the British, then why can’t we jab a nation of 383 million to fight covid?
But a workable approach isn’t what Carroll was after. He was, however, ready to compare covid-19, a virus associated with an infection that has a 99 percent recovery rate among the young and that poses a much lower death risk than influenza among children, with more deadly ailments caused by highly contagious pathogens.
When the United States was fighting smallpox long ago, it took mandates to get enough people vaccinated. To eradicate polio, the same was true. Nearly all major infectious diseases in the country—measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, diphtheria and more—have been managed through vaccine mandates by schools. The result is that the vast majority of children are vaccinated, and in time, they grow into adults who are vaccinated. That’s how the country achieves real herd immunity.
But this process can take decades. Covid-19 is an emergency, and we don’t have that much time.
Forcing parents to vaccinate kids against covid now, Carroll argues, might just do the trick.
It’s the Science, Stupid
What the Indiana University chief health officer failed to mention in his case for the mass vaccination of children was that the mRNA shots are actually dangerous to that same age group.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) itself is investigating this, following a record-breaking increase in the number of adverse reactions suffered by people of all ages and a considerable increase in heart-related ailments suffered by the young and healthy following the Pfizer shots.
While the CDC is trying to downplay the issue, saying heart-related complications in children, teens, and young adults are rare and often mild, data from the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) paints another picture. in which hundreds of the vaccinated who suffer heart-related conditions turn up at the ER. Some are even dying as a result.
In Carroll’s op-ed, he estimates that once the vaccines are fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), it should be easy for federal and state officials to begin imposing mandates. But what would happen to the noncompliant? While the Indiana University health chief doesn’t acknowledge that the stick analogy could be interpreted as code for violence, he doesn’t offer a different interpretation.
Despite his faith in the process, it’s important to note that a full OK from the FDA doesn’t mean much.
Cronyism: Bad for Your Health
It’s no secret that a number of major drug companies use the state to squash competition, not help patients.
Agencies like the CDC take sizable donations from the very pharmaceutical companies that push the drugs and treatments approved by America’s health czars, while the FDA employs advisors tasked with reviewing new drugs and treatments who are directly paid by these same companies. For example, the four physicians who were on the reviewing committee for Brilinta, a drug produced and sold by AstraZeneca, later accepted generous cash gifts from the same drug company, causing a scandal.
But that’s not the only way the FDA helps pharmaceutical companies.
By putting drug makers through a drug approval process that costs $3 billion on average, the FDA “eliminates any competition from un-patentable treatments,” author Hunter Lewis pointed out in this article for the Mises Institute. That money “also flows into the salaries of FDA employees, who consequently tend to take a friendly view of drug companies and zealously guard the legal exclusivity of their products.”
Congress is also filled with lawmakers whose political campaigns were supported by the same type of professionals. This is the case of Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Chris Coons (D-DE), who after receiving over $100,000 each in political contributions from political action committees tied to drug manufacturers in 2019 are now fighting to expand the array of items eligible to be patented, a move that would directly benefit drugmakers and companies developing medical treatments.
With several other examples proving that the relationship between healthcare giants and Congress clearly helps to guide health policy in America, it is clear that we’re far from having a free market in healthcare. Without a free market in healthcare, how can anybody trust the FDA and the drugs its bureaucratic apparatus approves?
By giving the state yet more power to dictate our health decisions, we also hand the same large companies that fund health officials carte blanche to push experimental treatments on the young and old alike, all the while actively playing down any reports of injury, disease, or death associated with these treatments.
If Indiana University’s chief health officer wants to give these power players even more control over his students’ health, he won’t be doing Hoosiers any favors. Instead, he will be simply serving as an enabler of tyranny.
Originally published at Mises.org.
Image source: Thomas Hawk via Flickr
