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Supreme Imbecility on CMS Vax Mandate
Government statistics show that 90.5% of US citizens from age 65 to 74 have been fully vaccinated, and 100% have received at least one shot. For citizens 74 and above, 99.05% have had at least one shot and 84% are fully vaccinated. So, if those who have had one shot get the second shot within the month, then by mid-February close to 100% of Medicare beneficiaries will have been fully vaccinated. Yet the Supreme Court agrees that CMS should mandate vaccines for employees of institutions that receive Medicare funds, at the penalty of losing their jobs, in order to protect the Medicare beneficiaries admitted to those facilities. If all of the Medicare beneficiaries are vaccinated, how is this not a complete admission that the vaccines don’t work?
Clearly, the vaccines do not prevent infection with or transmission of COVID. So, vaccinating employees of these institutions will not protect the Medicare beneficiaries admitted to those facilities. Some evidence (like the huge spike in COVID infections on Gibralter as soon as the population had been fully vaccinated, whereas before vaccination, COVID cases were very few on the island) suggests that vaccination enhances the risk of infection and transmission.
So the Supreme Court has given its imprimatur to a (unconstitutional) mandate that does not and cannot work to achieve the stated goal of the mandate (stop the spread of COVID and protect those covered by CMS). Indeed that mandate may not be just neutral, but actively harmful and induce the very problem the mandate is meant to prevent.
This of course overturns Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which required that the mandated vaccines actually work to prevent contracting and spreading the contagion. So, one can conclude that such a requirement for efficacy of a mandated measure for public health purposes no longer holds. Any old thing can be mandated, whether effective or not, whether related to the problem to be addressed or not, whether there is a problem or not (not to mention that Jacobson v. Massachusetts concerned state, not federal, authority).
I conclude (I suspect Ricochetti, and everyone else, will disagree) that there no longer exists in federal law any constraint whatsoever on federal mandates for public health and safety purposes when the federal government provides money to those mandated. In upholding the CMS mandate (or at least ending the stays on that policy … indicating that the Court thinks there is a good likelihood that CMS will prevail. as they say, ‘on the merits’) the Supreme Court has left the realm of reality. We are now in unchartered waters.
Will CMS mandate that facilities that receive CMS funds give the flu shot to all of their employees, with a penalty of loss of job for noncompliance? Will they mandate pneumonia vaccines, shingles vaccines, meningitis vaccines? Hospitals already require annual TB testing for employees, and Hep B vaccination. And Universal Precautions. What else might they mandate for these facilities? Continuous glucose monitoring for employees with diabetes, to assure that personnel do not compromise patient safety by suffering hypoglycemic episodes? Annual cardiac caths, or imaging stress tests, to assure that employees do not have a risk for acute myocardial infarction that might compromise patient safety? Periodic carotid ultrasounds? Or daily home sleep monitoring for all employees to assure that they get seven to nine hours of sleep so they are not sleep-deprived and at risk for making medication errors on the wards or procedural errors in the operating room? Breathalyzer tests for all employees several times a day to assure no alcohol consumption before or during work hours that might compromise performance? Maybe no tryptophan in any foods in the cafeteria to assure no excess drowsiness after lunch?
The benefit, if any, of the vaccines is to provide a measure of personal protection from severe illness, hospitalization, or death from COVID. So if CMS were actually concerned about the health and safety of their beneficiaries, they would mandate the vaccine FOR THE BENEFICIARIES, not the hospital employees who take of them (who may be younger and at very low risk for severe disease or death, pregnancy, already immune from prior infection). But that horse is out of the barn, given that an extremely high percentage of beneficiaries have been vaccinated.
If Medicare beneficiaries were vaccine-hesitant (and they don’t seem to be at all), one might envision being treated to a reprise of Dan Rostenkowski being chased down the street and beaten by little old ladies with their umbrellas for messing with their Medicare benefits. Third-rail issues, as they say. But does firing those health care workers who refuse vaccination, worsening the existing shortage of such workers, and likely thereby worsening the care Medicare beneficiaries receive, or even limiting their access to care, solve the problem of safety and health that CMS thinks that it is addressing? Of course not. Yet, this is what the Supreme Court is allowing.
When Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, opined that “…three generations of imbeciles are enough” he unfortunately was not referring to Supreme Court Justices. We will have those with us forever.
Published in Healthcare
Gibralter’s an island? Who knew?
Are you sure? Once they’ve attained a certain status, libs always try to pull up the ladder.
I can conceive of a positive outcome to that dreadful decision, namely that as a practical matter the mandates will not work because of the resulting staffing shortages, so that the institutions in question will press hard for a change in policy. Working it out on that level is not such a bad thing.
Further the Louisiana and Missouri cases are not over, and it may be, too, that when they are fully litigated, the outcome will be different. One can only pray that eventually the Court might agree with the wisdom of Justice Thomas and rule that even health care providers may not be forced to submit to unwanted medical procedures.
Why does the phrase “Catch 22” immediately leap to the mind?
Is it really difficult to understand that the vaccines are effective, but not 100% effective?
Real vaccines (like polio and the basic set of childhood diseases) are essentially 100% effective, so maybe these shots should be called something other than vaccines. Truth in labeling would be good.
“Effective” can mean having an effect, for good or for bad effects. I am of the opinion that vaccines are “effective”.
The question is are they effective for good, and more importantly, are they effective for what they were intended for?
It’s interesting that these are called vaccines and not “immunizations”. If they were called immunizations, both they and their effects would be much more easily understood.
In the mind of the the great majority of Americans the closest experience that almost all have is childhood immunizations, which are so effective that they are not extended through the adult population — in effect, they are administered once and done.
Also, “immunizations” naturally imply immunity. Notice that though these vaccines are rarely called “inoculations”. And they have never been, in my reading, referred to as immunizations — a knowable term with a fairly clear meaning — to make one immune to a disease pathogen.
This rewording is for the purpose of disguising their ineffectiveness. In fact this obfuscates that no one, to my knowledge — no one advocating and advancing mass mandatory vaccinations, on a governmental level, or a public health level, or a pharmaceutical level — has ever actually said what the purpose of the vaccines was ever intended to be. Sure in retrospect advocates say that they do reduce but do not prevent infection or transmission, and that they reduce but do not prevent hospitalizations or deaths.
But what were they originally touted to do? Was it ever really said? Or was it just that “stay tuned, vaccines are on the way” and we were all left to — as with a Rorschach blot — left to draw our own various conclusions based on our own experiences with childhood immunizations which are more or less compulsory, and the annual flu vaccines for changing strains (and HPV and pneumonia vaccines) which are subjects of controversy and are voluntary?
No one ever gets routinely reinoculated for childhood MMR, chicken pox or measles immunizations, but only for tetanus and even then that’s only every 10 years or so. But this is by far what all Americans know when they are told of vaccines — childhood immunizations, given early in life, for life-long protection, and then never again.
And also in fact, the very definition was changed to accommodate these vaccines. They are not vaccines in the traditional sense.
In short, they do not confer immunity, they do not prevent infection, they do not prevent transmission, and they do not last long — quite unlike nearly all the vaccines that Americans think of when they think of the vaccines that are given in childhood immunizations. And we were never told what to expect, only left to use our imaginations.
Jerry: “Is it really difficult to understand that the vaccines are effective, but not 100% effective?”
More utter nonsense from Jerry.
From a new study ” New Study More Evidence for Omicron Immunity Evasion ” of 12-17-21 from the Columbia University Irving Medical Center:
“A new study from Columbia researchers, in collaboration with scientists at the University of Hong Kong, adds more evidence that the omicron variant can evade the immune protection conferred by vaccines and natural infection and suggests the need for new vaccines and treatments that anticipate how the virus may soon evolve.”
The findings were published(link is external and opens in a new window) Dec. 23 in the journal Nature by David Ho, MD, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center and the Clyde’56 and Helen Wu Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Large drop in omicron neutralization by antibodies from vaccines
The new study tested the ability of antibodies generated by vaccination to neutralize the omicron variant in laboratory assays that pitted antibodies against live viruses and against pseudoviruses constructed in the lab to mimic omicron.
