For Texans shunning vaccine, choices come with consequences
Republicans have discovered their love of personal liberty, not to mention the legislative process — and all it took was a little help from President Joe Biden.
Biden on Thursday announced “a new plan to require more Americans to be vaccinated.” He said he would sign an executive order requiring all federal employees to be vaccinated and one setting the same requirement for federal contractors. He’s also mandating that Americans who work in hospitals, home health care facilities and other medical facilities get shots to protect them and those they come into contact with from COVID-19.
And, Biden continued, he wants corporate America to get off the fence: the Department of Labor is developing a new rule that will require employers with 100 or more employees to require that those employees be vaccinated or show proof of a negative COVID test at least once a week.
He made a few points to unvaccinated Americans. The vaccine is safe. It’s free. It’s widely available. The Pfizer version, at least, is FDA-approved. And most eligible Americans — roughly 200 million people — have already gotten at least one vaccine dose.
“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin,” the Democratic president said. “And your refusal has cost all of us.”
The following morning, he shrugged off the threat of lawsuits from officeholders in GOPled states such as Texas.
“Have at it,” Biden said.
“I am so disappointed that, particularly, some Republican governors have been so cavalier with the health of these kids,” he added.
He didn’t name names, but there was no need. A couple of GOP governors — Larry Hogan of Maryland, Charlie Baker of Massachusetts — have taken a hard line against the coronavirus since the outset of the pandemic. Others, including Texas’ Greg Abbott, prefer to tailor their message to a GOP base. Abbott
faces two Republican primary challengers next year, both of whom have sought to stake out positions to his right.
“Texas is already working to halt this power grab,” Abbott predictably tweeted Thursday evening after Biden’s address, describing it as “an assault on private businesses.”
Go get ’em, Governor!
Only hours earlier, Abbott had signed a new law barring big social media companies, which are private companies, from banning users based on their political viewpoints. But as Friedrich Hayek often observed, it’s different when Republicans do it.
What happens now? Employers across Houston were trying to figure that out Friday. Some were secretly happy about Biden’s order, which takes a potentially contentious decision out of their hands. Others were exasperated about the prospect of setting up a weekly testing regime for employees who might otherwise quit. In a new Washington Post/ABC Poll, 72 percent of unvaccinated respondents said they would quit their job rather than be vaccinated if their employer imposed such a requirement and they couldn’t get a religious or medical exemption.
Lawyers, too, were at work. “There will be litigation. Lots of litigation,” predicted Josh Blackman, a professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston, in an article for Reason magazine laying out his initial thoughts. One of those lawsuits, he continued, will probably work, in the sense that a judge will agree that Biden’s moves exceeded his authority. But this is a risk worth taking, from the administration’s perspective: “In the interim, millions of people will get vaccinated.”
Millions more will face a tough choice, potentially — or a choice that involves real consequences. But unvaccinated Americans affected by Biden’s order shouldn’t count on our state’s Republican leaders to spare them the trouble of making it.
The courts may ultimately side against Biden. But he also knows that most Americans want to bring an end to this nightmare.
More than 70 percent of American adults are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, and many of them are losing patience with adults who are not. An AP-NORC poll conducted in August found that 50 percent of Americans were in favor of vaccine mandates at their own workplaces, with an additional 23 percent being neither for nor against. Similarly, a Gallup poll from August, which presented respondents with a binary choice, found 56 percent of respondents in favor of vaccine requirements at their offices or work sites and 44 percent against.
And Biden’s announcement marks a turning point in our approach to this pandemic. As recently as July, the administration was rejecting calls from Democrats to issue any sort of national vaccine mandate. “That’s not the role of the federal government,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at the time.
If Biden’s now taking a more aggressive approach to the pandemic, there’s a reason for that. As he said, leaders of red states have been disappointingly “cavalier” when it comes to the health of their constituents.
Across Texas, more than 20 percent of hospital beds are currently occupied by COVID patients, according to the Department of State Health Services. Since August, 5,500 Texans have died of this disease, most of them unvaccinated. And then there are the tragic cases of those too young to be vaccinated who die, such as 4-year-old Kali Cook, who passed away Tuesday morning, just weeks after starting preschool.
The overall official death toll from the pandemic, in Texas, stands at 58,332, according to state figures. And that figure is incomplete, in a sense: Last month Daniel Wilkinson, a Houston veteran who served two tours in Afghanistan, died of gallstones after surgeons were unable to find him an ICU bed.
We can debate the merits of Biden’s latest strategy, but he’s at least trying to do something. It’s unclear what Abbott’s plan is, but he seems wholly indifferent, preferring to hold bill signings touting “election integrity” rather than confront the runaway delta variant that’s claiming the lives of more than 200 Texans a day. The governor, who already issued an executive order banning state or local vaccine mandates, has also asked legislators to pass a law to that effect in the special session that begins later this month.
So unvaccinated Texans shouldn’t be surprised by the president’s new moves, or by the frustration he expressed. If you still don’t want to get vaccinated, that’s your choice. But for some time now, we’ve been living with the consequences: Should we choose to ignore that?