In an editorial published on Saturday, The Salt Lake City Tribune’s editorial board called for the National Guard to be deployed to keep unvaccinated people from taking part in society. The paper also called for Utah’s government to organize a “mass vaccination campaign,” even though it’s been shown that the experimental COVID-19 vaccines have not been completely effective in halting the spread of the Chinese Virus, even among those who have been vaccinated.
“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,” the Tribune’s editorial board concluded.
Blaming “cowardice and misinformation at all levels” as the reason for a recent surge in the virus and an absence of COVID-19 tests in the state, the Tribune claimed that Utah’s leaders were “waving the white flag of surrender in the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Calling the situation in the state “tragic” and “disgraceful,” the editorial board lamented a lack of available testing kits in the state, as well as a recent vote in the Salt Lake Council which nearly overturned a county-wide mask mandate, as proof that the Government of Utah had somehow abandoned its citizens.
“All this news is shocking even as it is not at all surprising. For more than two years now, officials at all levels and in all branches of our government have missed chance after chance to get a handle on this rapidly spreading and rapidly evolving virus,” the editorial board wrote.
The Tribune blamed government — especially Republicans — for not being authoritarian enough with vaccine and mask mandates.
“Government officials, mostly but not exclusively Republicans, were apparently determined not to be caught governing in the face of this challenge,” the paper complained. “Any move or recommendation to mask up or, when safe and effective vaccines became available, to make vaccination a requirement of admission to public places and society in general was shouted down as an unwarranted imposition on individual freedoms.”
That’s because those things are indeed “unwarranted imposition(s) on individual freedoms.” And “safe and effective,” when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccines currently available, is apparently in the eye of the beholder, as none of the vaccines completely stop the virus and all of them are linked to life-threatening conditions such as blood clotting, myocarditis, and pericarditis.
The newspaper also made clear its anti-liberty bias, writing, “So now we are free all right. Free to fend for ourselves. To watch our children lose weeks, months or more of their precious educational opportunities. To wonder whether it is safe to go to work or to the store or to sporting events. To see businesses close for want of employees or lack of customers.”
The editors also had praise for President Joe Biden’s authoritarian vaccine mandate, which was struck down by the Supreme Court last week.
“President Joe Biden tried to pull a couple of useful levers by ordering vaccine mandates for health care workers and vaccine-or-test rules for workplaces of more than 100 employees. The U.S. Supreme Court this week upheld the former while quashing the latter, foolishly holding that a communicable disease is not a workplace hazard.”
Needless to say, the Tribune faced swift backlash from people who are unconvinced that the COVID-19 situation calls for the National Guard to restore order and imprison their fellow citizens in their homes.
Congressman Chip Roy (R-Texas) tweeted that the editorial board was “masquerading as journalists” as it called “on the military to target their own neighbors.”
Talk show host Clay Travis called the Tribune’s position “mindless, anti-science insanity,” and said that the paper was “demanding totalitarianism.”
A few years ago, if anyone said that an editorial board at a newspaper in a major American city in a deeply red state was calling for the National Guard to imprison citizens in their home because of a virus with a higher than 99-percent survival rate in healthy individuals, you might have thought they were insane.
But yesterday’s insanity has become today’s reality.
