Over the past two weeks we have been “treated” to a barrage of media regarding the Tulsa “massacre” of Blacks in the 1920’s. There was also some coverage of bodies being disinterred in a Tulsa cemetery.
Oklahoma was Indian Territory in 1900. Tulsa was and still is part of an existing Creek reservation.
The cemetery being dug up in Tulsa existed prior to 1900. It was the closest cemetery to the smallpox clinic that opened for one year -1900- in Tulsa.
Smallpox victims were forbidden to be embalmed or transported. They were to be disinfected, wrapped in a prescribed thickness of cloth and bandages, and buried six feet underground immediately. Smallpox was the only disease where the dead bodies were treated in this manner.
By law, in most, (if not all) states Smallpox bodies must never be disinterred. The picture accompanying this post shows volunteers carrying trays of remains bare handed.
According to Mayo Clinic’s site, if someone were infected we have 7-14 days until the symptomatic red sores appear and they become transmissible. So say t-minus 5 days at this point, assuming one or some of those workers were infected by their proximity to possible Smallpox victims.
The disease is transmitted when the first symptoms appear, about four days before the rash.
The initial symptoms resemble any flu virus, or COVID-19.
They will get COVID tested and sent home to wait for the results. The COVID tests will be negative.
These people go to work, to church, to rallies, to Wal-Mart, to casinos, to … Fourth of July picnics.
This opens one hell of a can of worms. Was this promoted because COVID didn’t play out the way they wanted? (rampant speculation there, I know…)
How much is “enough” is dependent upon each persons perception. What might be too much to you isn’t going to be too much to someone else. We as a society have become soft, we’re way too willing to accept governmental/cultural intrusions as long as we have plenty of beer to drink, chips to eat, and Kardashians to watch. I believe the historical term that applies here is “Bread and Circuses.”
A lot of people have a serious misunderstanding of our first revolutionary war. Most people think it started because Redcoats shot some people in Boston, so everyone grabbed their squirrel rifle and headed to Lexington. In reality, that revolution was decades in the making. It was a series of actions on the part of the British government that, eventually, pissed off enough people that they were willing to fight. Even then, historical consensus is that the majority of the American people did not support Amerexit. I’ve read that as little as 1/3rd of the population actually supported the rebellion when it started. That means that 2/3rds of the people in the colonies were either apathetic about the rebellion, or outright opposed it. In our Civil War, less than half the people in the North, at least initially, supported the war. It was almost 4 months from the time South Carolina seceded until the actual “shootin’ war” started. The country was falling apart for 4 months, and nobody, at least not a large number of people, in the North seemed to care. Look at Lincoln’s 64 reelection, he only garnered 55% of the vote. Now yes, that’s a majority, but definitely not an overwhelming majority…especially considering the war was very much going in the North’s favor at that point.
It doesn’t take a majority of people to overthrow a government. History shows that a minority, if dedicated enough, can do it. The thing that will most likely spark an actual war war is economic turmoil. Most governments have been overthrown, by their own people I mean, because of economic chaos than any other reason. Wait until hyperinflation…caused by all this phony money they keep creating…erodes people’s ability to put food on the table. Wait until the world dumps the dollar for the yuan, at which point our dollar bills will become nothing more than fancy toilet paper. The only question then is who best uses the turmoil to their benefit…the left or the right. Recent history, the last century or so, shows it to be the left.
DISCLAIMER: The purpose of this blog post is to inform not to convince. Take what is said here and apply reason, logic and research of your own… or don’t.Take what you need and leave the rest.
Centuries from now, historians may wonder: Where exactly did Congress store all those pork barrels? On the Capitol grounds they might look for the bushes, which were beaten around, and a row of haystacks in which members of Congress used to look for needles. The driveway is paved with stones, none of which was unturned, and there are three bandwagons in front of the building upon which they frequently climbed. There are no fewer than seven flagpoles for the running up of ideas. The law is perverted, and, in its wake, all the collective forces of the nation are not only diverted from their proper direction but pursue a diametrically opposed course to the detriment of the populace.Government, at all levels, has become the tool of every kind of avarice, skullduggery, flim-flam, double dealing and iniquity that government, through the mechanism of the law, is designed to punish and exterminate.
