Tucker: Politicians, bureaucrats 'should have no role' in deciding who gets vaccinated
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' slams Biden's vaccination stance: He's not 'pro-choice, Joe Biden is pro-mandate'
Back in March, Joe Biden gave his first prime address as president. Almost all 24 minutes of the speech were devoted to promoting the new coronavirus vaccines – the miracle of medicine. One of the administration’s main priorities, Joe Biden told the country, was making sure every American got a COVID shot. And yet, the administration later took pains to explain, universal vaccination was not the same as a federal mandate, they’re very different. "The government is not now, nor will we be," requiring vaccine passports – that’s what Joe Biden’s flack assured reporters. As important as vaccines may be, the question of whether to take them, whether to have powerful drugs injected into your body is the most intimate kind of personal health decision
Politicians and bureaucrats should have no role in a decision like that. These decisions are for the individual alone to decide, in consultation with family, physicians and clergy. When it comes to medical care, it is your body, your choice — just as it’s been since 1973. That seemed to be, consistently enough, the Biden Administration’s position on vaccines. Many people assumed that it was their position. But it was not. On the questions of vaccines, Joe Biden is not pro-choice. He is pro-mandate. You may have missed that.
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Just because there’s no official federal requirement to take the coronavirus vaccine, does not mean that you and your family won’t be required to take it. With the full backing of the Biden administration, private industry and nonprofits may be forcing you to. For example, colleges across the country have announced they will require vaccine passports in the fall. Students who can’t show proof of COVID vaccination will not be allowed on campus. Yale, Georgetown and Princeton have adopted this rule, and most have followed. Now, Duke, Columbia and Cornell. The University of Michigan is requiring the COVID vaccine. So is the University of Massachusetts, and the entire University of California system, which is the largest in the country.
KTVU SAN FRANCISCO REPORTER: When students at the University of California head back to school next fall, they'll need to have a COVID vaccination when they step onto campus…UC made the announcement Thursday along with California State University campuses. And Stanford University's provost sent out a letter stating they will require full COVID-19 vaccination as well.
You can see where this is going, and at high speed. Soon, virtually all college students in America will be required to take the COVID vaccine. In effect, it is a national mandate — though, because it has happened piecemeal, school by school, each apparently making an independent decision, few recognize it as that as it’s happened. But a national mandate is what it is. The question is, why are schools doing this, and is it a good idea? From a medical standpoint, it’s hard to understand the reasoning behind this. As a group, young people are not at risk of dying from COVID. Maybe more significant, huge numbers of college students have already been infected with the coronavirus. We know that, and therefore they have a natural immunity to it. Why do these kids need a vaccine? No one has explained that the question has rarely been asked.
In no other circumstance do we immunize people against a virus for which they already have antibodies. From a medical perspective, that doesn’t make sense. It seems especially strange to require it in this case. None of the coronavirus vaccines have been approved by the FDA. They’re experimental medicines, they’re administered under emergency authorization. That doesn’t mean they’re dangerous, and we’re not claiming the Coronavirus vaccines are dangerous. But there are unresolved concerns about their long-term effects on some people, including their effects on female fertility. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is true. It’s an honest question that no one so far has been able to answer. And, it’s not simply being asked by partisans. It’s being asked by practicing physicians.
Katharine Lee, for example, is a research fellow in the Division of Public Health Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Lee doesn’t seem like a partisan Republican or a QAnon adherent or a crank. She gladly took the Coronavirus vaccine, she seemed to support the Coronavirus vaccine strongly. But then, in herself, she noticed unexpected effects on her menstrual cycle.
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"It wasn’t a symptom that was on the list," Lee said. "I expected that my arm would be sore, or that I might have a fever or a headache, but this just wasn’t on the list."
Kate Clancy, another scientist who studies female fertility at the University of Illinois, reported that she had the same symptom after getting the vaccine. She wrote about it in some detail on Twitter. After she did write about it, dozens of other women wrote about similar experiences they’d had after getting the vaccine. None of these symptoms had been described in medical literature. The reason: the clinical trials for the vaccine never tested for the effects on the female menstrual cycle, or for fertility, or on pregnant women.
So, maybe the symptoms amount to nothing. That’s often the case. Maybe they amount to something. We don’t know. The fact is, we can’t say what the long-term effects of this vaccine will be on women, including pregnant women. Honest people admit this. Every scientist knows this. According to a recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, "more longitudinal follow-up, including follow-up of large numbers of women vaccinated earlier in pregnancy, is necessary to inform maternity, pregnancy, and infant outcomes."
In other words, at this point, we just don’t know. Again, that doesn’t mean the Coronavirus vaccine is dangerous. There’s no proof that it’s dangerous. But there doesn’t need to be. We don’t need proof of harm in order for public health officials to be careful and precise about how they distribute these drugs. No medicine is designed for every person, in all circumstances. In fact, every prescription is the result of a cost-benefit analysis. Most people, for example, would consider chemotherapy a miracle treatment. It is. It saves lives. We are grateful for chemotherapy. But just because we’re grateful to have chemotherapy doesn’t mean we’d give chemotherapy to the entire American population. We don’t even give chemotherapy to every cancer patient. Because every patient is unique. Just as every person is. That’s a fundamental precept of medicine. Of science. Yet somehow our COVID vaccination policy doesn’t acknowledge this. For the purposes of vaccination, our leaders pretend that a 19-year-old athlete is identical to an 80-year-old with emphysema. Both need the COVID vaccination immediately.
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Whatever else that is, it is not a scientific standard. It’s quackery. Yet every power center in American life appears to be unquestionably on board with it. NBC News is now running PSA’s with its on-air talent demanding that everyone in the country get the shot.
Barack Obama just released a creepy little video telling small children to get the shot.