Antibodies from people double-vaccinated with any of the four most widely used vaccines—Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson—were significantly less effective at neutralizing the omicron variant compared to the ancestral virus. Antibodies from previously infected individuals were even less likely to neutralize omicron.
“The new results suggest that previously infected individuals and fully vaccinated individuals are at risk for infection with the omicron variant,” says Ho. “Even a third booster shot may not adequately protect against omicron infection, but of course it is advisable to get one, as you’ll still benefit from some immunity.”
The results are consistent with other neutralization studies, as well as early epidemiological data from South Africa and the U.K., which show efficacy of two doses of the vaccines against symptomatic disease is significantly reduced against the omicron variant.
Most monoclonal antibodies are unable to neutralize omicron
In neutralization studies with monoclonal antibodies, only one (Brii198 approved in China) maintained notable activity against omicron. A minor form of omicron is completely resistant to all antibodies in clinical use today. “
Basically what this study says is that neither the mRNA vaccines or natural antibodies gained from a COVID infection are really effective at all against Omicron which is now 95% of COVID infections. Anecdotal evidence all over the place bears out this fact with many people, even ones you know, that have been either vaccinated or have had COVID are getting Omicron. The good news is that Omicron is not that deadly.
However, that said there are substantial studies that show that the artificial spike protein and the Graphene Oxide delivery system embedded in the new mRNA vaccines are very dangerous, deadly and are killing people by the thousands upon thousands, so given that these vaccines are not hardly effective at all at saving people from Omicron why are they being proscribed at all?
I realize this is not your main point, but I doubt that 100% of Americans age 65-74 have had at least one shot. What’s your source for this?
I don’t understand the vaccine well enough to have confidence in it or not. But what I have read about it over the past two years has been intriguing and to my untrained mind, promising. I like that it doesn’t last that long, that RNA is eliminated after it does its job of programming proteins. I like that it is a new way of thinking about the immune system. It’s an inexpensive preventive medicine. That’s a good thing. It’s cheaper to disinfect a water source than to treat cholera.
However, under no circumstances would I order anyone of any age to have any medicine. I can see recommending it. But I would never force anyone to accept any medical treatment. And by the same token, if someone wants to try apricot pits to cure their cancer, it’s fine with me.
There are days when I think the Democrats screw up everything they touch. The development of these vaccines should have been a great event. And it would have been had it not been for Biden and his friends. They first denigrated the vaccines and the companies who developed them because the work was conducted under the Republican Trump administration. Then they changed their minds completely and decided to order everyone to have a vaccine they initially had said they did not trust. After all that, of course people reacted strongly for or against the vaccines, as if it were a candidate running for office.
For a new vaccine to be tried willingly by 60 percent of the public its first year out was extraordinary. That was the initial percentage of people who wanted to try it. The public health administrators at all levels of government should have been happy with that and simply continued to pursue treatment at the same time, much of which has been very successful. We’ve learned a lot these past two years. I saw last week somewhere that doctors are using gentle CPAP machines instead of dangerous ventilators, with great success. Even turning patients to lie on their stomach instead of back probably saved thousands of lives. Prevention and treatment.
That 60 percent number is interesting because it was the same percentage of the adult population who have been getting a flu shot every year even during well-publicized “bad flu years.” Sometimes we have to say, “That’s the best we can do.” Accept people the way they are and work with it in a positive way.
I can’t picture Donald Trump going at this mandate as doggedly as Biden has. In the primary debates in New Hampshire, Trump expressed his own reservations about mandated vaccines for children.
What a mess Biden has made of something that should have been a good turn of events. Because politicians will always come and go, perhaps the best preventive medicine strategy going forward would be to remove them entirely from the practice of medicine.
If a vaccine enhances the spread of the disease that it is supposed to protect us from, how exactly is that “effective”?
