Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra knows nothing about health or human services.  He is a lawyer, politician, and leftist who came up through the ranks in the Los Angeles Democrat party.  When you have someone like that in charge of the Biden administration's vaccine policy, you're looking at someone who's thinking not in terms of either "health" or "human" services, but in terms of government power.  Becerra made that perfectly clear during an appearance on CNN, when he explicitly said Americans owe it to the federal government to get vaccinated.

Here's Becerra being explicit about his views when it comes to American citizens and the COVID vaccine:

HHS Sec. Xavier Becerra: "The federal government has spent trillions of dollars to keep Americans alive during this pandemic. So it is absolutely the government's business [to know who is vaccinated.] It is taxpayers' business if we have to continue to spend money." pic.twitter.com/iMm9UupBup

— CNN (@CNN) July 8, 2021

Let's unpack a few things:

1. The FDA hasn't approved of the vaccine (it's being distributed on an "emergency use" basis), so it's perfectly reasonable to be wary.

2. The vaccine has resulted in an extraordinary number of bad results, starting with sky-high deaths, so it's perfectly reasonable to be wary.

3. The push for vaccines does not take into consideration people who already have immunity and who could have a deadly reaction to the vaccine.  It also ignores that young people are most at risk from the vaccine and least at risk from COVID.

4. You don't need to have 100% of the population vaccinated to achieve herd immunity.  Even measles, an exceptionally contagious disease, requires 95% herd immunity to stop the spread.  Wikipedia still admits that if 65% of the population is immune to COVID-19, that will stop the spread.

5. Although Becerra has the wit to admit that the government cannot force vaccines on people, he is very strongly saying that, once the federal government starts paying out large sums of money, people lose their right to privacy.  People were so offended by this that, in a subsequent tweet, Becerra clarified that the "government has no database tracking who is vaccinated."

I consider that scant consolation.  As we've learned, the government tracks everything or bullies others into handing over data.  The fact that it does not currently have a dedicated "database tracking who is vaccinated" does not mean that it cannot easily create such a database.  After all, you owe the government because of those trillions it spent.

6. While the Delta variant is very contagious, it is also less dangerous.  This is apparently a typical pattern for mutating diseases and, in fact, explains many childhood illnesses.  They started as deadly scourges and ended up as chickenpox. 

7. Becerra is correct in one way, which is that one of the government's traditional jobs, going back to time immemorial, is to protect citizens' health.  The problem is that the federal government has made a very bad case for itself when it comes to protecting Americans' health.

It's clear that masking and lockdowns were not only useless against COVID's spread, but also disastrous.  The masks exposed people to everything from hypoxia to even worse diseases than COVID, without doing anything to slow the spread.  As for lockdowns, they destroyed the economy and individual businesses and led to a huge increase in deaths from untreated diseases, suicide, and drug overdoses.

Meanwhile, we're learning that the hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin that Fauci, the media, and the leftist medical establishment denigrated, if given to people early enough, could have saved thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of lives.  In the push to destroy Trump by denying him a swift recovery and rebound, the government willingly killed Americans.

And there's the whole problem of the Democrats, the Deep State, and Fauci (but I repeat myself) denying what was obvious to all intelligent people very early on — namely, that the Chinese created this disease, deliberately withheld information about the disease, and encouraged infected Chinese citizens to travel beyond China.

While it is a traditional government job to protect American health, and while the government has indeed spent a lot of money on COVID lockdowns and vaccinations, nothing it has done has made it a trustworthy guardian of American well-being.

When you have a government that's been stupid, duplicitous, and biased, citizens of a free country are going to say, "My body, my choice."  It's the height of hypocrisy for the same administration that is doing everything it can to enable unlimited abortion and to use taxpayer dollars to fund those abortions, to object when people assert that mantra about a very experimental vaccination.

Image: Vaccine bottles by Braňo. Free use under Unsplash License.

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