Category Archives: ethics

Vaccination Shortfall

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The Trump administration promised 20 million doses of the Wuhan Virus vaccine would be delivered to the States by the end of 2020. In fact, only 12-14 million doses were delivered. That’s a significant shortfall—or it would be were it not for a far more significant shortfall that renders the lacking 6-8 million doses wholly irrelevant.

…far fewer people than expected are being immunized against Covid-19, as the process moves slower than officials had projected and has been beset by confusion and disorganization in many states.
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Of the more than 12 million doses of vaccines from Moderna Inc and Pfizer Inc with BioNTech SE that have been shipped, only 2.8 million have been administered, according to federal figures.

Never mind that the States had been told for months that vaccines would be available and that vaccine doses would be available in those millions by the end of the year.

The States chose not to act; their administrations chose to disbelieve the Federal administration, and so they sat on their hands. Claire Hannan, Association of Immunization Managers Executive Director, offered this excuse:

There may have been an expectation from Operation Warp Speed or others that we’d give everyone the vaccine overnight.…It was a logistics equation for them. If you’ve been in vaccines for a long time, you know that’s the easy part. Getting it into actual arms is the hard part.

Indeed. And yet, knowing these folks had the hard part—getting the syringes needed, getting folks trained to give the shots in order to fill staffing shortfalls that these folks had to have known would exist—they chose to do nothing. Because they chose to not believe the ability of American business and a Trump administration to work together to deliver vaccines—multiple vaccines—within the promised time frame.

And another typical excuse:

State and local jurisdictions have been asking the federal government for more funding to support vaccine distribution than the $340 million disbursed so far.

Never mind that the State and local distributions already have plenty of money—it’s just currently misallocated.

The list of State failures goes on, yet they’re all laid off to the Federal government—in particular the Trump administration—without any regard for the federal republic nature of our governance structure.  All the Feds can do, and the Trump administration down through the CDC did every bit of it, is jawbone the States on domestic matters. The CDC issued guidelines regarding the vaccines—it cannot issue rules—yet the States in many cases chose to do something entirely different.  The Federal government cannot dictate to the States’ their internal policies, particularly including how they prepare for reception of and deliver vaccination shots to their individual citizens.

2.8 million vaccinations injected out of 12 million doses delivered is unacceptable—and the States, Republican and Progressive-Democrat alike have no one to blame but their own disbelieving and inactive selves.

It would have been a no-lose situation, too. Say the States had scrambled to be ready to handle the promised 20 million doses and the vaccines would not have been produced and deliverable until the end of 2021 as so many so-called experts insisted was the earliest possible time frame. The States would have been ready in time to receive and inject, instead of being the failures they are presently.

Diversity

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A brief thought. Joseph Epstein wrote about true diversity, as opposed to the Left’s and their Progressive-Democratic Party’s ideology of race, sex, et al., diversity before merit in his Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

In the main, he’s right. I want to add a little, though, to his concluding sentence.

The best way to celebrate diversity, perhaps, is to begin by celebrating diversity of thought.

Number one.

Number two is overtly recognizing the inequality of individual talent, interest, work ethic, plain luck, and a host of other inequalities intrinsic in every man that culminate in unequal outcomes flowing from the utterly necessary equality of opportunity.

That equality of opportunity is at the center of individual liberty, which includes the freedom to speak diversely—out loud and publicly—from that diversity of thought.

That ability to speak freely is a critical part of every man’s right to show the best that there is in him, a right that is truncated by demanding equality of position or of outcome.

Additionally, that demand for equality of position or of outcome insults every one of us by insisting that our best isn’t worthy of consideration or that we cannot achieve that best without Know Betters in government doing for us.

Surveillance State

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And it’s not the People’s Republic of China this time. It’s a European ally.

Spain is planning to keep a record of individuals who refuse to receive the coronavirus vaccine, said the country’s minister of health on Monday.

Worse, Salvador Illa, Spain’s Minister of Health says,

The log of people who refuse vaccination will be shared with the country’s “European partners,” but will not be shared with employers or otherwise made public….

Not even simple, ordinary doctor-patient confidentiality matters here. This medical information will be shared around so all of Europe’s governments can participate in a pan-European surveillance state, even though the putative purpose of such surveillance—so that local employers, et al., can take “appropriate” measures—will be blocked.

The contradiction is so obvious it can only be taken as a distraction from the move’s true purpose: to take an initial step in tracking the details of the daily lives of citizens.

This is the Europe Joe Biden and his ilk want us to emulate. Of course, that dovetails nicely with the administrative state he and his want to expand in our nation.

Checks, Balances, and Pardons

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Alan Dershowitz made short work of this and of the objections to President Donald Trump’s recent small number of pardons.

The media is just wrong: President Trump understands better than previous presidents that the pardon power is part of the system of checks and balances. He understands when the executive and judicial branches get out of whack, it’s the job of the president to restore justice.

And

Not only is it not corrupt, it’s absolutely proper. The president feels very strongly that the Mueller commission acted improperly—and if that’s his belief and he believes that strongly, and he has a basis for it, he should be pardoning and commuting people who were the victims of an injustice.

What he said.

Apologies

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Daniel Henninger had a thought in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal on the relationship between the Wuhan Virus situation (my term, not his) and apologies.

I have my own thought on the broader matter of apologies themselves.

…difficult this year to tell which is greater—the number of people infected with Covid-19 or the number of politicians issuing apologies….

Other than Operation Warp Speed’s chief, General Gustave Perna, I’ve heard almost no politician apologize for anything. In truth, though, the apology was killed long ago.

What is issued in lieu of apology, and not only by politicians, has long been an expression of “regret” for “any offense that might have occurred.” Never mind that offense plainly was taken, or there’d have been no objection. Doubting that is dishonest.

On top of that, the utterer piously announces his regret—for an offense that he’s not convinced even occurred—but he has not a syllable of actual apology for his misbehavior that led to the offense. Masquerading his utterance as an apology is a very large lie.

Aside from that, “accepting responsibility,” “owning the matter,” and similar self-serving claims are cynically meaningless phrases, uttered only to distract from the fact that the speaker does nothing to change his behavior or otherwise to correct his error.