OPINION:
A Rasmussen poll this week showed nearly 60% of Democrats believe the government should forcibly confine unvaccinated Americans to their homes. CNN’s Don Lemon called for unvaccinated “idiots” to be removed from society.
While most of America sees omicron as momentum to move on from the pandemic, the left views those divisive attitudes as an opportunity. They will call it “the new normal,” and there won’t be anything normal about it.
It will start off sounding pretty good. Dr. Anthony Fauci has finally publicly admitted what most Americans figured out a year ago: COVID-19 will continue to mutate and become one of many endemic viruses that humanity lives with. It will not go away.
Dr. Fauci’s statement upends the Biden administration and blue-state governors’ entire strategy to deal with COVID-19. Forced vaccination, documentation and testing of virtually everyone over the age of 5 has not and will not stop the virus. Contrary to the administration’s repeated assertions, the vaccines, while capable of reducing severity of symptoms in high-risk patients, do not stop infection or transmission.
Admitting that COVID will become endemic like the flu and the common cold, means that the public health emergency surrounding COVID, which has been abused by governors, mayors and Washington to institute restrictions and mandates, must therefore come to an end.
But there’s a catch. Famous for moving the goal posts regarding the virus, “Dr. Science” will determine when we transition from a pandemic to an endemic. That may not happen until new guardrails are in place to manage and monitor American society.
The unvaccinated will continue to be vilified regardless of whether they are COVID-19-recovered or regardless of the effectiveness of the vaccines. As a result of COVID-19 psychosis, mask-wearing here in the U.S. may become in many places as prevalent over the long term as it is in Asia.
Controversial Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel and other Biden health policy advisers have also penned a series of articles recently in the left-leaning Journal of the American Medical Association that lay out their recommendations for Biden’s new COVID strategy.
Again, at first glance, that might look like a good thing. Then you read that they are advocating a “permanent public health implementation workforce” and “real-time electronic collection of comprehensive information on respiratory viral infections, hospitalizations, deaths, disease-specific outcomes, and immunizations merged with sociodemographic and other relevant variables.” Data would be collected and monitored at a local, state and national level including academic institutions, labs and health care systems across the country.
They said the government should also establish appropriate thresholds for infections and hospitalizations on an ongoing basis.
That means, they can keep the nation dangling on a hook indefinitely.
The government will use the supposed need to monitor the virus in society as an excuse to create new lists of Americans — lists of the vaccinated, boosted, unvaccinated, religious and medical exemptions and others.
The databasing of Americans in the name of public health will be another way that Big Government, Big Tech, Big Pharma and Big Media meld in their missions to create Big Brother.
All of this means nothing close to normal for anyone, including those willing to subject themselves to continuous ongoing vaccination regimes.
The “new normal” is also about fundamental changes to our expectations of medical privacy and the role of government in health care.
More vaccine mandates for health care workers to get third, fourth and even fifth shots at the government’s behest would mean more mass retirements, firings and shortages of qualified health care personnel overall.
But health care worker shortages won’t bother the American left, who have been attempting to effect a government takeover of the nation’s health care systems for decades. In typical fashion, they will create the crisis and then propose a massive government program to handle it.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to envision Mr. Biden establishing a Federal Medical Corps of thousands of doctors and nurses that would work for the U.S. government placed in hospitals across the country. Democrats are presently trying to create a Civilian Climate Corps, so one for health care may not be far behind.
A Federal Medical Corps would provide the government with built-in monitors in hospitals, reducing the independence of both physicians and administrators.
A year into the most radical presidential administration since President Lyndon Johnson, Democrats’ idea of “normal” doesn’t mean a return to 2019. It means less privacy, less personal and economic freedom and bigger government. It must be aggressively opposed.
• Tom Basile is an author, a former Bush Administration official and the host of “America Right Now” and “Wake Up America Weekend” on Newsmax Television.
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