We have been indoctrinated that man, (and woman), by the very act of being born comes into this world with God-given rights of freedom of personality, personal liberty and personal property-these three things are the core of being human. Because of the existence of personality, liberty and property, mankind has created laws for their protection. Law is nothing more than the organization of the natural right of lawful personal defense.
Every person has the right of defending, even by force, his or her person, liberty and property. If, under our constitutional republic, one person has these unalienable rights and the full right to defend them, the corollary is that ALL persons have these same rights and are free to exercise them so long as they do nothing to encroach on the sovereign rights of their neighbor.
Each individual, exercising THEIR rights while taking care to refrain from impinging on their neighbors sovereign rights is the very definition of justice. But, something has gone drastically wrong with the government failing in its legitimate duties while encroaching on the natural rights of its citizenry. The state, at all levels has, without justification, intervened in private affairs rather than protect the rights of the individual from encroachment by others.
The function of the state is clearly spelled out in the preamble to the US Constitution; “We, the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity…” THESE are the legitimate functions of the state. Unfortunately, we have seen the government unlawfully expand its activities into the private affairs of citizens. It has acted in direct opposition to its proper function. It has, over time, destroyed the vision of the Founders. It has employed itself in annihilating the very justice it was created to establish. It has wielded the coercive force of the collective in the service of those who traffic, without personal risk and without moral scruple against the persons, liberty and property of others. Like the privateers of old, it has converted plunder into a right and lawful defense into a crime.
There has been a number of decades when the law and the government has been perverted through naked greed and misconceived “charity” to a point where there is no negative consequence to the miscreants who inhabit the various positions within the halls of government.
Humans are driven, in the end, by two very basic and opposing desires; attaining pleasure, (reward) and avoiding pain, (punishment). To achieve pleasure, humans can pursue two routes; 1) application of his/her faculties to objects or personal labor. This is the origin of property. 2) By seizing and appropriating the production of property of his fellow man. This is the origin of plunder.
Labor, by its nature, creates pain and being inclined to avoid pain, history shows that whenever plunder is less burdensome that labor, plunder increases. Neither religion nor morality can prevent it from prevailing.
What can we do to have a cessation of plunder by the state? We must find a way to make it more burdensome and dangerous than labor. Later on in this series I will explore different mechanisms to achieve that end.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” John Adams
DISCLAIMER: The purpose of this blog post is to inform not to convince. Take what is said here and apply reason, logic and research of your own… or don’t.Take what you need and leave the rest.
It has been said that these United States of America have as their foundation pillars, two documents, The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.The precepts and principles illustrated therein form the basis and justification for the republic that was formed by the breakaway British colonies in 1776…or so we are told.
Although it has never been used as an example of United States law, the Declaration of Independence is cited as the bedrock foundation of all United States jurisprudence that has followed. The operational clause of that Declaration is as follows:”We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
Two points stand out. Item first; The Founders’ position was that all men were endued with certain rights “by their Creator”, (common usage understood by the Founders was a description of God), that were unalienable, that is to say that those rights were: “unable to be taken away from or given away by the possessor.” The Declaration states that among these many rights are; “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. (Thomas Jefferson, on of the chief architects of the Declaration originally had “Property” in the place of Happiness).
The second major point was that governments derived their just powers from the consent of the governed, which is to say that in order to exercise power legitimately, those governed must so consent. It therefore strains reason that in a republic that maintains it is composed of free and sovereign people who have been granted equal and that are unable to be taken or given away that “we the people” are ruled by the whim of tyrants and are constrained through force and the threat of force in a manner no different that that exercised by the dictators at the heads of nation-states we identify as evil and destructive to both “civilized” people and their own subjects.
A weakness of humans is that we often obey force from fear of retribution, physical pain or death, yet we as an assumedly “free” people make concessions to those we absurdly characterize as our “public servants” when, in truth, it is “we the people” who do the bidding of the “elected” officials and their unelected and appointed bureaucrats.
Why would a “free people” do this? There are more of us than there are of them. Is it cowardice? Have we become so accustomed to kowtowing to power while pulling our own forelock to please our political masters that we no longer understand the requirements of freedom let along have the intestinal fortitude to stand up for ourselves? Have we become so blinded by the propaganda that we prefer comfortable voluntary servitude to dangerous and uncertain freedom?
