As more cities push forward with vaccine mandates to one degree or another, one large city has moved to require all unvaccinated city workers to mask up — twice. Beginning September 1, all city workers in Philadelphia will be required to either receive one of the experimental vaccines or wear two masks. Proof of vaccination will be a prerequisite for all new hires. The mandate also extends to all healthcare workers and faculty, staff, and students at all city colleges and universities.
In an announcement last week, the City of Brotherly Love stated, “The City has a vested interest in ensuring that all staff are protected as thoroughly as possible from severe COVID infection and death.” The announcement went on to say that “as of September 1, the city will be instituting the following new policies” and listed the policies as: (1) “All City employees will be required to provide proof that they’ve completed their schedule of COVID-19 vaccinations,” (2) “New employees hired must be fully vaccinated as a condition of their employment,” and (3) “Employees who are not fully vaccinated by September 1 will be required to wear two masks (a cloth mask over a disposable or surgical mask) at all times while working on-site.”
Almost immediately following the announcement that city employees would need to vax or mask, the city also announced that starting October 15, all healthcare workers and all faculty, staff, and students at all Philadelphia colleges and universities will be required to receive one of the experimental vaccines. From that statement:
Starting on October 15th, all healthcare workers in the City of Philadelphia will be required to be vaccinated against COVID-19 unless they have a religious or medical exemption.
All staff, students, and faculty at colleges and universities in the city will also be required to be vaccinated against COVID-19 unless they have a religious or medical exemption.
Philadelphia has a deep history steeped in liberty. This writer is reliably informed by his nine-year-old son (who has seen every episode of Liberty’s Kids several times) that Benjamin Franklin lived and worked there, using his printing press to sow the seeds of freedom into the hearts and minds of his fellow citizens; both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were written there, as was Thomas Paine’s Common Sense; the Liberty Bell resides there; and the Marquis de Lafayette traveled there at his own expense to present himself to the Continental Congress to volunteer his services as a military officer in the service of liberty.
Neither this writer nor his nine-year-old son can imagine the brave men and women of Philadelphia who fought for liberty against the tyranny of King George would be able to believe that their city is now mandating that free men and women receive an experimental pharmaceutical product against their will.
Neither liberty nor common sense appear to still have a place in government in Philadelphia.
Liberty would dictate that free men and women have the God-given right to make their own medical decisions. And common sense would laugh in the face of anyone wearing two masks — especially if one of those masks is a surgical mask.
This appears to be a simple matter of making it so much more difficult not to get the vaccine (by adding an arbitrary difficulty) that city employees will be more likely to cave to the pressure and get the shots.
As to mandating the vaccine at city colleges and universities, the city’s announcement claims that is because “vaccination rates in Philadelphia are the lowest in our younger folks and coincidentally, those are the folks with the highest rates of COVID infection these days” and so “it’s important that we do everything we can to cut that infection rate.” This does not address the medical fact that infections among “our younger folks” are still relatively rare and statistically are shown to be non-life-threatening.
And mandating vaccines for healthcare workers overlooks the fact that those who work in the industry are certainly not lacking information about either the risks or the efficacy of the experimental vaccines. That some of them have — even all these weeks and months later — still chosen not to get the shots should stand out as a point unto itself.
As to the “religious or medical exemption” clause in the mandate, it may not prove to be worth much. After all, Washington State University has just rescinded its “personal or philosophical” exemption for the experimental vaccines. And while a “personal or philosophical” exemption is not a “religious or medical exemption,” ask yourself which of those things actually carries more weight in our modern American society. “Personal or philosophical” ideas are the very hallmark of modern American society. A man who “identifies” as a woman is viewed as having a “right” to undress in front of women and girls in a female locker room or shower room. His “personal or philosophical” identity is seen as having more bearing than the physical reality of his male body.
If WSU can strike down “personal or philosophical” exemptions, “religious” exemptions won’t likely stand, either.
So far, cities across America — including New York City, and now Philadelphia, on the East Coast and San Francisco and Los Angeles on the West Coast — have begun implementing vaccine mandates to one degree or another. If that trend continues, the rest of America may find itself being squeezed from both sides.
