The News Media Owns Newsom’s Obscene Student Vaccine Mandate Plan As Much As He Does

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As California Governor/King Gavin Newsom was about to defeat the recent recall effort against him, I predicted that he would vindictively punish those who attempted to hold him accountable by adding to the growing list of vaccine mandates. Sure enough, on Friday, he announced, before the FDA has even approved their use in any capacity for those under 12 years old, that every student (including my two young daughters), in both public and private schools, will eventually be required to be vaccinated for Covid in order to be allowed to attend class.

Of all the absurd examples of Newsom’s nonsensical and often anti-science governmental overreach in the Covid era, this one is the most obscene and, even assuming the vaccines are perfectly safe for children, will cause significant real-world harm to California families like mine. While Newsom himself is the primary culprit in this outrage, his adoring allies in the news media are as much to blame as he is for mindlessly going along with this insanity, and for not properly educating the public to why it makes absolutely no sense.

Newsom’s claim is that, because we require children to be vaccinated for various other illnesses, he has the authority to force every student in America’s most populous state to take this new vaccine. However, while the news media has been extremely negligent in publicizing this reality, Newsom’s comparison completely falls apart on nearly every level.

First, there is no illness for which we currently force vaccinations that has so little impact on school-age children. There is little evidence that, for healthy kids, getting Covid is any more dangerous than the normal flu. Much has been made of the fact that more children are now getting hospitalized due to the Delta strain, but, when you start with a number near zero, any increase at all appears far worse than it actually is.

Secondly, those mandated vaccines are all very different from what we have already learned about those for Covid (which, for the record, I have taken and am very much in favor of vulnerable people choosing to receive on their own). All of them have been tested for far longer periods of time, they are only given to children once as opposed to possibly numerous times in this situation, and they almost always provide life-long immunity from ever even getting the disease.

Even the CDC, faced with a mountain of depressing data from the post-vaccine summer wave of new cases, shifted course to acknowledge that these vaccines do not prevent someone from getting or transmitting the virus. There is also an alarming new study (which has not yet been peer-reviewed but which is remarkably unambiguous) from UC-Davis which found no significant difference in viral load between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, while another new survey of data has found that world-wide there appears to be no correlation between the current Covid spread and the vaccination level in that locality.

It cannot be overstated how much of the argument for forced vaccinations is based on the now antiquated hope (one that is still very widely clung to by liberals whose media sources, in their glee over being able to blame the recent surge solely on unvaccinated Trump supporters, have yet to really break them the bad news) that if everyone was vaccinated the spread of the virus would totally stop. Without that premise, there is little justification for our government to mandate their use, especially for children who have effectively no choice in the matter and, especially if they are healthy, are at statistically no serious risk from the virus in comparison to all sorts of other hazards of normal life.

Taking this out of the theoretical and into the real world, this edict from King Newsom is very likely going to result in extraordinary tension in my family, and could even cause it to eventually be split apart. While my and wife and I are vaccinated, she is far more adamant than even I am that our two young daughters not take a brand-new vaccine for a virus to which they are clearly not vulnerable (we have taken no unforced precautions with our children since about May of 2020 when we realized that the Covid threat was generally overblown, with healthy children effectively not being significantly impacted, and none of us has gotten sick at all, except for myself the day after my vaccination).

While we are still hoping for some viable path out of this predicament, because we cannot currently move out of state due to my elderly in-laws, and neither private schooling (which I predict will eventually be exempted from this insanity by the courts) nor home-schooling are viable options, we may well eventually come to an irreconcilable impasse. The really sick part of this senselessness is that King Newsom clearly does not care, and may even relish knowing that he is going to cause so many people, almost none of them liberals, except for some Black and Hispanic families for which he apparently has no real regard, enormous anguish for a cause which, at best, will do little to improve public health/safety.

Why is he really doing this? The simplest answer is because he can get away with, and there are two primary reasons why this is the case.

Thanks to the news media never making it an issue even during the recall campaign, Newsom has still not given up his emergency powers, even as the state is clearly not in anything close to an “emergency.” This means the only thing theoretically keeping him in line post-recall is a huge revolt from his political base, which clearly loves him mandating how people they perceive as mostly Trump supporters should run their lives.

The last line of defense against the tyranny of the majority in a situation where democracy is on an extended (permanent?) vacation is a news media being willing to fight against it, but that does not exist in this circumstance. Because the news media has greatly inflated the dangers of Covid from the start (largely because Newsom himself did so very dramatically), far too many Californians think that any move that is “pro-safety” is inherently good, and because the news media is deeply invested in the success of the vaccines, the public is grossly uneducated about their limitations.

Covid is obviously very real and, for certain demographics, extremely scary. But if it was nearly as frightening for healthy kids as Newsom continues to pretend it is, there would be a need to force parents to get their kids vaccinated. In fact, you wouldn’t be able to physically stop us from beating down the doors to have our children be first in line to get their shots.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.