You can rarely be sure that judicial incompetence will kill people, but Federal District Judge Terry Doughty crossed that line when he issued an injunctionblocking the Biden administration’s requirement that nursing home personnel be vaccinated for COVID-19. (The injunction, which the administration is appealing, has since been modified by a higher court to apply only in the 14 states that sued.) This week, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch produced something worse than incompetence.
Doughty uncritically cites numerous false claims by McCullough: that “the COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent transmission of the disease among the vaccinated or mixed vaccinated/unvaccinated populations; that mandatory COVID-19 vaccines for hospitals do not increase safety for employees or hospital patients”; “that because of the progressive mutation of the spike protein, the virus has achieved an immune escape from COVID-19 vaccines”; and that “the Delta variant is not adequately covered by the vaccines.” There is so much wrong here that it is hard to know where to begin.
This week, in another dissent (joined by Justice Samuel Alito) Gorsuch explained himself.
If some people would be harmed by vaccines – if they are among the tiny number whom no ethical doctor would vaccinate – Gorsuch thinks that the fair solution is to force vaccines on them in order to make room for the objections of the religious. Of course this would not even address one of the state’s principal worries, which is that vaccine resistors tend to be geographically clustered, to spread the disease among themselves and so to present far greater risks than those with medical excuses. And notice that both cases involved health care workers. The dangers that Gorsuch is willing to tolerate for the sake of religion are not only to them but to their patients.
Doughty is gullible; Gorsuch is worse. Fully aware of what he is doing, he is prepared to physically hurt people in order to promote other people’s religious liberty.
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/586457-give-me-liberty-and-give-you-death