I will examine these and other questions in the following series of posts. Among other things, I will be questioning the truth of the lyric of a Lee Greenwood song that says; “I’m proud to be an American where at least I know I’m free. And I won’t forget the men who died to give that right to me…”
To quote Founding Father John Adams; “But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever. “
Watch as this pharmacist opens the MASSIVE insert found inside the Johnson and Johnson COVID vaccine and learns two important and shocking things. First, the insert is the size of a flag once opened, but more importantly, the entire insert is blank. No information on safety or what chemicals and medicines are found in the actual vax. Run time 1:33
Could “the mere presence of the corona virus” suppress flu cases? As in the big tough Chinese alpha male coronavirus scaring away the metrosexual beta male influenza virus?
Seasonal influenza, also known as “the flu,” visits America every year, similar to tornados, thunderstorms, heat waves, and snowstorms. As tracked by the CDC, over the past decade symptomatic flu cases ranged from 9 to 45 million cases per year in the US. Hospitalizations varied from 140 to 810 thousand, and deaths from 12 to 61 thousand, depending on the particular year, strain of influenza, and effectiveness of the vaccine.
This year, “flu activity is unusually low at this time” according to CDC surveillance. Since late September 2020, they recorded only about 2000 cases, a minute fraction of the tens of millions of cases in past years. Hospitalizations this flu season are minimal with only 224 confirmed influenza hospitalizations from September 2020 to mid-April 202, nowhere near the hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations in past seasons. Deaths are harder to measure since the CDC conveniently changed how deaths are characterized this past year. Instead of pneumonia, influenza, and COVID being in separate categories, now it’s called PIC, lumping the three entities together. For children, the CDC doesn’t use PIC as COVID hospitalization or death in children is exceedingly rare, unless the child is immunocompromised. In each of the past three years, pediatric deaths ranged from 144 to 198 per year. This current flu season has seen only one single child die from the flu. Biden Is Using Lies To Divide America So what happened to the flu? From millions of cases to a few thousand. It would like having a winter with no snow, which despite predictions of NY Times climate experts, hasn’t come close to happening. Perhaps the flu cases are mysteriously lost, like Hillary Clinton’s emails, Hunter Biden’s laptop, or John Durham’s sealed indictments. A virologist was perplexed and honest. According to the New York Times, “We don’t really have a clue,” said Richard Webby, a virologist at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. “We’re in uncharted territory. We haven’t had an influenza season this low, I think as long as we’ve been measuring it. So what the potential implications are is a bit unclear.” Other than an occasional news story like the one above, the media has been rather uninterested in this fluke of science, instead wringing their paws over an election audit in Arizona or Frank Luntz and Kevin McCarthy shacking up. As big media is too busy looking for racism hiding behind every Republican, let’s explore why the flu might have mysteriously vanished. One theory is that public health measures for COVID eradicated the flu. Did we just now discover hygiene? Was last year the first time that Americans washed their hands and used hand sanitizer? We have always done these things. And if they worked to stop the flu, why didn’t they stop COVID?
We didn’t need Dr Fauci scolding us into isolation when sick. Those ill with the flu stayed home until better. We naturally distanced when sick. Again, if these measures, far more draconian this year, stopped the flu, why didn’t they also stop COVID?
Perhaps the flu vaccine last season was a home run, unlike the 40-60 percent effectiveness of past seasons, one year as low as 19 percent effective. In a normal flu season, the vaccination rate is between 50-60 percent. It was likely much lower last year during COVID as a flu shot was not a priority and many avoided going to the doctor unless necessary.
Maybe it was the incessant mask use, going from none to one to two to one, according to Dr Fauci’s whims. If masks worked so well, why weren’t we told to wear them every flu season, preventing tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations? It is not like masks were just invented last year.
Does size matter? The influenza virus is 80-120 nanometers. COVID is similar in size, 50-140 nm. If, as we are incessantly told, masks work to save lives from COVID, then they should work similarly for influenza. Yet COVID cases are high and influenza cases are near zero. Why is that?
The pore size in standard surgical masks is 300 nm to 10,000 nm, far larger than either virus, meaning masks cannot explain the discrepancy. Masks don’t stop either virus, which is why we never masked up during past flu pandemics. Unless the masks contain a pore bouncer, letting in only COVID but telling influenza to get lost.
