“This is not about freedom or personal choice.”
President Biden announced today that he intends to force all employers with at least 100 employees to issue a vaccine mandate (with a weekly testing option, at least for now). His language was authoritarian and un-American. He made it clear that he has determined what I and other Americans are to do with our bodies, and that “my body, my choice” is now irrelevant. They pretended to offer a choice for a time, but “patience is wearing thin.” The only real choice was to comply, or be punished and eventually forced.
They have found a way to do an end-run around the freedom and bodily autonomy that is the birthright of every human being by mandating that employers use economic coercion to impose their will on the bodies of Americans.
“My job as President is to protect all Americans.”
One of the many valid criticisms of President Trump was that he didn’t try hard enough to be the President of all Americans, including those who didn’t vote for him or agree with him.
President Biden has now gone significantly farther than Trump ever did — he is now threatening the livelihoods of everyone who doesn’t agree with his conclusion about what they should do with their bodies.
It is not the job of the President to determine what healthcare choices I should make--something that the Democratic party used to understand, and could once be counted upon to defend.
“What more do you need to see?”
I need to see that the vaccines, produced in under a year, offer longer-lasting and more robust protection than the natural immunity produced by my immune system, programmed by millions of years of evolution.
This will require long-term data that cannot exist yet because neither COVID nor the vaccines have existed long enough. It is my right to place the benefit of the doubt towards evolution rather than novelty, and that is a right I will not surrender.
I need to see that the President respects my autonomy as a human being and my right, as a grown woman, to control my own healthcare choices.
I need to see honesty. The fact that USPS employees are not included in the federal mandate offers strong evidence that this is about control and compliance, nothing more. There is no other explanation for not including the one group of federal employees from whom a mass-scale resignation would cause chaos that hurts him politically.
I refuse to permit the government into my bedroom, my uterus, or my arm.
Why this hill is worth dying on.
My lived experiences gives me an experiential understanding of the value of bodily autonomy that very few people can claim. My mind was fragmented by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a consequence of being sexually abused for most of the first ten years of my life. My shoulder hurts at this moment, as it hurts every moment of my life, because an act of violence damaged it irreparably.
It has taken me years of grueling, difficult work in therapy to come to a point where I believe that my body is mine. I deserve to control my body, to make my own decisions, to offer enthusiastic consent to what I do with my body — including what sexual acts I engage in and what healthcare decisions I make.
My body has been penetrated against my will several hundred times in my short life.
I will not permit it to happen again while my heart still beats.
Agents of the State, take notice: when you come to penetrate me with your injection by force, bring a gun and be prepared to kill me to do it.
You’re going to have to.
I will not comply.
Edited to Add:
We are regularly told that the VAERS database cannot be trusted because anyone can submit a report, and the reports are not vetted. Despite criminal penalties being attached to a false report, we are told that none of the reports are trustworthy. OSHA has an opportunity to gather reliable data, with dates, times, full names, and extensive details attached, but they are choosing not to do so.
This is an unfathomable dereliction of duty and a deliberate effort to put us in a position where all adverse event reports are anecdotal because anecdotes will literally be all that’s available. When the authorities flatly refuse to gather real data, that leaves anecdotes. I was already resolved not to be forced into submitting to this nonconsensual penetration of my body, but I was willing to change my mind and take a vaccine willingly if long-term data revealed it to likely benefit me more than relying on my natural immunity. Now that the authorities have deliberately decided to ensure that there cannot be reliable data about adverse events, long-term data claiming these vaccines meet any standard of safety will by definition always be bullshit.
This deliberate attempt to hide information so as not to “discourage” vaccination has guaranteed: I will never submit to this vaccine.