“I really believe this is why God gave us two arms, one for the flu shot and the other one for the COVID shot,” said White House Covid response coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha at a Tuesday briefing while pitching the public on new, Omicron-specific vaccine boosters.
The briefing also featured familiar faces such as Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Rochelle Walensky of the Centers for Disease Control, and Xavier Becerra, the secretary of Health and Human Services.
Jha’s quip about the teleology of human anatomy was presented as a joke, but given his company and employer, you could be forgiven for taking Jha literally.
Both I and National Review institutionally have been strong proponents of the Covid vaccines, which have saved no small number of lives and made a return to some semblance of normalcy possible. However, the Biden administration’s vaccine advocacy can fairly be described as the product of religious dogma — a conviction that the human body was designed by the Divine Creator himself to accept the coronavirus vaccines as many times as possible — rather than of considered medical research.
On July 21, 2021, President Biden declared that “you’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations.” Exactly one year later, the White House announced that its occupant — not two, not three, but four inoculations later — had contracted the virus.
In August 2021, Biden announced that the government would begin rolling out a booster shot program before such a program had received Food and Drug Administration approval. The premature announcement led to resignations and chaos at the FDA.
“FDA officials are scrambling to collect and analyze data that clearly demonstrate the boosters’ benefits before the administration’s Sept. 20 deadline for rolling them out to most adults,” reported Politico at the time.
That sounds like good process.
Under Walensky, the CDC recommended that unvaccinated children attending summer camp in 2021 be forced to remain masked “at all times,” including while outdoors.
Fauci called President Biden’s executive order requiring private employers with more than 100 employees to institute a vaccine mandate or institute a burdensome testing regime “moderate.”
Becerra is so reviled by members of the White House that “they have openly mused about who might be better in the job” and charge him with failing to carry out a “core responsibility of his job.” Moreover, he had lost the trust of the other side of the aisle even before assuming his present office by unjustly prosecuting and violating the First Amendment to hamstring pro-lifers.
And now, the administration is advocating that Americans twelve and older, regardless of what and how many vaccines they’ve already been administered, seek out Omicron-specific boosters that, in contrast to the original vaccines, have never been tested on humans. “If you’re 12 and above and previously vaccinated, it’s time to go get an updated COVID-19 shot,” submitted Dr. Jha on Tuesday.
This could easily be mistaken for a polemic against the coronavirus vaccines. Quite the opposite, it’s one against their most exaggerative, vindictive, and reckless advocates, who have done a disservice to vaccines and those who might otherwise have benefited from them. We all deserved better than a dressed-up Cult of the Supreme Vaccine.