Would Biden’s vaccine order ‘promote the general welfare’ and help Idaho fight COVID?

The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution reads, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Please note that the Preamble contains much more than just the word “liberty.”

We also strive to promote the general welfare.

As a nation, we do all sorts of things to promote the general welfare.

We institute traffic laws, requiring people to drive on the right side of the road and stop at traffic lights. We shut down restaurants that have a hepatitis outbreak. We arrest people trafficking in child pornography. We force companies to recall dangerous products and tainted food. We even require vaccines to stop the spread of diseases like polio, mumps, measles and rubella.

On its face, President Joe Biden’s announcement that employers with 100 or more employees would need to require its employees to get the COVID-19 vaccine or be tested regularly seems like government overreach.

Just as we do not endorse the government stepping in to tell businesses that they can’t impose vaccine mandates, we have trepidation about it telling businesses that they must impose vaccine mandates.

However, we share the frustrations that Biden expressed during a news conference announcing the plan.

“What more is there to wait for? What more do you need to see?” Biden said. “We’ve made vaccinations free, safe and convenient. The vaccine is FDA approved. Over 200 million Americans have gotten at least one shot. We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin.”

We share that impatience. And looking at the dire situation in Idaho, everyone should share that impatience.

It seems we’ve tried everything to convince people to get the vaccine.

We’ve tried science — which is undoubtedly on the side of getting vaccinated, despite what the misinformation spreaders would have you believe. We’ve tried reason — which is on the side of getting vaccinated, despite what opponents would have you believe. We’ve tried begging and pleading. We’ve tried scaring people. Now, we’re even trying prize giveaways at Boise State football games.

It’s a sad commentary, indeed, that we must go to such measures to get Americans to do something that is safe, effective and proven to save lives.

But here we are.

Crisis standards of care

This week, Idaho entered statewide crisis standards of care, which affect everyone, whether you have COVID-19 or not.

One thing is clear: What we have been doing is not working. And never will work.

We could repeat all of the things we’ve written before. About 95-98% of COVID-19 patients taking up ICU beds at St. Luke’s are unvaccinated, and 92-94% of its COVID-19 patients in the past week have been unvaccinated. For COVID-19 cases reported in Idaho from May 15 through Sept. 11, 89.9% were among individuals who were not fully vaccinated, according to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. Unvaccinated individuals accounted for 91.1% of COVID-19 hospitalizations during that same time period and 88% of deaths. Our health care system can’t handle the sheer volume of unvaccinated COVID-19 patients. The vaccine is safe and effective and was tested properly.

Repeating these facts doesn’t seem to do any good. Some people just won’t listen.

Frankly, we’re tired of hearing stories of people who didn’t get the vaccine — for whatever misguided reasons — and ended up in the ICU, where they tell the world on their deathbed that they wished they had gotten the shot.

Too late.

Promoting general welfare

So is a federal “mandate” force? Some might see it that way, because they erroneously believe that freedoms are absolute and that liberty means the government may never enact restraints. Is it government force to require you to stop at a red light? Is the government taking away the liberty of a diner owner when it shuts down their restaurant because it is sickening its customers with hepatitis? Is it tyranny if the government halts a shipment of frozen berries that’s been shown to be tainted with E. coli?

Or is the government promoting “the general welfare”?

The government imposes plenty of workplace rules — such as limiting the hours a truck driver may drive, enforcing child labor and discrimination laws, and putting in place equipment-handling rules — in order to promote the general welfare and keep people safe.

It makes sense to have a federal mandate in this case. This is a problem all over the country, not just in Idaho. The coronavirus doesn’t respect state borders.

And we are more comfortable with what the president is ordering because it’s not truly a mandate. People can still opt out, but they have to get tested. That’s vital.

If you’re not going to get a free vaccine, and therefore protect yourself and others around you, the least we can ask of you is to get tested to prevent the virus from spreading. We would support a requirement that the employee pay for the testing themselves, rather than place that burden on the employer, the insurance company or the taxpayer.

The health crisis caused by the coronavirus is never going away if we keep on this path. We have to change course and take action to change the trajectory. We should pull every lever that we can.

Every person who gets a vaccine is a victory. Even if we don’t achieve even a 90% or 95% vaccination rate, the closer we get, the better.

