On Jan. 23, thousands of protesters marched on Washington, D.C. to demand the end of vaccine mandates. Nearly six decades earlier, thousands from a different generation marched on the nation’s capital to demand the end of racial segregation.

Those events have more to do with each other than you might think, especially as the recent holiday honoring the life of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. fades into memory.

Just as equal access to employment, facilities, and legal status motivated the civil rights movement, so has equal access for the unvaccinated and unmasked become the civil rights issue of our time. Just as segregationists sought to limit access for the sake of an alleged greater social good, so do “progressives” who insist on indefinite vaccinations and mandates for the sake of “public health” and “the common good.”

Just as segregationist bigots viewed African-Americans as second-class citizens whose every movement must be closely monitored and controlled, so do “progressive” bigots view the unvaccinated.

The More Things Change…

If you don’t believe those attitudes are identical, consider the opinions of those who claim to champion “compassion,” “inclusion,” and “social justice” from a Rasmussen poll released Jan. 13.

Among the 1,016 likely voters polled, 59 percent of Democrats supported forcing the unvaccinated to stay home except for emergencies. Another 55 percent of Democrats supported levying fines against anyone who chose not to get a COVID-19 vaccine.

In other categories, 48 percent of Democrats endorsed imposing fines or imprisoning anybody who questions whether COVID-19 vaccines work. Another 47 percent of Democrats approved of a government tracking program targeting the unvaccinated, and 45 percent supported forcing the unvaccinated to live in “designated facilities,” akin to the internment camps in Australia. Even 29 percent of Democrats favored taking children away from parents who refused to get COVID-19 vaccines.

By contrast, substantial majorities of both Republicans and likely voters in general rejected those measures.

The Democrats’ attitudes persist not only despite the growing number of countries ending vaccination and mask mandates, including the United Kingdom. They persist not only despite the Supreme Court’s ruling against federal vaccine mandates for private businesses.

Those attitudes persist despite studies showing COVID-19 vaccines and boosters to be useless at best and dangerous at worst against Omicron. As The Stream reported in August, a study in the peer-reviewed Journal of Infection, published monthly by the British Society of Infection, showed that the spike proteins in mRNA vaccines increase the chances of infection from variants. The study encouraged vaccine manufacturers to eliminate that risk.

Truly Frightening

If you still don’t believe the link between vaccination fanatics and segregationists, consider The Salt Lake Tribune’s breathtaking recommendation in a Jan. 15 editorial, which claimed state officials were “waving the white flag of surrender in the battle against” COVID-19.

Were Utah a truly civilized place, the governor’s next move would be to find a way to mandate the kind of mass vaccination campaign we should have launched a year ago, going as far as to deploy the National Guard to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere. (emphasis added)

That comes from a supposedly “progressive” editorial board.

How many racial segregationists justified their position as “truly civilized?” How far would the Tribune’s editorial board go to ensure a “truly civilized” Utah? Would they go as far as “Bull” Connor, the commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Ala., the man who used police dogs and high-pressure fire hoses against legitimately peaceful protesters, including children?

Would the editorial board go as far as the Nazis, who viewed Jews and other “non-Aryans” as threats to racial health and dealt with them brutally?

Words Mean Things

Students in Los Angeles experienced the consequences of such ideas. On Jan. 18, New West Charter School, a public school in the Los Angeles Unified School District for Grades 8-12, not only prevented unvaccinated students from attending class. The school forced them to stand outside behind security tape. Most students were wearing masks.

“They asked for chairs, were denied & are sitting on the pavement, not allowed to even use restroom,” a group called Let Them Breathe posted on Twitter. “LAPD is on site but not intervening.”

Principal Shannon Weir even told parents that any student who did not leave campus would be suspended.

“We’re being threatened to be suspended because we don’t have the COVID-19 vaccine,” one student said on Twitter. “We’re being refused the right to attend school. We’re being segregated from the rest of the school.”

Yet the district decided Dec. 14 to delay its vaccine mandate until the fall.

How is the students’ situation any different than the situation African-Americans faced in the Jim Crow South, where a Democratic governor blocked a school door rather than let black students enter to enroll? 

Enough is Enough

College students have had enough. At Stanford, doctoral candidate Monte Fischer launched a petition demanding the administration revoke mandates for vaccine boosters. After one week, Fischer collected 1,600 signatures. Students at Cornell and George Mason, among other universities, organized similar drives.

“We are not anti-booster or anti-vaccination,” the petition states. “We are pro-bodily autonomy and support the rights of Stanford students to evaluate the data and make their own medical choices.”

Fischer went further in an interview with the The Mercury News.

“I, along with many Stanford community members,” he said, “believe that it is paternalistic and coercive to mandate boosters in the light of so much evidence suggesting that boosters confer little benefit to young people and carry real risks, both known and unknown.”

“Paternalistic” and “coercive” also describe the racial segregation of the past.

Supporting Fischer are Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford’s medical school and Dr. Vinay Prasad, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at UC San Francisco.

“This type of overreach poisons trust in Public Health,” tweeted Prasad, who mentioned that Dr. Paul Offit, an award-winning pediatrician who specializes in immunology and vaccines, recommended that his 20-year-old son not get the mRNA vaccine.

Bhattacharya, who initiated the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement from doctors worldwide who opposed comprehensive lockdowns, described the intimidating climate on campus.

“To my discredit, I have been reluctant to engage in local advocacy, in part because of the stifling, hostile atmosphere @Stanford to dissent against lockdowns and mandates,” he tweeted. “I am grateful for @themontefischer‘s call to let the winds of freedom blow again.”

But what if petitions aren’t enough?

The Past is Prologue

Perhaps unvaccinated and unmasked students could stage sit-ins at the offices of university administrators, just as students did during the turbulent 1960s. Perhaps unvaccinated and unmasked citizens at large could adopt a similar technique used during the civil rights movement.

Young African-Americans protested the segregation of lunch counters by sitting at those counters. Today’s unvaccinated and unmasked could protest in the same way by organizing large groups to patronize businesses, libraries, schools, or other places that demand masks or proof of vaccination.

Protesters likely will get arrested, just as the young African-Americans were. Just as seamstress Rosa Parks was. But defending liberty often comes at a price. 

Policy analyst Anthony LaMesa offered the perfect answer to officials who wish to segregate the unvaccinated.

“Democracies are fragile,” LaMesa said on Prasad’s Substack column, “and a novel respiratory virus circulating is not a good reason to suspend basic rights and constitutional protections for years on end.”

But just as yesterday’s segregationists did, today’s “progressives” will readily sacrifice the Constitution and its values on the altar of their own bigotry.

 

Joseph D’Hippolito has written commentaries for such outlets as the Jerusalem Post, the American Thinker and Front Page Magazine. He works as a free-lance writer.