BARACK OBAMA: Hi everybody. It’s Barack. Now that every American over the age of 16 is eligible to get the vaccine, I want to talk about you getting yours. The vaccine is safe. It’s effective. It’s free. I got one. Michelle got one. People you know got one. And now, you can get one too. The only way we’re going to get back to all the things we love — from safely spending time with grandparents to going to concerts and watching live sports. So get the vaccine as soon as you can.
Some creepy old guy telling your children, your little kids to take medicine with effects we don’t fully understand. Totally normal. That happens every day. Don’t ask questions. Just do it. CNN explained recently we’re not getting our freedom back until you do.
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CNN MEDICAL ANALYST LEANA WEN: And when we can reduce the level of infection in the community, increase vaccination rates, that's when, at some point, hopefully soon, but at some point, we can relax the restrictions…I don't know if that works for many Americans. For many people it probably does work to say, yes, we're in this together. It's patriotic. We're doing this together. But I think a lot of people are thinking kind of selfishly, thinking, what's in it for me? And they're not willing to wait until this elusive herd immunity. If we can tell those individuals who otherwise would not get vaccinated, if we say to them, the moment of freedom for you is when you get vaccinated, when you reach the two-week mark, these are people who otherwise might not be vaccinated. So let's give them that incentive.
Did you read that carefully? It is selfish, says the crank doctor on TV, even to consider what effect the vaccine might have on your body, or the bodies of your own children. It’s selfish. That’s the sort of person in now charge of America's public health policy. Just shut up and do it. It’s immoral to consider the risks. She just said that. Some are telling us it’s racist to consider the risks. The lady scientists at The View took the opportunity, as they so often do, to inject race hate into an intrinsically colorblind issue. What do vaccines have to do with race? Nothing. But the ladies on "The View" informed us that only people of a certain color are the real offenders here, they explained:
SUNNY HOSTIN: White evangelicals: 45% say they won't get vaccinated according to Pew Research. Almost 50% of Republicans are refusing to get the vaccine. So we won't reach herd immunity because of those particular groups. So I say we need to shun those that refuse to get vaccinated.
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It is awful for anyone with a public platform to talk like that, particularly now. It’s also destructive to the country. This has nothing to do with race. It has no bearing on race whatsoever. This is a question of free will. At this point, the people who haven’t been vaccinated against COVID are the ones who’ve affirmatively decided they don’t want to be vaccinated. In that, they’re exercising what they assumed was a fundamental American right: the right to choose which medicines you put in your own body. Until recently, all of us assumed that we had that right. And we did. And then, the people in charge figured out how to take it away. They found our pressure point: if you disobey us, they announced, we’ll just prevent your children from being educated.
That will work, by the way. Because short of arrest and imprisonment, keeping kids out of school is the most coercive measure the authorities could take. Why? Because most Americans still believe, correctly or not, that college is the key to advancement in our society. Take that away and everything collapses. Forbidding kids from getting an education dooms them to a life of low status and low income. Whether or not that’s true, many parents believe it as true as a matter of faith. We’ve been telling ourselves that for 80 years. So parents will do anything to save their children’s future, including allowing them to get medicine they don’t want and they need. Parents across the country have already allowed school administrators to harm their children in the name of COVID, and for the most part, they have said nothing. We saw this recently in Oregon.
NARRATOR: Maggie Williams just seconds from setting a school record in the 800-meter. (Runner collapses) A moment of glory overshadowed by this moment. Williams finished in 2 minutes and 8 seconds, collapsing as she crossed the finish line
RUNNER MAGGIE WILLIAMS: I just felt like I couldn’t get a full breath and after multiple times of that happening and not being able to get enough air, I just felt super dizzy, and eventually I passed out.
NARRATOR: Williams blames her lack of oxygen on the mask she’s required to wear during the competition.
Forced to wear a mask she didn’t need by administrators who didn’t care about her health, this child passed out from lack of oxygen — and the rest of us said nothing. That was not a national scandal. So, having allowed that, should we really be surprised that children as young as six years old are now being forced into coronavirus vaccination trials? In fact, a short time ago, news broke that starting next week, the FDA is planning to authorize Pfizer's vaccine for children 12 and over.
So what is next? It’s not a question of the vaccine. You may want the vaccine for yourself and your children, you may not. It’s a question of being forced to take it. And if we allow ourselves to be forced to take it, what next? Anything is the answer to that question. If the authorities are permitted to control a health care decision this intimate — if they can force you and your children to take a vaccine you don’t want and are afraid of — what can’t they do? Nothing. They’ll have total power over your body and your mind, forever. What’s the limit to their power? There isn’t one.
A few parents seem to understand this and have taken timid steps to resist it. One anonymous mother posted the letter she wrote to the college dean when she learned her children would be required to get the shot.
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"The Association of American Surgeons & Physicians thinks this is a terrible idea, and so do I."
She didn’t give her name, she didn’t give the name of the school. Good for her, but where are the rest of the mothers? The ones who are willing to go on the record? There must be some. They know that if they go public, they’ll be attacked immediately by Barack Obama and CNN and AP. They’ll be denounced as anti-vaxxers — as if there are actually many people actually oppose vaccines. There aren’t. Virtually every college student in America has already received some or all of the 15 separate vaccines the CDC tells parents to give their children by the age of 18. They’ve literally been vaccinated since birth. So Americans are for vaccines. They always have been for vaccines. The reason that not every American has taken this vaccine is a measure of the sincere and legitimate questions about it. But no one should ever be forced to take this, or any other medicine, against their will. Unless they speak up now unless they resist this, they’ll be getting the shot whether they like it or not, and a lot more after this. That’s the one thing that’s guaranteed.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the May 3, 2021, edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
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