Written by Braden Knapp
President Biden’s newly updated COVID-19 action plan is a step too far in undermining the personal freedoms that the United States Constitution affords Americans. The White House’s six-prong strategy will now be relying heavily on one main area: vaccinating unvaccinated people. According to Our World in Data, 54.7% of Americans are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as of September 16, 2021. The rate of vaccinations received in the U.S. has drastically decreased in the past few months. From August 16 to September 16, 2021, there was only a 3.3% increase in fully vaccinated people in the U.S., according to statistics from Our World in Data.
Vaccinated or unvaccinated, Americans have now had months of access to vaccines, so we can clearly agree that those who do not want to be vaccinated wish to remain that way. Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate strategy, applying to all federal workers and businesses that have over 100 employees on their staff, solely targets citizens who have taken a stance against the vaccine or are skeptical of its effectiveness and side effects. Requiring private businesses to enact such policies is dicey, to say the least, and a mandate of this scale on the private sector will be met with major pushbacks.
Besides the logical reasoning against why vaccine mandates should not be implemented, we can also see the indecisiveness of the government’s stance on such mandates. When asked by reporters on July 23 about the idea of vaccine mandates by the federal government, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki stated, “That’s not the role of the federal government; that is the role that institutions, private-sector entities and others may take.”
Sadly, this reasoning has since been thrown out the window. The new mandates will affect about 100 million Americans, which is nothing short of a near-nationwide order from the federal government.
This decision brings into question what liberties and freedoms the government affords us in modern day.
If American companies and citizens concede to this overreach by Biden, we can be sure to expect that the government will keep methodically snatching up more and more of our personal freedoms. Building on the comments of Psaki, the government has no proper reasoning for meddling with vaccination mandates. The best strategy the White House can take is to let our personal liberties prevail and leave the option of vaccination in the hands of each individual citizen.