Can we then have a Mandate that is not a 100% mandate?
Current government data. Although different data sets vary. At Data.CDC.gov, the percent of 65 to 74 age that have been received 1 shot is listed as 95% rather than 100%. Other values at that site are the same as quoted. These cohorts are, quite reasonably, the most vaccinated cohorts. If the vaccines worked, they would be the most protected. These are the cohorts that have the most to gain and the least to lose. Although I will concede two thing to the Supreme Court: the vaccines are likely the least effective in these cohorts, due to the number of comorbidities as one gets older. Second, the vaccines really don’t work. In my view, they are marginally useful in accomplishing the stated goal of CMS to protect beneficiaries admitted to healthcare facilities. Still in all, I have a very low opinion of the Supreme Court Justices who voted to allow the CMS mandate to proceed. I think it is highly counterproductive. But then like Dennis Miller, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.
I’m in your 65-74 group and am not vaccinated. African Americans in general are skeptical of the jab. If memory serves, about 40% of them have had it in NYC (all ages). They comprise at least 10% of the 65-74 population. I wonder if anyone has audited the CDC numbers. Given its dreadful record in the pandemic, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was fudging the numbers.
Interesting perspective. I like it.
That was precisely my thought.
And furthermore, no, just no on mandates for anyone, including medical personnel.
I’m not sure this is true. I have read that each mRNA molecule is destroyed after a single transcription, but I’ve also read that the vaccine has a coding that allows reusing each mRNA molecule to produce more than a single spike protein. I haven’t read (and don’t know where to find the information on it anyway) how many mRNA molecules are in a single dose of, say, the Moderna vaccine. If each mRNA molecule is destroyed after a single transcription of the spike protein then the total number of spike proteins the human cells create is strictly limited. And that would be good.
But either way, all traditional vaccines eventually are destroyed by the body’s immune system, and so are only active for a limited period of time. The only difference with the covid vaccines is that the covid vaccines don’t program the immune system to destroy the viral bodies and the parts which are encapsulated. That the body has to learn to fdo that on its own once it becomes infected, if it has not been sidetracked by that point by seeking the protein spikes. I think that’s why the vaccines are considered “leaky”; they don’t kill off the viruses, they merely interfere with the spike’s role in replication.
In the end, the vaccines don’t prevent infection, at best they merely mitigate the rate of infection. And mitigation of symptoms is not prevention of the disease.
I think you understand a great deal more about this than I do.
As I understand it, there are two ways to consider efficacy. One looks at the population in general–how many people got sick after getting vaccinated–and the other looks at antibody production after vaccination. I can see why people think the vaccines are not working because of the high number of breakthrough cases. However, the vaccine developers are also looking at the production of antibodies in vaccinated individuals, and the results have been positive. I guess there are compelling arguments on both sides of the efficacy question.
Well, I don’t know that I know more than you at all. I just see things diferently.
I look at efficacy not as what the vaccines manage to do, but how well they do what they were intended to do. Covid vaccines are not traditional immunizations. They do not induce immunity, they do not target the whole virus, and they do not really stimulate the immune system to kill the virus as far as anything I’ve read goes. They mitigate or reduce viral replication without eliminating the virus. That’s why I say covid vaccines do not work.
If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you what if anything any vaccine proponent — whether from the government, the medical establishment, the pharmaceutical industry or the national Press — said the long awaited vaccines would do. We were led to believe that they — with one administration regimen, whether it was one dose or two — would prevent infection, and stop the epidemic, and let us get back to a normal society. This they have not come even close to doing.
As such, with lockdowns, mandatory masking, mandatory vaccinations (with the penalty of ostracization from society), arrests for trespassing (of all legal manipulations), the loss of jobs, the threat of jail, and the specter of forced quarantine camps, the vaccines have not eliminated the covid “crisis” or made the world a better place, and, if anything, they have been used as a justification to make the world a far worse place.
