Sign bill to protect people's choices, safety

Even if it runs against type, Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards must sign HB 498 by Republican state Rep. Kathy Edmonston to prevent potential state government-mandated infliction of needless suffering.

That bill makes it illegal for the state to impose Wuhan coronavirus vaccinations onto people to allow their access to the state’s ordinary services, except for health care, until the Federal Drug Administration gives a permanent clearance to such vaccinations. This particularly makes an exception for schools, because Louisiana explicitly allows education at all levels to require certain vaccinations for enrollment.

Yet a de facto campaign continues by Edwards and his appointees to have students receive vaccinations. Exhortations, if not outright propaganda, and gamesmanship come from the Governor’s Office and state agencies for school-age individuals to receive it. The Louisiana State University Board of Supervisors – whose previous prominent action gave the system a woke president – asked the state to make it a requirement for attendance.

But this one-size-fits-all approach recklessly endangers lives, especially because the virus differentially affects people in significant ways. We know that few adults aged 30 and above without other comorbidities become seriously ill from it, much less die from it. We also know that almost no one under the age of 20 becomes seriously ill, much less dies from it, regardless of health status. Thus, since outside a small and select group of people the virus poses little more than an inconvenience and in the aggregate poses a mortality threat hardly different from influenza, appropriate policy allows the individual to choose for himself whether to receive vaccination, balanced against the potentially harmful side effects of vaccination.

Accentuating the need for this choice, data about side-effects still largely hasn’t been collected. Unfortunately in this nascent discovery process, something disturbing regarding youths has come to the surface, and the manner in which it did underscores why extreme caution must apply to overbroad vaccination mandates.

In late May, as anecdotal evidence built, particularly regarding youths, that vaccines produced myocarditis, the Centers for Disease Control issued a release stating the incidence of this was no higher among vaccinated youth than with the unvaccinated. Last week, four weeks later, it reversed itself and declared vaccines linked to that and pericarditis in youths. The FDA followed up with warnings issued attached to the vaccines.

Granted, the rate of 12.6 per million is not high. But if a youth has next to no chance of catching the virus that causes anything other than minor inconvenience, it should be up to the family to decide what risk to take, not have a choice forced onto them by the state that could end up seriously compromising that youth’s life.

Regrettably, Edwards and his administration never have put the science first in in virus policy-making. Instead, political considerations have ruled, based upon his liberal ideology. And a core tenet of that ideology holds that people don’t have the capacity to make choices in their lives to their own benefits, either because they are incapable of doing so and/or unseen malign and advantaged elements strip them of that. Therefore, government must intercede to protect them, disregarding the actual level of autonomy that people possess and therefore diluting their abilities to decide for themselves how they’ll live, in exchange for protection against hazards real and phantom.

As a result, Edwards’ first instinct would be to veto such a bill, and would be, joined by others in his administration, to go beyond advocacy only push for vaccination requirements. That impulse which would put lives needlessly in jeopardy should be resisted.