Last week, Tony Fauci made the admission that the U.S. is “out of the pandemic phase,” though Covid mandates across the several states were dropped long before. Yet there remain a dedicated few who champion them as an undying cause. Some progressives have even criticized Fauci, as did two characters in an op-ed for NBC.
In New York City, in particular, vaccine and mask mandates remain the rage among the entertainment crowd. Go to Broadway, the Lincoln Center, a comedy club in Greenwich Village, or a jazz performance at a theater, and you will be asked for proof of vaccination and told to wear a mask. It’s not just perfunctory. At a show I recently attended, during intermissions, ushers holding up big signs in boldface letters ordering “WEAR YOUR MASK” walked up and down the aisles to catch defaulters and “present the mace” in their faces.
Now, however, some locations across the U.S. are demanding proof of vaccination for influenza. You read that right: flu shots! It’s an incipient call, but one gaining in popularity in some corners. For instance, two doctors from the University of Maryland supported this. Employers, too, are stepping toward its embrace. The University of California system — one of America’s largest, with over 300,000 students and faculty — now requires it of everyone who visits their campuses.
We should be alarmed at this. Not even when the H1N1 swine flu spread in 2010 were flu vaccines widely mandated. The Occupational Health and Safety Administration, a federal workplace regulator whose nationwide Covid vaccine mandate was struck down by courts last year, doesn’t mandate the flu vaccine at workplaces. Even health-care workers treating hospitalized flu patients, in 47 out of 50 states, are not required to have the flu vaccine. The idea that, now, flu vaccines ought to be mandated verges on the fringe of hypochondria. When was the last time you had yours? I, for one, haven’t had a shot in over ten years.
Such vaccine-mandate insanity might not merit mention in ordinary times. However, this added requirement could soon proliferate in big Democratic cities still obsessing over Covid, thereby affecting us all, if the pandemic experience has taught us anything.