CNN personality and Princeton University professor Julian Zelizer offered an extremist opinion on COVID-19 vaccines in an opinion piece published on the network’s website on Thursday. According to Zeilzer, it’s far past time for America to impose mandatory vaccinations on the population as well as have citizens carry so-called vaccine passports in order to prove that they’ve been vaccinated.
In his piece entitled The blunt truth about vaccination, Zelizer cited the Delta variant of the COVID-19 virus as one of the main reasons to push his authoritarian vaccine plan on the citizens of the United States.
The CNN talking-head minced no words in calling for his freedom killing measure.
“It is time to impose vaccine mandates and passports. The Covid-19 vaccines continue to perform extraordinarily well, but the rate of infection is worsening in unvaccinated populations. The Delta variant is offering a sobering reminder that the pandemic has faded in much of the country but certainly not ended,” Zelizer wrote.
Zelizer blamed both political parties and the American ideal of individualism for government inaction on the experimental vaccines.
“Both political parties have made the mistake of framing vaccines within the tradition of individualism,” Zelizer wrote. “Even President Joe Biden, who has demonstrated his comfort with a muscular role for government, keeps appealing to individuals to make the right and patriotic choice when it comes to receiving their jabs.”
Zelizer must have missed Biden’s plan to go door-to-door to intimidate citizens into getting the vaccine. It seems that President Biden — or whoever is making decisions for him — is perfectly comfortable invading the personal space of Americans on behalf of the experimental vaccines.
But, apparently, that’s not authoritarian enough for Zelizer: “Citizens must … not see this as an optional inoculation,” the political history professor advised.
Zelizer next went full collectivist in his argument to inoculate everyone — no exceptions.
“Biden and other political leaders need to start thinking about the good of the collective and not just the rights of the individual,” Zelizer argued. “Doing so is not some sort of move toward socialism, as conservative critics inevitably argue. Thinking of the common good is as American as apple pie.”
The CNN contributor chose not to mention the myriad of problems associated with the vaccines — as if they were too inconsequential to even consider not getting vaccinated. The potentially deadly side effects of the mRNA vaccines include blood clotting disorders, myocarditis (inflammation of the heart) and pericarditis (inflammation of the muscles surrounding the heart). The latter side effects have been mostly reported in young males aged 16-30.
But Zelizer would have people simply consider the risky and experimental shot a public obligation — the same as passing a test to receive a driver’s license, taking out the trash or cleaning up after your dog.
“Collective obligations have always been part of what actually makes America great and we need to start talking about vaccines through this vital lens,” the doctor of history — not medicine — argued. “If we want to restore normality on a long-term basis, restore our economy, create opportunity for everyone and live in a society where we and our loved ones are safe, healthy and happy, much more of the population needs to be vaccinated.”
But in the case of COVID-19, “normality” was only interrupted by the government. Mask mandates and government stay-at-home orders were the main reasons that the average American life was so impacted by the coronavirus. And death rates from COVID-19 alone never warranted such draconian measures. In healthy people with no comorbidities, the survival rate from the Chinese virus was well above 99 percent.
If the COVID-19 vaccines are performing “extraordinarily well” as Zelizer claims in his piece, then it stands to reason that Americans who have made the right decision (in Zelizer’s eyes at least) are already protected from those who have chosen not to take the vaccine. Isn’t that right? If the vaccinated are still subject to COVID-19, why get the shot?
Still, the Biden administration is going to great lengths to get as many Americans as possible vaccinated for COVID-19. The president has already told the U.S. military to get ready for mandatory vaccinations as soon as the FDA grants full licensure to the vaccines. Now, they’re set to go door-to-door and harass citizens into taking the vaccine.
Unable to convince the American public to get vaccinated in numbers they consider appropriate by cajoling or shame, Zelizer and by extension CNN have now taken to threatening the populace into vaccine submission. Zelizer’s proclamation regarding government mandated vaccinations and vaccine passports sound less like an appeal from a learned commentator than it does some sort of veiled threat.