Gross Anti-Vaccine Mandate Sign Waving Event Planned
It's so dumb.
I know some think that writing about this non-sense elevates a group of people who are arguably concerned about all the wrong things, but since the COVID-19 pandemic—and it is a pandemic—directly relates to public safety and health, it seems important to know what the other side is doing. After all, it's often difficult to know what the "grassroots" super-secret, non-public and unfindable group is doing.
A poster promoting a rally against employment vaccine mandates has been circulated in the Save Anchorage Facebook group. You remember Save Anchorage, right? They're the Facebook group of political activists where we saw some members up in arms over “Sleeves up for Summer” and other members that likened health data sharing to Auschwitz tattoos.
Anyway, the rally is labeled as a "peaceful" sign-waving event held on public sidewalks in front of the Alaska Native Medical Center campus on August 5 at 5 pm.
A description for the event claims that an employment COVID-19 vaccine mandate enacted by the South Central Foundation and Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium is taking away someone's rights to make their own healthcare decisions.
Debbie Kaminer, a law professor at Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business, told MarketWatch last year that “Employers have significantly more freedom when it’s an employer just enacting its own policy, and it’s not a government-mandated policy — because constitutional restrictions simply do not apply to private employers.”
It's unfathomable that South Central Foundation and Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium would want to keep their healthcare workers and patients safe during a pandemic, especially since American Indians and Alaska Natives are dying of COVID-19 at much higher rates and younger ages than other groups, according to a report published earlier this year.
Personally, I believe that rallying to support a personal choice that could potentially spread a virus that's now more transmissible than the SARS-CoV-2 ancestral strain as well as the viruses that cause MERS, SARS, Ebola, the common cold, the seasonal flu, and smallpox demonstrates a lack of understanding about what the world is dealing with right now and how the pandemic is currently affecting patients in addition to stressing our healthcare workers and system.
I predict the impact of the rally will ultimately be zero but again, it's always good to know what's going on in your city.