In addition, if masks work, why the push for the vaccine? If the vaccine works, and it does far more effectively than the flu vaccine, why are we still masked up? It can’t be both ways. Except in Congress where the few Biden speech attendees, all vaccinated, were distanced and covering their faces. Do they consider the message they are sending? Apparently not.
The NY Times article suggests previous public exposure to influenza with no previous exposure to COVID might explain things. But every year there is “previous public exposure” to influenza and every year plenty of flu cases. Until this year. As influenza occurs every year, there is always natural immunity to influenza yet there are always many cases the following year. What changed?
Could “the mere presence of the corona virus” suppress flu cases? As in the big tough Chinese alpha male coronavirus scaring away the metrosexual beta male influenza virus? Has social justice and wokeness penetrated viral capsids? Perhaps that makes sense to CNN anchors.
I’ll throw out an idea, namely testing. Perhaps COVID numbers are artificially high due to PCR cycle thresholds, as I have written about. At cycle threshold of 35-40, “up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus” according to the NY Times, meaning most positives are false positives.
Deliberately attributing accidental deaths to COVID falsely inflates the death counts.
What if influenza cases were incorrectly labeled as COVID? After all, everything now is called PIC. Perhaps the influenza numbers are much higher and COVID numbers much lower based on misclassification.
The CDC wouldn’t play numbers games like that would they? Sure they would. The CDC changed its cycle threshold for “vaccine breakthrough cases,” those cases occurring post vaccination, to 28, far below that for normal cases of 40 or higher, to reduce COVID cases numbers after the vaccine. Imagine if they had done that last year. COVID cases numbers would resemble that of a bad flu season.
The CDC was happy to let high case numbers work against President Trump last year when he was campaigning for reelection but now want to lower case numbers to favor their heralded vaccines. This is the same CDC that allowed a national teachers union to help draft school opening guidance, just as Congress lets lobbyists write legislation. Can the CDC be trusted?
The CDC director said their data, “suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus” yet vaccinated people are still distanced and masked. Is the CDC about public health or just another political arm of the ruling class, like the FBI and DOJ?
Are the vanishing flu cases just a numbers game, the CDC playing three-card Monte, hiding flu cases while America bets her economy on this con game, the American people coming up short and the Democrats always winning? Was it every really about the virus?
A 40-cycle threshold produces a 97 percent false positive rate.
People vaccinated if tested get a cycle threshold of 28, very low intentionally to give a negative sars-cov-2 result. But the great unvaxed get a PCR test with a much higher threshold of 40-45 so anything looks like its positive for covid.
Check out this document from the U.S. Centers Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which openly admits that two different PCR tests are now being used for the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.
“The American CDC uses a 40+ cycle threshold to inflate the number of Covid-19 cases and generate fear based on ‘presumption,’ not deaths,” reports Taps Newswire. “40+ cycles are also used in Canada. A 40-cycle threshold produces a 97 percent false positive rate.” More at link and other links to follow for more info:
In the new study, the researchers created a “pseudovirus” that was surrounded by SARS-CoV-2 classic crown of spike proteins, but did not contain any actual virus. Exposure to this pseudovirus resulted in damage to the lungs and arteries of an animal model—proving that the spike protein alone was enough to cause disease. Tissue samples showed inflammation in endothelial cells lining the pulmonary artery walls.
In an article entitled, “The novel coronavirus’ spike protein plays additional key role in illness“, published on April 30th, 2021, the Salk Institute warns that, “Salk researchers and collaborators show how the protein damages cells, confirming COVID-19 as a primarily vascular disease.”
From that article: Now, a major new study shows that the virus spike proteins (which behave very differently than those safely encoded by vaccines) also play a key role in the disease itself. The paper, published on April 30, 2021, in Circulation Research, also shows conclusively that COVID-19 is a vascular disease, demonstrating exactly how the SARS-CoV-2 virus damages and attacks the vascular system on a cellular level. “A lot of people think of it as a respiratory disease, but it’s really a vascular disease,” says Assistant Research Professor Uri Manor, who is co-senior author of the study. “That could explain why some people have strokes, and why some people have issues in other parts of the body. The commonality between them is that they all have vascular underpinnings.” …the paper provides clear confirmation and a detailed explanation of the mechanism through which the protein damages vascular cells for the first time.
