Oregon Adopts Vaccine Passports
In recent months we’ve heard conflicting reports about “vaccine passports.” What’s a vaccine passort? Vaccine passports grant additional privileges to people who take the COVID inoculation and carry an ID to prove it. Some plans use an ID card while other track via smartphone apps. In March, Biden announced that vaccine passports are on the way, but later backpedaled under public pressure. More recently, the Associated Press dismissed vaxports with a recent fact-check article. In stating this, the AP uses the truth to make a misleading claim. The truth is that vaxports have been enacted at the state level, but not at the federal level (yet). Oregon’s governor, Kate Brown, has made vaccine passports a reality in her state.
Fact Checkers Say Vaccine Passports Are Not Happening
The fact-checkers say vaccine passports aren’t real so we can move on. The approved narrative is that there is no federal vaccine passport so public concern is unfounded. However, vaccine passport mandates are indeed happening at the state level. Oregon has enacted a mask mandate that requires private businesses to check vaccination status. People who don’t comply are forced to wear a mask. Under this mandate, customers must show an identification card that proves they got the shot or wear a mask. Oregon’s mandate is exactly a vaccine passport.
The problem is that the media told us that the government wasn’t doing a vaxport and then governors mandated additional privileges for people who show their vaccine cards. So, if I carry an ID card to show I’ve been vaccinated, how is that not a vaccine passport? In this way, the media dismisses reality as fake news by hiding behind technicalities and granular definitions.
Show Me Your Papers…
Requiring citizens to show their papers or be forced to cover their faces is a violation of our civil liberties. In typical partisan fashion, the ACLU cares about show me your papers laws with regard to immigration. Problematically, the ACLU remains conspicuously silent with regard to COVID mandates. The vaxport needlessly divides our society. Those who bow to authoritarian rule are favored over those who value their freedom and right to privacy. Cable news dismisses these infringements as reasonable to combat COVID. However, requiring citizens to show special paperwork to go about normal life is a common theme in totalitarian governments. Those who question the official narrative have been ridiculed and silenced. Social media, cable news and politicians have moved in lockstep with little to no transparency.
What’s Wrong With The Narrative
Why should we question the official narrative anyway? After all, our leaders are just trying to keep us safe. Well, perhaps not. In many cases, the official narrative has suppressed important ideas about the origins of SARS-Cov-2. When addressing a disease, it’s vital that doctors know a disease’s origins. Startlingly, nobody in the mainstream media took the lab leak hypothesis seriously for over a year. Furthermore, experts agreed that questioning the pandemic origins was dangerous fake news. The problem is that these expert virologists investigating COVID had conflicts of interest with regard to uncovering how the virus started. Journalists could have uncovered these conflicts, but chose not to. If lab-leak was (truly) investigated, leading virologists may be found at-fault. Hiding a lab leak may well have contributed to millions of deaths and trillions in economic damage. It’s reasonable to assume that if doctors had been told the whole truth, our hospitals would be more able to treat the disease.
The Lab Leak Hypothesis asks if COVID-19 came from lab experiments. The public has been told to trust the science. Publicly considering the lab leak on social media has been punished/censored. Recently however, the idea of a lab leak causing the pandemic has finally been taken seriously. Until a few days ago, Facebook banned lab leak discussions on their platform. This is not how science works. Politicians and big tech shouldn’t control what scientists are allowed to discuss.
The authorities have been wringing their hands over the public’s vaccine hesitancy. Officials wonder how to improve people’s compliance while enacting a mix of coercion and incentives. Here’s an idea. How about they start telling the American people the whole truth?
