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Vaccine Passport Ban in Florida
Forty-three businesses or government offices are being investigated as a result of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ newly signed law on banning the requirement of vaccine passports. Violators will receive a notice of violation from the health department, which includes the right to a hearing before an administrative judge. If the final order is approved, a fine of $5,000 would be due within 30 days. The legislation appears here.
No one is surprised that Gov. DeSantis has taken this gutsy move, although there are those who see it as a political ploy (unfortunately behind a paywall). State Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, D-Orlando, said that the DeSantis administration has not fined anyone is telling. He said the law was politically motivated.
‘He’s not actually fining any businesses,’ said Guillermo Smith, who is suing the Department of Health over the disappearance of detailed coronavirus data. ‘It’s just another bumper sticker for him to help him raise money.’
Of course, the money raised will go to the Florida Department of Health. Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’ Press Secretary, made this statement:
‘Vaccine passports reduce individual freedom and harm patient privacy,’ she said. ‘Allowing businesses and educational institutions to require vaccine passports as a condition of entry or service would entrench an unfair, two-tiered society.’
In spite of those who are criticizing DeSantis, I believe his actions are wise and courageous. Except for very early on, he has been consistent and relentless in his actions regarding Covid-19. Recently he tried to prohibit schools requiring mask mandates, but he was overruled by a judge, and a motion to reconsider was refused.
Gov. DeSantis is not the only one who is taking action. Several states are leaning toward or have enacted bans on vaccine passports to date: Montana, North Dakota, Idaho, Wyoming, South Dakota, Utah, Arizona, Alaska, Iowa, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arizona, Tennessee, Alabama, Texas, Georgia, and South Carolina.
Now we will need to see whether the State of Florida follows through. I suspect that the businesses are being investigated not only to verify the claims against them, but to give them an opportunity to withdraw their bans. To my knowledge, no business has yet gone before an administrative judge, nor has anyone been fined. Whether it’s popular or not, I expect that some businesses will be fined.
Our privacy and personal agency, as well as equal treatment under the law, are priorities.
People are learning to take Governor Ron DeSantis seriously.
Published in Domestic Policy
I haven’t been anywhere lately where they’re still taking tempertures–not even the hospital! But I wonder if they will come up with something else that will be sure to remind us that they have us under their thumb!
All the hospitals and medical offices in NYC take temperatures. I’m surprised they don’t do it down there.
The ability to forge that little CDC card is…well…anyone could do it. I’m going to guess that at this very moment 10s of thousands of those cards that were swiped from clinics and Walgreens and CVS’s all over the country are being sold on some sort of black market or simply handed out.
And in… “warmer”… places like Phoenix, where I used to live, where people will come in off the streets warmer than most other places in the country, will they set up “cooling rooms” where people can cool down before getting their temperature taken? And will those “cooling rooms” be packing people together to spread covid?
Just the opposite in colder areas, I suppose. Being out in the cold could falsely lower body temperature, so those places will need “warming up” rooms where people will be spreading covid…
To say nothing of the lack of accuracy in some of those systems…
That’s a good question. They read to a decimal place. I doubt they are a full degree off. If you’re reading 101F, I don’t want to be in the same room with you, whether you have Covid or not.
Perhaps a desert environment might have to compensate. But I don’t think a person’s body temp gets effected that much from the outside. Unless you’re getting a heat stroke.
Unless they plan to use rectal thermometers, it can take a least a few minutes from coming out of a different environment, before an accurate temperature reading can be obtained from the forehead (people wash their faces etc, or use a cooling wipe, etc, and even the instructions for those devices say to wait a few minutes after that before taking a reading) or the mouth (breathing hot or cold air, drinking hot or cold liquids or eating food…) so in addition to cooling/warming rooms, they might have to be monitored to make sure the people don’t wipe their faces, or eat or drink anything while they wait to get their temperatures taken…
That they read to a decimal place, does not somehow prove that the readings are accurate/correct. If the devices are miscalibrated or something, that just means that they will be wrong to a decimal place.
I have an indoor/outdoor thermometer gadget thing. When I first got it, I put in the batteries and had it sitting on my desk – both parts, the indoor unit and the outdoor remote sensor – while getting ready to mount the remote sensor outside. Even while sitting right next to each other, in the same room, I noticed that the indoor and “outdoor” (actually still indoor, then) readings differed by up to 4 degrees.
One person, who won’t be named, told me that the machine at their office recorded the exact same temp for many people in a row.
In many/most of these situations, it doesn’t even matter if the reading is accurate/correct. They have A Machine, and they followed The Procedure, it’s just CYA.
They are not using a handheld. It’s a stationary device. Four degrees, that’s not a thermometer to measure human temperature. I would not consider that even remotely comparable to what the hospitals are using.
Ok. You sir will have to show a vaccine passport. Everybody else can have their temp taken.
