A former Obama administration official says the unvaxxed are no different than terrorists and other dangerous individuals. Most everyone who isn’t vaccinated against the China Virus belongs on a no-fly list.
An assistant secretary for homeland security under the two-term leftist, Juliette Kayyem thinks that “unvaccinated people need to bear the burden,” as the headline over her piece in The Atlantic put it. In other words, it’s time for legal discrimination against those who don’t trust the experimental and sometimes fatal vaccines.
The unvaxxed, she wrote, are a “threat” that federal authorities must isolate and ostracize.
Flying Not a Right
The daughter of Lebanese immigrants, Kayyem claimed the proposal is akin to other security procedures.
“When you go to the airport, you see two kinds of security rules,” she wrote. “Some apply equally to everyone; no one can carry weapons through the TSA checkpoint.”
Then again, “other protocols divide passengers into categories according to how much of a threat the government thinks they pose,” she continued:
If you submit to heightened scrutiny in advance, TSA PreCheck lets you go through security without taking off your shoes; a no-fly list keeps certain people off the plane entirely. Not everyone poses an equal threat. Rifling through the bags of every business traveler and patting down every preschooler and octogenarian would waste the TSA’s time and needlessly burden many passengers.
In fact, TSA does “needlessly burden many passengers” by “patting down” elderly Americans and others who pose no threat. Horror stories abound. TSA agents punctured a man’s urostomy bag, strip-searched a toddler, and forced a woman to remove a prosthetic breast. They even tried to seize the Medal of Honor that North Dakota Governor Joe Foss received in World War II. He was 86.
Then comes the call for a new form of legal segregation:
At this stage of the pandemic, tougher universal restrictions are not the solution to continuing viral spread. While flying, vaccinated people should no longer carry the burden for unvaccinated people. The White House has rejected a nationwide vaccine mandate — a sweeping suggestion that the Biden administration could not easily enact if it wanted to — but a no-fly list for unvaccinated adults is an obvious step that the federal government should take. It will help limit the risk of transmission at destinations where unvaccinated people travel — and, by setting norms that restrict certain privileges to vaccinated people, will also help raise the stagnant vaccination rates that are keeping both the economy and society from fully recovering.
After that cute fib, the former Obama factotum continued. “The same principle applies to limiting the spread of the coronavirus,” she averred, because “the number of COVID-19 cases keeps growing, even though remarkably safe, effective vaccines are widely available, at least to adults.” True, and more than 125,000 of those cases are among the vaxxed.
Of course, Kayyem didn’t bother offering any data to back those claims, but at any rate she then explained what our rights are:
Flying is not a right, and the case for restricting it to vaccinated people is straightforward: The federal government is the sole entity that can regulate the terms and conditions of airline safety. And although air-filtration systems and mask requirements make transmission of the coronavirus unlikely during any given passenger flight, infected people can spread it when they leave the airport and take off their mask. The whole point of international-travel bans is to curb infections in the destination country; to protect itself, the United States still has many such restrictions in place. Beyond limiting the virus’s flow from hot spots to the rest of the country, allowing only vaccinated people on domestic flights will change minds, too.
Databases Needed
Americans are fortunate to have someone with no ancestral connection to those who founded and built the country explain what “rights” they enjoy, but at any rate, Kayyem wasn’t so hot on travel bans when President Trump imposed them. She called travel restrictions on Europe an “incomprehensible priority.”
That change aside, Kayyem explained that the unvaxxed will surrender “certain societal benefits. Nobody has a constitutional right to attend The Lion King on Broadway or work at Disney or Walmart.”
Airlines must build “databases” to code and trace the unvaxxed. And then those databases would expand.
“Vaccine verification and legitimate exceptions for age or preexisting health conditions can be part of airline databases, as are other security features,” she wrote:
The current reliance on paper vaccination cards makes for a clumsy system, but better public- and private-sector systems are likely to emerge if employers, entertainment venues, and the TSA all seek to verify individuals’ status. Some people may try to lie and cheat their way around a TSA requirement, but violating federal aviation-safety measures is generally a crime.
“People who still want to wait and see about the vaccines can continue doing so,” she concluded. “They just can’t keep pushing all the costs on everyone else.”
Conservative Jack Posobiec observed that The Atlantic altered the headline over the piece, which bluntly said the unvaxxed “belong on the no-fly list.”