Politicized pandemic

Unfortunately, the pandemic got politicized, as if dying alone and isolated, futilely gasping for air on a ventilator in a hospital ICU bed, were a conservative principle.

Unfortunately, the pandemic resulted in a tremendous amount of misinformation and disinformation, leading people to be fooled or misled into believing the virus isn’t real; the crisis isn’t real; there was no pandemic; after the election there’d be no coronavirus; the vaccine makes you magnetic; and that somehow ivermectin (also made by Big Pharma), which isn’t proven to be an effective COVID-19 treatment, is a better alternative than getting the vaccine, which is proven to be safe and effective.

Idaho traditionally has among the lowest vaccination rates in the country for everything — sitting at 89.5% for the mumps, measles, rubella shot, often leading to dangerous health outcomes in the state. But even 89.5% is better than the 50% we’re sitting at for the COVID-19 vaccine.

We’ll just state it plainly: The people who are opposed to the COVID-19 vaccine are wrong. The conspiracies and misinformation and disinformation are just wrong. And now, unfortunately, that’s hurting everyone else.

It’s sad that Idaho Gov. Brad Little is threatening to sue President Biden over the vaccine order. As governor, Little has done precious little this year to avert this health care crisis. He has said all along that health care capacity has been his guiding star. Last year, he took action to prove that. This year, the path that he chose — to beg, plead, ask nicely, rely on Idahoans “to do the right thing” — has failed. Health care is now in crisis mode. It’s past time to admit his strategy failed.

In the absence of his leadership, we have President Biden who is leading. Controversial, to be sure, but isn’t that the true definition of leadership — to do what’s right even when it’s unpopular among the misguided?

Unfortunately, Little buckled under continued pressure from the far-right wing of his party — which, to Little’s defense, has called for his head for merely suggesting people should get the vaccine. In the end, though, Little still stood by and watched as we got to this point.

Get the vaccine

Most of us are tired of this. We did what was right. We masked up, we worked from home, we socially distanced, waiting and thinking this would all be over once we got a vaccine.

Well, we got a vaccine, but not only are we still dealing with this, we’re in even worse shape than we were last year.

Thousands of people are dying every day in this country, and Idaho’s case count and death toll are increasing at an alarming rate.

The state of Idaho Thursday reported the deaths of 40 Idahoans related to COVID-19. Imagine if 40 people died Thursday because of a giant sinkhole on Interstate 84, and then we just kept driving on I-84 without fixing the sinkhole. That’s what we’re doing with COVID-19 in Idaho right now.

History is going to be unkind, looking back and wondering what was wrong with us.

But the bottom line is we have got to get the spread under control. What we’re doing now is not working, and it never will.

Idaho is worse off now than at any time since COVID-19 arrived, and hospitals can’t even care for people properly. Why is that OK? How can people think that’s OK?

How can people be more upset about a vaccine/testing mandate than they are about the fact that half of our population is just willingly facilitating a terrible pandemic that has had us all stuck in neutral since March 2020?

Appealing to people’s better nature has not worked, and nothing indicates it will work in the future.

If people really cared, we never would have reached this point.

And here’s another factor: the economy.

Somehow, the economy managed to survive OK through all of this, mostly because of the government propping it up. At what point does the enormous weight of the pandemic finally cause the economy to truly buckle?

What about health care costs? It’s clear that people who get the vaccine, even if they come down with a rare breakthrough COVID-19 case, don’t place nearly the same kind of burden on the health care system. From June through August 2021, preventable COVID-19 hospitalizations among unvaccinated adults cost over $5 billion, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Ultimately, the unvaccinated masses backed the Biden administration into this position. Just as Little was crushed into a mostly no-win position in this state right from the start, Biden has now been crushed into this rock-and-a-hard-place crevasse.

Doing nothing is a horrible idea and getting us nowhere, but it seems that “doing nothing” is what vaccine opponents want.

Enough. That’s not a better solution. That’s not any solution. The end game with that scenario is dire.

We choose the “do something” route.

While we have yet to see the details of President Biden’s vaccine order, we support the idea in concept, particularly if it includes an opt-out for employees as long as they get regular testing.

We encourage Gov. Little to get out of the way and let the president lead on the issue of ending the pandemic.

Otherwise, it’s never going to end.

This story was originally published September 19, 2021 at 4:00 AM.