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Reasons for Cautious Optimism From Supreme Court Oral Arguments on Vaccine Mandates?
Based on reporting by such disparate sources as The New York Times and Alex Berenson, in my humble opinion one of the most knowledgeable and reliable sources of information and actual, fact-based data on the COVID-19 pandemic and the hysterical overreaction to it, it appears from today’s oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court that the heretofore unknown legal doctrine known as “the Constitutional workaround,” also known as the vaccine mandates, is about to go down in flames. This is just a very brief notice of the arguments and not a researched piece about the various legal points involved, but it does appear that a majority of the justices are ready to hold these incredible overreaches on the part of the current “administration” what many thought they were the day they were announced — blatantly violative of the Constitution of the United States.
Here is the NYT lead, as quoted in the Berenson newsletter:
Conservative Majority on Supreme Court Appears Skeptical of Biden’s Virus Plan
The court seemed more likely to sustain a separate requirement that health care workers at facilities that receive federal money be vaccinated.
The Berenson newsletter summarizes the outlook as follows:
The OSHA mandate is clearly at the greatest risk, as it is the biggest reach both legally and medically. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services mandate on health-care workers at least fits with what CMS does, and trying to protect patients from communicable disease is a worthy goal. (Too bad the Covid vaccines don’t stop infection or transmission.)
I suspect the OSHA mandate goes. What happens to health-care workers may depend on whether Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh know the science well enough to understand how useless the vaccines have become. If not, they might just decide to split the difference and allow the CMS mandate to move forward. That would be a (seemingly) reasonable decision, and Roberts likes to seem reasonable…
A good summary of the arguments of this morning can also be found in the New York Post in a column entitled “Divided Supreme Court weighs vax mandates for large companies, health care workers,” which contains these interesting passages about the views expressed by some of the justices:
Conservative members of the court expressed skepticism about the rule, with Justice Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts suggesting the administration had overstepped its bounds. Roberts said it was “hard to argue” that officials had been given the power to act by Congress. Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested that a problem with the rule was its broad scope.
At one point, Gorsuch asked Prelogar why OSHA has not mandated vaccines for other viruses such as the flu, which the justice said “kills hundreds of thousands of people a year.” Prelogar responded that COVID-19 is unprecedented, adding that if there was “a similar 1918 influenza outbreak,” then OSHA would consider taking similar measures.
Meanwhile, Justice Samuel Alito floated a possible administrative stay of the rule – asking Prelogar what a difference of a few days could make since the mandate was announced months ago and has yet to be implemented.
***
Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s interventions bordered on the hysterical. At one point, Sotomayor — who took part in arguments remotely — wrongly claimed that 100,000 children were “in serious condition” due to COVID-19, with “many on ventilators.” In fact, the current number of pediatric hospitalizations with the virus stood at 3,342 as of Friday, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
As this appeal and oral arguments were granted on an emergency basis, one might be entitled to be optimistic enough to expect a ruling in the very near future. If one, or most optimistically both, of these outrageous abuses of power are reined in, it should give all of us reason to be hopeful that other acts of this lawless administration will be similarly restrained.
Published in GeneralRicochet editors have scheduled this post to be promoted to the Main Feed at 6:40AM (PT) on January 10th, 2022.There are 74 comments.
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Look no further than Israel on its second boaster.
Bingo
I would be against forced vaccinations even if it was 100% effective.
Also, their effectiveness wanes quickly, requiring more and more boosters. Now they’re saying every five months instead of every eight.
If these vaccines worked, they wouldn’t have to force them. Their effectiveness would make the sale.
I was shocked when the subject of federal vs state power came up and one of the female lefty justices said the federal government had the power because it had passed a law giving it the power. Who needs enumerated powers and an amendment process when a mere statute will suffice?
I’m sorry. I didn’t read those first two paragraphs of yours closely enough. I made a mistake that I often accuse others of making. I take it back. I agree about the purpose of the mandate.
