Intensely personal

Nov 13th, 2021 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

A federal appeals court rescues our precious freedom to spread lethal diseases.

A federal appeals court has kept its block in place against a federal mandate that all large employers require their workers to get vaccinated against the coronavirus or submit to weekly testing starting in January, declaring that the rule “grossly exceeds” the authority of the occupational safety agency that issued it.

Because it’s not occupational safety to be able to go to work without risking death by Covid? Sounds like occupational safety to me. Working with assholes can be very unsafe indeed.

“From economic uncertainty to workplace strife, the mere specter of the mandate has contributed to untold economic upheaval in recent months,” Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt wrote.

He added: “Of course, the principles at stake when it comes to the mandate are not reducible to dollars and cents. The public interest is also served by maintaining our constitutional structure and maintaining the liberty of individuals to make intensely personal decisions according to their own convictions — even, or perhaps particularly, when those decisions frustrate government officials.”

What’s so “intensely personal” about it? Yes, it’s a needle in the personal arm, but lots of things impinge on our bodies and we don’t think of them as “intensely personal.” Our feet make contact with the sidewalk; we breathe the public air along with everyone else; we go into buildings that contain other people. It’s not particularly “personal” that I can see, and it’s definitely not exclusively personal. That’s the whole point: it’s about everyone. We protect others as well as ourselves by getting it, and they do the same. The protection is mutual. It’s a public and reciprocal matter much more than it’s a personal one.

Maybe he means it’s “intensely personal” because it rests on a belief – a wrong, stupid, unreasonable belief. Hey, that sounds like religion! Religion is “intensely personal” (as well as very public and as mandatory as we can make it), so refusing to get vaccinated must be too. You can’t make me get vaccinated because I have an intensely personal wrong belief about vaccinations, so there.

In a filing asking the Fifth Circuit to withdraw its stay this week, the Justice Department argued that requiring large employers to force their workers to get vaccinated or submit to weekly testing was well within the authority granted by Congress to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA. It also said blocking the mandate would have dire consequences.

Keeping the mandate from coming into effect “would likely cost dozens or even hundreds of lives per day, in addition to large numbers of hospitalizations, other serious health effects and tremendous costs,” the Justice Department said in its filing. “That is a confluence of harms of the highest order.”

Meh, said the three Republican judges. We don’t care.

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