In the new study, the researchers created a “pseudovirus” that was surrounded by SARS-CoV-2 classic crown of spike proteins, but did not contain any actual virus. Exposure to this pseudovirus resulted in damage to the lungs and arteries of an animal model—proving that the spike protein alone was enough to cause disease. Tissue samples showed inflammation in endothelial cells lining the pulmonary artery walls. The team then replicated this process in the lab, exposing healthy endothelial cells (which line arteries) to the spike protein. They showed that the spike protein damaged the cells by binding ACE2. This binding disrupted ACE2’s molecular signaling to mitochondria (organelles that generate energy for cells), causing the mitochondria to become damaged and fragmented. Previous studies have shown a similar effect when cells were exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but this is the first study to show that the damage occurs when cells are exposed to the spike protein on its own. “If you remove the replicating capabilities of the virus, it still has a major damaging effect on the vascular cells, simply by virtue of its ability to bind to this ACE2 receptor, the S protein receptor, now famous thanks to COVID,” Manor explains. “Further studies with mutant spike proteins will also provide new insight towards the infectivity and severity of mutant SARS CoV-2 viruses.”
The article does not mention that covid-19 vaccines are injecting patients with the very same spike protein that was studied, but this fact is widely known and even touted by the vaccine industry. The upshot of this research is that covid vaccines are inducing vascular disease and directly causing injuries and deaths stemming to blood clots and other vascular reactions. This is all caused by the spike protein that’s deliberately engineered into the vaccines.
The Military Can’t Get Troops to Take the Covid Vaccine. Come Again? Service members aren’t getting the vaccine. That’s a problem, and it’s more complicated than you’d expect. By Andrew McCormickTwitter MARCH 1, 2021
About one-third of military service members are refusing to take the coronavirus vaccine. In some units, refusal rates exceed half of all members. At a time when the virus remains as dangerous as ever, that’s bananas. Yet the military says troops who decline the vaccine will face no repercussions or changes to their assigned duties, meaning even uninoculated troops will remain deployable around the country and the world. What the hell?
The deal is, federal law prohibits the mandatory application of medicines within the military that are not fully licensed by the US Food and Drug Administration. The three coronavirus vaccines currently available in the United States—the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and, as of Saturday, the Johnson & Johnson versions—are approved on “emergency use authorizations,” meaning the drugs are technically still experimental. Full approval could take years, during which time hundreds of thousands of service members will apparently remain susceptible to, and potentially vectors of, Covid-19.
There’s good reason for this law. The government and military have nasty histories of experimenting on people, including service members, without their knowledge or consent. And in fact, the law has been put to the test.
In 1997, the military instituted a mandatory vaccination program for anthrax. Upon receiving that vaccine, huge numbers of service members complained of debilitating side effects. (The vaccine may also have been a factor in what’s known as “Gulf War syndrome,” a multi-symptom illness of unknown origin related to service in the 1991 war.) Lawsuits ensued, and in 2004 the D.C. Circuit court determined that the government had violated federal law by mandating the medicine, specifically because the vaccine in question was proven to prevent cutaneous anthrax infection, though the military sought to prevent against inhalation anthrax, the most deadly form of the disease and the one most likely to be associated with a bio-attack. But the FDA hadn’t adequately studied the vaccine’s use against inhalation anthrax, the court found, meaning it didn’t meet the standard for mandatory military distribution.
Following further testing, mandatory anthrax vaccinations resumed in 2007, with troops risking court-martial and even separation from the service if they refused the vaccine. (Fun fact: Jake Angeli, the Viking-helmeted “QAnon shaman” of Capitol riot infamy, was kicked out of the Navy in late 2007, after two years as an enlisted sailor, for this very reason, according to Task & Purpose.)
With the coronavirus vaccine, the Pentagon surely would want to avoid similar, protracted legal battles. Military leaders have expressed frustration at low vaccine acceptance rates—the AP reported they had hoped the military might serve as an example to the public. But the law is clear.
There are critical and obvious differences, though, between the anthrax case and America’s present predicament, which should cause the government to reconsider its approach.