The effectiveness in keeping antibody levels up wanes in a few months. That doesn’t mean the effectiveness of the vaccine wanes quickly. If you expect the vaccine to keep your antibody levels high, you need continuous boosters, it seems. But if you’re willing to accept the benefit of the T-cells and B-cells that can, among other things, generate antibodies when you are infected (given a few days to do their work) you don’t need continuous boosters, at least not on nearly such a frequent basis.
There are plenty of people who talk about the data on this topic on an ongoing basis. You probably won’t have time, though, if you spend your time listening to anti-vaxxers who don’t bother to learn the basics of immunology and virology.
I could add that there are a few people who don’t have immune systems that are in good shape and who don’t get a good T-cell and B-cell response from the vaccine. The only good those people could get from a vaccine is to keep their antibody levels high, and for that they would probably need frequent boosters. The vast majority of people aren’t in that situation.
I don’t think we’re able to easily identify those individuals for sure, because the tests to determine whether an individual had a good T-cell response to a vaccine are not easy or cheap to perform. You don’t do it from a blood sample. Those tests are done only for research on small samples of a population. But I think we can know, based on other health factors, which people are likely to be in that group. I’d be glad to be corrected by anyone who knows more about this. I’m operating on the assumption that I’m not in that group yet, even though I’m in my 70s.
There are some people out there, including some very knowledgeable people, who claim to want the high antibody levels so they won’t get even mild covid. I don’t know if they’re still talking that way now that the omicron variant makes it very difficult to provide that kind of protection.
In any case, vaccine mandates are kind of stupid for that or any other purpose. The people pushing them don’t seem to be keeping up with the science, but that’s the way government programs are. They develop a momentum of their own.
Insufficiently cynical.🙄
We shouldn’t outsource preserving our liberty to the Supreme Court. After all, it is only a branch of the federal government that the Bill of Rights was added to protect us from overreach. Allowing our liberties to be defended by one branch of the federal government is letting the fox guard the henhouse. We need state governments that fiercely defend their sovereignty, but do so without themselves stepping on the federal responsibilities.
I entirely agree that this graphic is nonsense. It omits the unvaccinated absolute risk in order to trick observers into making comparisons of two percentages that are on different scales. There’s no “perspective” that makes this legitimate.
Dr Simone Gold’s summary of the BS claims the Supreme Court supported:
Supreme Court Justices just falsely claimed:
1. The jab prevents transmission
2. Omicron is as deadly as Delta
3. 100K children are hospitalized with COVID, many on ventilators
4. Vax mandates would prevent 100% of cases
5. Hospitals are overrun
Every point is provably false. Even a ‘casual’ look at the medical literature would have enlightened the Justices.
Their ignorance and dangerous spreading of misinformation is a serious problem.
#############
Dr Simone Gold is a founding member of “America’s Frontline Doctors.” Prior to this involvement, she was a physician in Calif with hospital privileges who utilized HCQ in her quest to obliterate COVID. Her data did not please her hospital administrators. Although her patients lived, while a huge percentage of those patients deprived of HCQ died, the admins fired her for refusing to bow to their dictates.
This clearly shows the relationship of hospital admins and hospital protocols with regards to the Hippocratic Oath.
True. If those SC justices would be more accurate and precise in their statements, our liberties would be safer.
However, in other threads right here on Ricochet people are saying it’s “lame” when I suggest that we should be more accurate and precise in our statements about what “we were told” about vaccines, and what they do and don’t do.
Seasonal flu did kill 100,000 people in 1968. I was a senior in HS and have never been so sick prior to this or since.
But “hundreds of thousands” is over the top. Unless of course, for the fatality tally of Feb 2020 to Jan 2022, when someone who is infected with a corona virus then ends up in the hospital, treated with rocephin and remdesivir and intubated, actions that killed off many of the people now listed a having died of COVID.
Between March 2020 and November 8th 2020, We had 62 “COVID” fatalities for every single fatality from COVID that the Japanese had. (With accounting for the difference in population considered in this ratio.) The Japanese used HCQ and favipiravir. Japanese patients with extreme breathing difficulties were put on rather inexpensive C Pap machines, identical to what people in the USA use to combat sleep apnea, rather than being given anesthesia and put on ventilators..