Ok then show your vaccine passport.
You miss the point of that completely, it seems.
Perhaps the most important part is that nobody really cared what the number was, as long as it appeared to be below the limit. It didn’t matter that it even showed the exact same number for many people. As long as it showed a number below the limit, they were covered.
Fine. Maybe that one had problem. I’ve been to many of them here and they all seem to work fine. Because one is broken does not mean the concept is flawed. Because that one office was manned by dolts doesn’t mean it doesn’t work elsewhere. You seem to have a habit of drawing conclusions from minuscule and insignificant events.
Well see, if they admit that the temperature scanner thingamajig isn’t working, and assuming they don’t keep a spare on hand (and why would they, it just doubles the cost for no good reason) that means they would have to close until they get a replacement. There are a variety of reasons why any place, public or private, wouldn’t want to do that.
And you don’t know that it’s “working fine” unless it’s checked against something else. Perhaps several times a day, depending on how reliable they tend to be. etc.
I humbly submit that you haven’t the foggiest idea if any of them work. You put your face in there, you got the green thing to light up, which you believe comports with what you think you already know. Maybe you are right, but maybe you are wrong.
Expressing incredulity at the notion that these things make us safer at work at all is not grounds for calling one’s consistency in to question. Vaccine passports don’t work. Temperature taking stations at the workplace probably don’t work, either.
The first Covid summer they took temps on everyone entering the ballpark. I frequently would have been dead had the thing been accurate.
People realize it is silly. I know someone who went to a bar and didn’t know she needed to show her vaccine card. They let her in when she went back through her messages and showed one where she was messaging about getting the shot.
Vaccine passports don’t tell anyone whether you are infectious. They do mean a holder of a legitimate passport is less likely to be infectious.
Immunity passports would be more informative than vaccine passports. But they don’t guarantee the holders are not infectious, either.
Temperature checks might be more informative, but as you note, would have false negatives and false positives. Rapid antigen tests would be more informative, and would be more practical if our regulatory agencies would allow a $3 test to come into the market, as has happened in Germany. This would require our regulators to give up on some of their intrusive nonsense, and to understand the difference between a diagnostic test and a test for infectiousness. Of course, even a ten-minute test is not practical to use everywhere, but it would be in practical and appropriate in some places. But some combo of temperature check and rapid test might be more practical in more venues.
I think the vaccines are great and wish that more people would choose to get them, but I am suspicious of the motives and upbringing of people who are pushing vaccines to the exclusion of other means to accomplish their purpose.
So when you go to a doctor’s office and they take your temp, blood pressure, and your O2, you question the instruments? Sure some may not be accurate. I think by and large they are.
I agree with everything you said. I do think the temp machines are accurate enough. They are accurate enough to distinguish someone who is normal from 101F. They don’t have to be spot on accurate to make a difference.
And I might add, if someone registers a 101 or a 100.5, they can get another thermometer to double check.
I’m not concerned about the accuracy of the measurements. What I’m not sure about is the correlation between infectiousness and fever temperatures. Have their been studies on that in covid-19 or other respiratory viruses?
The instruments used in medical offices are built more precisely to start with, checked and calibrated occasionally as needed… and they cost way more than a bar or restaurant is going to spend on that function.
I will point out, however, that my BP is routinely overstated by the automatic machines versus when I have them check it manually. Whether that’s an equipment problem, or that the way the machines do it causes stress that raises my BP, or maybe the manufacturers get kickbacks on high-blood-pressure medications, I can’t say.
If they want to bother, and take the time… it seems more likely that they would either just tell the person they can’t come in, or shrug and say the machine has been acting up and let them in anyway.
I hear you. I too live in a region known for clean air (when we don’t have fires) and watching cyclists out in the middle of nowhere wearing masks seems so silly!
With yesterday’s release of the two or three year old C Span film footage of Fauci and the Health And Human Services Medical Innovation Director Mr Bright making it known about how they deliberately plotted to move beyond the old technology of egg-based vaccines into the glorious New Age of mRNA Vaxxes, many in the public are even more pissed off than before. The Round Table of government bureaucrats was gleefully chortling about how a mutated form of avian flu and/or SARS, when combined with a corona virus, might easily be unleashed in such a way that humanity would be made so fearful we would let them skip the usual 2 to 6 years of vax testing & just go ahead & mandate untested vaxxes to be released on the world.
Yes I wholeheartedly agree these men are monsters & criminals.
Saw a news item on this a few days ago. Some nurse was arrested, IIRC. By the way, is there a law against forging vaccine passports?
A former NBA player was taken into custody when he arrived in Hawaii for using a “fake” vaccine document. He was sent back to California
Sorry but that argument just don’t hold no water. Have you implemented these things? I have. The medical equipment at the doctor is designed and built to a standard and generally calibrated regularly. The little doo-dad at the front door? Not so much.