First, during the last major anthrax scare in the United States, in 2001, the disease killed five people. Covid-19 has killed more than 500,000 Americans, with more deaths in January 2021 than during any previous month of the pandemic.
Second, anthrax is not contagious. Coronavirus, clearly, is. And new, even more infectious—and more virulent—variants are on the rise. That in mind, it’s worth noting the military is a highly mobile profession, and that service members aren’t self-contained on bases. Many live off-base and often, as a group, play significant roles in their respective communities. In other words, an unvaccinated troop poses a risk to more than only their fellow service members. It’s not clear if service members refusing the vaccine will participate in the military’s efforts to distribute the vaccine domestically, though that would be ironic. I asked the Pentagon about this. “That’s a good question,” a public affairs officer told me, though an emailed request for further comment went unanswered.
And third, many service members aren’t giving very good reasons for refusing the vaccine. With anthrax, there were serious questions about the vaccine’s efficacy and evidence of significant side-effects. By contrast, evidence from large vaccine trials and more than 24 million completed vaccinations in the United States so far show that the coronavirus vaccines are very safe (even if the second doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines can pack a wallop). Fears about side effects from the coronavirus vaccine are only natural, and military leaders should address them compassionately. But some members refusing the vaccine are instead citing misinformation, such as that the vaccine is a tracking device (it isn’t); partisan objections, in the same way that some view masks as a political statement (they aren’t); and even the novelty of self-determination. “The Army tells me what, how, and when to do almost everything,” one soldier told The New York Times. “They finally asked me to do something and I actually have a choice, so I said no.”
In the seven years I spent in the US Navy, I was vaccinated for at least anthrax, smallpox, hepatitis A and B, typhoid, yellow fever, and, every year, the flu. When my unit was deployed to East Africa, under Special Operations Command, we were given pills to prevent against malaria. These were said, perhaps apocryphally, to cause bizarre dreams and mood swings, so most of us left the pills in the bottle. Then a few guys actually got malaria. The commanding general was furious. New guidance from my boss was: “It’s funny. If you get malaria, it’ll be the general who kills you.” We took the pills.
Now, commanders are jumping through hoops to push the coronavirus vaccine. They’re convening town halls, hosting question-and-answer information sessions, and posting photos and videos of themselves receiving shots. The message: Please, please follow our lead.
It’s an uncomfortable position for leaders, in an organization that hinges on an expectation of compliance. One commanding officer in the Washington, D.C., area told me that the optional vaccine has also opened a door to obvious partisanship and misinformation in the ranks. This officer has strenuously encouraged subordinates to receive the vaccine but is hamstrung by an influential member of the command who declined it because, this person said, “it feels partisan.” In any other circumstance, it would be incumbent on a leader to squash rhetoric like this, as a matter of what the military calls “good order and discipline.”
There are impacts on operations, too. If a member who refuses the vaccine winds up testing positive for the virus—not an unlikely scenario, with cases still high—that person is of course moved to quarantine. An unequal burden then falls on troops who did take the vaccine, who must flex to cover the infected member’s duties. Another officer relayed a story to me in which an unvaccinated sailor was due to be deployed but contracted the coronavirus and ultimately missed the unit’s departure.
Mandatory vaccination may not be the answer, but clearly something is broken here.
The law does provide one way around the informed-consent requirement for the military with experimental drugs: The president can waive that requirement, if it is deemed in the best interest of service members or national security to do so. I won’t presume to say President Biden should do this, but the question is worthy of consideration.
More practically, and soon, the Defense Department should confer additional tools to military leaders to help compel vaccine acceptance. The military could introduce incentives for taking the vaccine, in the form of financial bonuses—like some US companies have done—or time off (the military loves time off). Or, without making the vaccine mandatory, commanders could be empowered to relegate subordinates who refuse the vaccine to a limited set of duties. Those troops could also be required to live on base, in barracks, until they receive the vaccine, or until the spread of the virus has declined significantly. (To readers not in the know: This is a near-nuclear suggestion; it would have the desired effect.) Importantly, the latter two proposals shouldn’t be viewed as reprisal. They’re commonsense measures, to the benefit of public health. And common sense, at least, should not be optional.
Andrew McCormickTWITTERAndrew McCormick is an independent journalist in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Columbia Journalism Review, and the South China Morning Post, among other publications. He is a US Navy veteran.