The Big Pharma companies knew from the get go that the vaccines would not prevent the transmission of COVID. If they had thought that the vaxxes would work that way, they would never have released “relative risk” clinical study data, and then stopped dead in their tracks after that trial’s release. Yes, they would have released the relative risk data and then figured out the absolute risk and showed the public that.
(The situation was so bad, they avoided the idea of absolute risk in its entirety, leaving those calculations for the critics of this bioweapon program.)
It is also interesting that the Israelis themselves have gone ballistic and taken to the streets over the idea that there are mandates their children be vaccinated, for an infection that is one the youngsters will not get (unless they wreck their immune systems by getting vaxxed.)
You fail to understand the un-vaxxed were how they arrive at the efficacy ratios? (I guess so)
The entire efficacy trial was designed around comparing vaxxed to unvaxxed. Period.
The fact is this one:
The Big Pharma companies knew from the get go that the vaxxes would not prevent the transmission of COVID.
If they had thought that they would work that way, Pharma would never have released “relative risk” clinical study data, and then stopped dead in their tracks after that efficacy trial’s release. Yes, they would have released the relative risk data; then figured out the absolute risk and showed the public that.
(The situation was so bad, they avoided the idea of absolute risk in its entirety, leaving those calculations for the critics of this bioweapon program.)
An unvaccinated person in the USA in Summer of 2020 had a mere 0.88% chance of getting COVID.
A vaxxed person in the USA during the same summer would have had, according to Pfizer’s release of their clinical study of relative risk for their vaccine, and had the vaccine been available, a mere 0.04% chance of getting COVID.
So they can talk about “relative risk being this wonderful 95%” efficacy. The average person in the street will think that means their chances of not getting COVID after being vaxxed are close to 100%.
But if the individual gets the vaccine, they have only upped their chances of COVID avoidance by a mere 0.84%. If the individual does not believe that people die or get injured by the vaxxes, then they will go & get vaxxed.
But the protection being offered is so minimal, especially given how anyone under age 40 most likely would not become seriously ill if infected – unless they destroy their immune system by getting vaccinated – this makes the whole situation be a big “F” for Pharma in terms of overall risk to benefit.
Yes, and the naïve bean counters who think that the studies are the key to discerning truth don’t realize that everyone (except them, and probably only in hindsight) thought that Facui was talking about relative risk reduction rather than absolute risk reduction, as if everyone had a actual risk of 100% of contracting covid, and would have only a 5% chance of contracting covid if vaccinated.
I should hope so. What else would you use for a control group?
No, Carol. I understand exactly how this works. Without the third column, un-vaxxed absolute risk, the graphic is apples and oranges.
Precisely. The graphic doesn’t compare vaxxed to unvaxxed percentages. The latter is missing. The mathematical ratio of those two is the relative risk column, but is on a different scale. (Absolute => ratio, percentage while Relative => ratio of ratios, also expressed as per cent.)
If you don’t grasp that little bit of math, you have no rhetorical leg to stand on. Go brush up on basic algebra. It isn’t rocket science.
Why would anything else be used for a risk assessment of efficacy of a medical product?
The situation demands the control group be neutral, that is, not partaking of the medical device, medicine or vaccine.
And that the active group be partaking of the medical device, medicine or vaccine.
The clearest thing from this interesting exchange is that we can’t allow the top political bureaucratic folks to make medical decisions. That leaves individuals who have to do their own research, and it seems do it carefully.
Turns out Gorsuch didn’t say that. He said “Flu kills—I believe—hundreds . . . thousands of people every year.”
FACT CHECK: Gorsuch Didn’t Say the Seasonal Flu Kills ‘Hundreds of Thousands’ a Year – PJ Media
Jerry, I’m going to ignore a lot of the discussion down page. The only starting point to justify a workplace mandate would be if the effectiveness of the “vaccines” in preventing infection and transmission is 95+%.
