No Mandates! Mandates! And the Republican Religious Right
By Steven Jonas
“No Mandates! No Mandates!! No Mandates!!!” This seems to be the common approach to dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic adopted by the vast bulk of the Republican Party. Elected and otherwise. “It’s my body; they’re my children,” and etc. “And I get to decide.” Whether we are dealing with company- or government- (the Armed Services) mandated COVID-19 vaccination for their employees, or mandatory mask-wearing in schools, and everything in-between, that is the common response emanating from the Right. (By the way, I have not seen any calls from any responsible sources calling for mandatory vaccination of the population in general, the far extremes of the anti-vaxx movement, Right and Left, scream about that possibility on a regular basis.)
(Actually, such anti-health messages do indeed emanate from certain sectors of the Left — I’m on a couple of list-serves which promote this message. But I don’t think that the message from that side of the political spectrum reaches too many people, fortunately. In any case, I am not sure that some of the so-called “leftists” putting forth such positions as that the whole thing is the result of a plot by Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, George Soros, and etc. to, pick one: reduce the Earth’s population, bring all under fascist control, vastly increase the profits of the drug companies, and etc., are not actually trolls, whether they present as individuals or as “medical journals.” [I am not going to dignify Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s outrageous attack on Dr. Fauci with any kind of response, for it is so outrageous that it needs none.] But I am not nearly technologically equipped enough to do down that possible find-the-trolls rabbit-hole, so I won’t. And in any case, since most left-wingers who I know are rational, I think that the main outcome of the anti-vaxx propaganda that appears on the left-wing sites with which I am familiar, and others as well, I am sure, is to drive people who wish to express and discuss traditional left-wing policies, off the sites. Which, trolls or just anti-science, they have been doing.)
But now getting back to the “No-mandates” mantra for the Right (and fortunately it has not infected all Republicans) for this particular epidemic. First, as many of the readers of these columns know, I am a career public health physician. A couple of weeks ago my son asked me if I knew of any other major pandemic in history that had been politicized the way this one has been. I replied that while I certainly had not studied the history of pandemics in any detail, I certainly did not know of any major one in which political forces had intervened to promote interventions or lack thereof that would actually end up promoting the spread of the disease. Which the anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, let’s-wait-until-people-get-sick-and-then-treat-them-crowd do. Although COVID-19 is a particularly challenging type of viral respiratory (an important word — it’s spread through the air) disease, the public health basics for dealing with it are very straightforward: “social distancing,” masking, testing-contact-tracing-isolation, and, when available, vaccination.
But what we have here — and it started with Trump — is on the Right the politicization for electoral purposes of the responses or non-responses to it. E.g., see the first ten paragraphs or so of my recent column on this same subject, “Why Anti-Pandemic Control: from the Right” for a summary of my extensive writings over time on that subject. Which is precisely what Republicans from Abbott to DeSantis [Florida recently suffered its highest increase in number of COVID-19 deaths yet] and everyone in between are doing. And, for example, in a fund-raising letter of August 9, 2021, DeSantis made it very clear that he is speaking to a national, not just Floridian, audience, when he said: “The Left is currently doing everything they can to take [your] God-given rights away from you.” And do note there that DeSantis is talking about “God-given” rights, not those talking that are protected by, say, the Constitution, for all Americans, believers or not.
Of course, their policies are killing people in their states, from getting excess numbers of cases to deaths to overwhelming hospital systems (which effects not only those infected with COVID-19 but also other persons who might need, say, an important surgery, from getting the proper care because all the beds are full). And so, turning to Texas, while Health authorities and university researchers have said masks are an effective way to prevent the spread of Covid-19, Gov. (and GOP Presidential nominee-wanna-be) Abbott has argued that his executive order prohibiting mandates allows Texans to rely on “personal responsibility rather than government mandates.” Now this is an absolutely fascinating statement in the context of “when Abbott does believe in one particular mandate,” firmly implanted in the law, too, a subject to which we shall return shortly.
Why do Abbott, DeSantis, and many other Republican politicians with their eyes on the 2022 and 2024 elections, take such a strong anti-mandate position, for actions that can control the spread of COVID-19? Well, as noted, as noted by me and many other observers, as Republican politicians they’ve got their eyes on all those Republican primary voters and then on to all those Minority-majority Republican voters in all of the gerrymandered-voter-suppressed states they are setting up for hopefully (for them) easy wins in 2022 and 2024. And so on and so forth.
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Source: OpEdNews