And of course the unvaccinated themselves are blamed for each one of these evils I mentioned above. The vaccines don’t work to “crush covid” or to end what is still being called a “pandemic”, but the unvaccinated are blamed. In fact, the leaky ineffective vaccines — which aren’t the answer — have been mandated just about everywhere for everyone is if they were effective to stop the covid “crisis”. As a minor example, Israel which perhaps can be said to have successfully pushed more for vaccinations per person than any other place on earth, has the highest rate of, guess what, covid cases involving the vaccinated.
We focus on the numbers and the minutia, and see a half a percent reduction in total infection rates, and we argue over whether the vaccine is effective or “not 100% effective” but we don’t see the big picture that’s right in front of our faces: the vaccines aren’t working at what we were all led to believe they would do, which is end the pandemic.
How is that? Misdirection by the government and the world’s public health establishment.
Why? I don’t know, but it has nothing to do with medicine or public health.
[edited slightly]
I followed this news stream from what the companies themselves said, and they never said those things. So I’m okay with how the vaccines have done. I’ve been surprised at what the public’s expectations were from the beginning. I’m sorry they were misled by their own sources of information.
I’m sorry you heard that. I never heard that.
I’m 100 percent opposed to the mandates. But I remain optimistic that the vaccines might do some good.
The politicians, including those in the medical field, are another story. I’ve lost hope for them completely. :-)
Postscript to comment 21: Moderna is a Boston-based company. Boston is very close to me. These are my geographic friends and neighbors who worked on this development project. Massachusetts was hit very hard by the pandemic the first year, and the Moderna company worked really hard to help in some way. It was a difficult year here.
That’s probably one reason why I remain optimistic about the vaccine. I’m probably biased to want it to succeed. :-)
That and I tend to look to the private sector to solve problems the government causes. :-)
You’re both correct. The breakthroughs demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the vaccine, especially now, and that everyone will eventually get omicron, and excepting for more at-risk folks (similar to any flu season), the risks are supremely low for hospitalization or serious outcome.
The data on the dud vaccines has been out there for at least a year, it’s just become impossible to ignore – hence the change of tone in the reporting/media, and even the Pfizer CEO.
At no time that I know of did Pfizer, J&J, Moderna, or AstraZeneca ever say that this type of vaccine would work any differently than it has. It would not protect the unvaccinated because the vaccinated would continue to carry it and “shed” it. They said this from the very start. Hence the face mask recommendation when the vaccines were introduced.
The companies themselves said from the beginning these vaccines would ameliorate symptoms for many people who came in contact with the virus. That’s all they ever said.
If anyone misrepresented the vaccines to the public, it was probably the CDC and the governors.
The vaccines have done exactly what the companies said they would do. At least that’s true to my knowledge.
In that case, I think calling them vaccines is a misrepresentation per se.
As an editor, I could not agree more. They should have called it something else.
Yes. A thousand times.
But their intention was not to deceive the public about them, only to use a familiar term. Big Big Big mistake on their part.
But I can understand it from the companies’ point of view too. The flu vaccine works badly too in comparison to the tetanus vaccine, for example. Looking at it in the upper-respiratory vaccine family, there was some logic to their choice of language.
Neither the Flu Shot or the Covid shot deserve the name vaccine.
Calling obvious naiveté here.
But what did they say? What did they say the vaccines would do?
I know a very smart, capable guy who keeps up with the journals and one day he came into work (I think it was January of 2021, and raised his arms like Rocky Balboa and said, I’m now invincible! I’m vaccinated!
Now though, he won’t see a patient without the patient wearing a mask, And if any staff member’s mask is not tightly fitting to the nose, he demandingly tells them to fix it.
This guy is a medical professional, but what did he think the vaccine would do? Provide immunity. And the vaccine didn’t do it. He’s not stupid. He was misled by what vaccines are supposed to do, and what it turns out these vaccines ended up not doing.
I think Moderna and Pfizer wanted a magic bullet vaccine. I think the developers were hoping to have one when they were done. That’s the other side of this labeling issue. In their minds, that’s what they were working to achieve. They were not able to do that, but that’s how the project was framed in their minds.
Again, I think that is completely forgivable.