The message during Saturday’s World Wide Freedom Rally in Des Moines was clear — stop the forced vaccinations, protect citizens, preserve liberty and champion freedom.
Some health care facilities have come out and given employees the ultimate ultimatum — get injected with an experimental drug or lose your job.
For many of those health care workers who remain unvaccinated, that is a scary proposition. Imagine the stress of waking up every day wondering if you’ll really have to decide between an injection that could do damage or your ability to provide for your family.
But that isn’t some exercise of the imagination for Iowa health care workers at certain facilities — it’s an everyday reality. And it’s an everyday reality because the legislature failed to prohibit employers from requiring employees to get the COVID vaccine.
Factually, receiving the COVID vaccine does not keep anyone from actually getting COVID. It’s never been suggested to do that. It has only been suggested to lessen the severity of the illness.
Factually, according to Israel, the vaccine isn’t very effective against the Delta variant of the virus.
But here in America, the supposed land of the free and home of the brave, citizens are at-risk of losing their liberty, their ability to choose when it comes to having the vaccine injected or lose their livelihood.
They’re choice — I guess. Life, or livelihood.
Right here in Iowa, where our flag reads our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain — our lawmakers have to decide if they’re going to ensure that motto remains true or if they’re going to allow it to be amended to read “our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain…unless we’re at work.”
For some legislators, it’s an easy decision. Protect the citizens. Protect the individual.
For others, however, it’s more complicated. It’s concern over government intrusion and regulation of private business. But government has intruded and regulated private business since, well, forever.
Right here in Iowa there is a bill — House Study Bill 10 — proposed by Rep. Steve Holt, that prohibits an employer from requiring an employee have a microchip or other device implanted or inserted in the employee’s body.
In addition, the bill prohibits an employer from providing any incentive or privilege to an employee for agreeing to be microchipped.
Swap out the word “microchip” and toss in the word “vaccine” and it seems like the same idea.
As strange and odd as a microchip would be to implant into someone’s body, it has to be less dangerous than an experimental vaccine.
A simple search of VAERS would confirm this.
It is difficult to imagine where this might go if employers are allowed to require a certain medical treatment for all of their employees. What if an employer decided it was too inconvenient to have their female employees out on maternity leave? And all female employees were required to take birth control or have an abortion?
Would the government intrusion on private business be OK in that case?
Sometimes some people make things more complicated than they are. This shouldn’t be an overly complicated situation. When talking about a shot, a vaccine, an injection — you’re talking about something literally being pushed into someone else’s body. Once it’s in, it isn’t coming out.
Look, Republicans are in control of the legislature in Iowa, so I’m going to write this in a way that is directed toward Republicans. If you’re a Republican who makes your decisions based on politics, and more of them do than we realize, those more likely to be “vaccine-hesitant” are Republican voters. Do you really want to anger your own base? Is that the best way to enter an election year?
If you’re a Republican who simply makes your decision based on what is right, do you really believe an employer should be allowed to require — REQUIRE — an employee have something injected into their body? And if so, what Republican principle do you believe supports such a decision?
Because last time I checked, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness trumped business interest. I struggle to imagine the authors of the Declaration of Independence would have considered writing “life, liberty, the ability of anyone (let alone an employer) to force anyone else to have something injected into their body and the pursuit of happiness.”
Perhaps for the legislators who aren’t on board with banning employer-required vaccinations, it just isn’t real enough to them. Maybe it isn’t their loved one faced with losing their job or risking their health or violating their conscience.
But that is the reality many Iowans are facing. And right now, it seems like the only thing that will stop this is a law.
A law that protects the citizen, the individual.
One cannot claim to love freedom while seeing what is happening here and not preventing it from taking place.
There may not be much at stake for elected Republicans, but everything is on the line for Iowans. They need their elected officials, now more than ever, to prize their liberties and maintain their rights.