It’s clear at this point that they are not. There is plenty of reporting on “fully-vaxed and boosted” folks getting the Ailment. (See AOC getting infected.) I haven’t had time to run down the numbers, but the CDC Director said yesterday on CNN “What the vaccines can’t do anymore is prevent transmission.” (I’m not sure they were ever that effective. )
Vaccines are highly effective against symptomatic infection. The point you are gliding past is that we were expressly told by Fauci and his chorus that vaccines would function like herd immunity in that vaccinated persons would not be infected or transmit. The vaccinated would be taken off the board so to speak leaving the bug an inadequate supply of targets. The entire rationale for a mandate is that if I get vaccinated I am no longer a threat to transmit. Fauci did not say that vaccines would reduce that threat for a while or in part.
It is not some of the over-the-top claims of anti-vaxxers that clouded or complicated the issue. It is the fact that vaccinated and boosted people still get infected, that vaccinated and boosted people are still wearing masks to no avail. It is the confusion and despair from endless goalpost moving, gross errors, and outright lies that created the problem. 70-90% of us are vaccinated and “cases” (the metric selected for us) are higher than ever. Arguing that well, vaccines do kinda help on spread misses the point.
Apparently, he said “hundreds, thousands” and the NYT inserted the “of.”
For people under 60 with no co-morbidities, the COVID fatality rate does appear to be no different than with most flu seasons. COVID is unusually and exceptionally deadly for an identifiable demographic but not for most people. I think Gorsuch’s point in part is that a presumed baseline of zero risk distorts our perception of this pandemic.
I suspect NYT leaped on this to provide cover for the utterly asinine takes by the three lefty innumerates.
I believe that some people have been told that we were told that.
But as to the point about a vaccine that is well under 100 percent effective against infection being an argument against the utility of mandates, I agree with that 100 percent and always have. I don’t know that I’d say 100 percent is the cutoff point for that argument. Maybe 85 percent is the cutoff point for that argument. There are other tools, such as antigen tests, that would do a far better job than vaccines at ensuring workplace safety. But it doesn’t matter. I would be in favor of federal and even state vaccine mandates only in the most extreme circumstances, and we haven’t yet had those circumstances.
How else do we interpret Fauci’s widely reported remarks from May 2021: https://news.yahoo.com/fauci-70-americans-vaccinated-us-182517262.html about 70% vaxxed resulting in mere “blips” rather than “surges”.
I freely admit that I fully expected the vaccines would provide much more immunity against spread than they have. But unlike Fauci, I adjust my expectations and policy opinions in light of the actual data.
We agree on mandates. If the vaccines did in fact make further spread impossible, barring proof of significant adverse risk and if appropriate exemptions for cognizable personal values were included, it would be really tough to argue that public welfare would not be served by and justify some form of well-crafted mandate. Not impossible, but a lot harder.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/vaccine-covid-fauci-deaths-b1808878.html
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/joe-biden-said-in-july-that-if-you-get-vaccinated-you-will-not-get-covid/ar-AART6wH
Yes, “some people” were told that. Everyone who accessed the mainstream news was told that.
I haven’t given his remarks any thought. I don’t get my covid news from the news media, and have only watched a couple brief clips of him over the past 2 years. Seems to me there was a time early in the pandemic when I paid a little attention to 2nd hand info about him, probably from what I heard here on Ricochet, and I never got the impression it was necessary or useful to keep up.
I’m not in a good place to check out that link now.
Because the issues before the court involve the force-feeding of our citizens with foreign substances, I do not see how the issue of the legality of mandates should hinge in any way on their effectiveness, although it’s interesting that it appears that the less effective the vaccines prove to be, the harder the push for complete control. What is important is that the Court has an opportunity to lay down an important marker, and none too soon. I have hopes that the more conservative Justices, in particular, will rise to the occasion so that the principles are clearly articulated and we are not served some mushy compromise. Unfortunately if Roberts is with a conservative majority he may write the opinion and that may be what we get.