Have Vaccine Mandates Killed Efforts to Reform Policing?

Dr. Munr Kazmir
5 min readOct 21, 2021

Progressives may soon be forced to choose between the two.

Photo by Kayle Kaupanger on Unsplash.

Vaccine mandates were bound to produce a certain amount of pushback.

The Biden Administration, staffed as it is by very intelligent people, had to have known this. Going forward with vaccine mandates was always bound to be more popular with some- loyal Democratic voters- than others- everyone else. At least in the short-term.

There were sure to be constitutional challenges and legal challenges galore, along with bitter disagreements about everything from efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines to the advisability of endowing the U.S. government and public health agencies with this much control over individual medical decisions.

Leadership Democrats must have known there would be privacy concerns to be addressed. There must have been no shortage of purely logistical problems, either. There were no end of HIPPA guidelines to consider. Liability- for adverse reactions, for the legal costs of defending against lawsuits- had to have been on every brilliant political mind in the White House and beyond.

Vaccine mandates were never something to be entered into lightly. Every Democrat in leadership defending vaccine mandates today must first have considered the all important question: How would progressive voters feel if it was Donald Trump doing the mandating?

As, alas: Democratic President Joe Biden is every bit as unpopular with Republicans and Independents as Donald Trump was or is with Democrats and progressives.

During the height of the Trump years, when Russiagate was at its most breathless and speculative, long before the Afghanistan Papers or the Mueller Report, it might have been difficult for Democrats to imagine any president being as unpopular as Donald Trump; let alone one of their guys.

Democratic strategists from the DNC to the Washington Post are contemplating that reality now, and it is none too comforting. Worse, for these still-devoted acolytes anyway, is the undeniable reality that things are likely to get far worse on the ground before they get any better at all.

Gas isn’t going to magically get cheaper, a fact that will suit city-dwelling progressives just fine…

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