Salt Lake Tribune: We Should Mobilize The National Guard to Imprison the Unvaccinated In Their Homes

Via Twitchy, our nasty, vicious communist temporary countrymen continue demonstrating the need for separating from them.

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.

Instead we were left to listen to various forms of foolishness and misinformation, promises of being rescued by everything from a bleach cocktail to horse dewormers to, most recently, drinking our own urine.

So now we are free all right. Free to fend for ourselves. To watch our children lose weeks, months or more of their precious educational opportunities. To wonder whether it is safe to go to work or to the store or to sporting events. To see businesses close for want of employees or lack of customers.

...

Not that Biden is blameless in all this. Seeing the obvious reluctance of so many people to get, or to require, vaccinations has only now moved him to push to make tests and the most effective kind of masks available to everyone. It's the right thing to do, but months late.

Utah House Speaker Brad Wilson Friday offered an absurd, and all too typical, defense of the government's failure to act.

"This pandemic has proven to be anything but predictable," Wilson said. "We all recognize that so we need to be very flexible and adaptable as we move through this current wave."

But the omicron variant now rippling through humanity was predicted. There is consensus among epidemiologists (long before COVID) that viruses tend to mutate into less potent but more easily transmissible variants, which is exactly what happened. And the challenge is the same as it was with alpha and delta: Most people weather it OK, but the serious cases are still enough to overwhelm hospitals.

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. Instead, we get, "No one could have seen this coming." That is patently untrue. They were told what to do, and they refused.

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.

But it may be too late for that, politically and medically.

In the meantime, get vaccinated. If you are sick, stay home. And let your elected officials at all levels know that you expected them to lead us out of this mess, not stand by and meekly express concern.

If the media is going to demand thuggishly authoritarian measures against the populace, perhaps the populace should begin debating thuggishly authoritarian measures against the media.

posted by Ace at 12:16 PM

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